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Jews and the Myth of Tolerance in Islamic Spain
APR 14, 2023 10:00 AM
BY HUGH FITZGERALD
Jihad Watch
Cordoba Cathedral
Many know about the falsification of history that underlies the claim that Islamic Spain was a place of remarkable harmony among Muslims, Jews, and Christians, a “convivencia” that testified to the benign nature of Muslim rule. Among the best known champions of this myth was the late Yale professor Maria Rosa Menocal, with her 2003 book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain.
The myths about Islamic Spain (known collectively as the “myth of Andalusia”) have their origins in the romantic writers of the early 19th century. Just as Sir Walter Scott, venturing beyond Scotland, painted a completely fictional portrait in The Talisman of the “noble Saracens” tutoring the Christians in chivalrous behavior, so the myths of wonderful tolerant Andalusia owes its existence to two highly imaginative works by two of the most eloquent and convincing of writers: Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving and Le Dernier des Abencérages by Chateaubriand. The latter, of course, thought nothing of making things up even about his own life — some of his entirely fictional trips are set down as fact in Memoires d’Outre-Tombe, including a visit to Lexington, to see where the first battle of the American Revolution took place — a visit that he never made, but made up out of whole cloth.
The apotheosis of this is the dreamy effort of Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World, which purports to be about Cordoba, where members of the “three faiths” lived, she would like us to believe, in complete harmony. Now the first thing to know about this impressionistic fantasy is that it completely ignores, does not even mention in its bibliography, any of the major scholarly works on Muslim Spain — including those of Evariste Lévi-Provencal, of Dufourcq, of Bousquet, of many others. It ignores a good deal else as well, including Maimonides’ own words: “…the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us…Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they…”
This is particularly disturbing because this book received all sorts of praise when it appeared in 2003. The author was then a “professor at Yale” and the “Director of the Whitney Humanities Center” which impressed those who cannot see beyond the credentials. Sensible people cannot be expected to ake what are comically called academic standards very seriously anymore, what with the clownish Cornel West being snapped up, first by Princeton, then by Harvard, and now by Union Theological Seminary, and the sinister Rashid Khalidi, a former propagandist in Beirut for the PLO, still offering his PLO propaganda, but now he does it from his eminent perch high up on Morningside Heights as that appetizing thing, a full professor, at Columbia, and let’s not forget the army of academics carrying on about “post-colonial hegemonic discourse” as they dig ever deeper the graves of Academe. One cannot here resist the temptation to report that more than one teacher of literature has publicly expressed his long-past-receiving-tenure version of a deathbed conversion, and publicly admits that all that theory, that post-hegemonic discourse, whether of the Derrida-delirium, or Saidian swamp variety, was a monstrous error, and that one would do better to teach students in this audiovisual age to read books with attention, affection, and a well-stocked mind, rather than embrace the latest “theory of literature” arriving at American universities from across the Atlantic.
The myth of Islamic Spain’s fabled tolerance has been repeatedly punctured, but it lives on nonetheless. So many non-Muslims, after all, have a psychological stake, and so many Muslims have a geopolitical one, in its being accepted as true. Fabled and fabulous Al-Andalus and the city of Cordoba, with its red gitanillas in pots, flowing over the ornamental balconies that hang high above the whitewashed walls flanking the narrow alleys, and from outside one can hear the pleasing plash of fountains in the hidden courtyards, and one can see, in one’s imagination, three venerable old scholars, one Muslim, one Jew, one Christian (in a kind of backdated Benetton ad), walking together, talking animatedly of philosophy and spiritual matters, in an atmosphere of the highest mutual regard and understanding — for that was Al-Andalus, wasn’t it? — and the omnipresent smell of the orange blossoms, a whole city holiendo a azahar, and in the beautiful distance a glimpse of the Guadalquivir, and….fill in the rest yourself, courtesy of the Tourist Board of Spain and your own imagination.
Islamic Spain was far from being a paradise. Cordoba was no tolerant “ornament of the world.” Maimonides had to flee the city because of the persecution of the Almohads, but even before the fanatical Alhomads arrived from Morocco, the treatment of non-Muslims was dismal. When Joseph ibn Naghrela became Grand Vizier in Grenada, ordinary Muslims were incensed, believing that he had been given too much power by the Muslim ruler. In 1066, a Muslim mob assembled, murdered Ibn Naghrela, and then crucified his dead body. They then put to sword almost the entire Jewish community of Grenada, the very city celebrated as a place of tolerance by Washington Irving in his Tales of the Alhambra. There were other major massacres of Jews. One of them, committed by Christians in this supposed land of “tolerance among the three faiths,” took place in 1391, nearly simultaneously in Seville, Castile, and Aragon.
Richard Fletcher’s Moorish Spain and the scholarship of Evariste Lévi-Provencal and others all show that this “tolerance” myth was born from the Romantic poets-in-prose mentioned above and is directly contradicted by the historical evidence. The records of the Muslim jurists, such as Ibn Abdun, confirm that the tolerance of Muslim Spain has been greatly exaggerated. In his opinion on the treatment of the Christians and Jews of Seville, Ibn Abdun insisted that “No…Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual; on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to accost them with the greeting, ‘Peace be upon you’…In effect, ‘Satan has gained possession of them, and caused them to forget God’s warning. They are the confederates of Satan’s path; Satan’s confederates will surely be the losers! (Quran 58:19). A distinct sign must be imposed upon them in order that they may be recognized and this will be for them a form of disgrace.”
A well-known jurist and poet of Muslim Spain may have helped to promote the Grenada massacres in his famous anti-Jewish poem:
Bring them [the Jews] down to their place and Return them to the most abject station. They used to roam around us in tatters Covered with contempt, humiliation, and scorn. They used to rummage amongst the dungheaps for a bit of a filthy rag To serve as a shroud for a man to be buried in…Do not consider that killing them is treachery. Nay, it would be treachery to leave them scoffing.
That is the real story of the Jews in Islamic Spain. It was not Maria Rosa Menocal’s paradise of tolerance, but a place where Jews could be robbed, beaten, extorted, their property seized, even their lives forfeited, by the Muslims who ruled over them. They lived in a state of constant fear, never knowing when a Muslim ruler, or a Muslim mob, might find a reason to turn on them. That is the dismal truth.
