Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing Our Approach to Medieval Convivencia

n 1992, the quincentennial marking the expulsion of the Jews from Spain brought with it a flurry of studies on medieval Jewish, or Sephardic, civilization. In the succeeding dozen years, Spain has become an increasingly “hot” subject for medievalists and Judaicists alike, and new courses on the diverse cultural legacy of the Iberian Peninsula have continued to appear at colleges and universities throughout the Europe, Israel, and North America.1 The proliferation of such curricula has been aided by the publication of sourcebooks and readers that have enabled even nonspecialists to offer courses on medieval Iberia that highlight the important contributions of Muslims, Jews, and Conversos to the broader history of the medieval Iberian world.2 The historiographic motif that runs throughout this new interest in medieval Spain is the subject of convivencia, or coexistence—a term that has been used to describe the tripartite society of medieval Iberia ever since it was introduced by the great Spanish philologist and historian Americo Castro in the 1940s.3 In recent years, this term has been embraced and distorted by an ever-widening group of academics, journalists, and politicians, a phenomenon that increasingly challenges historians of medieval Spain to return convivencia to its original context. I