Convivencia in Medieval Spain: A Brief History of an Idea

Abstract

Convivencia refers to the 'coexistence' of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities in medieval Spain and by extension the cultural interaction and exchange fostered by such proximity. The term first appeared as part of a controversial thesis about Spanish historical identity advanced by Américo Castro in 1948. Since then interest in the idea of convivencia has spread, fueled in part by increased attention to multi-culturalism and rising concern about religiously framed acts of violence. The application of social scientific models has gone a long way toward clarifying the mechanisms of acculturation at work in medieval Spain and tempering the tendency to romanticize convivencia.Convivencia refers to the 'coexistence' of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities in medieval Spain and by extension the cultural interaction and exchange fostered by such proximity. While it first emerged as part of a famous debate about Spanish historical identity that punctuated the Franco years, the notion that these three religious communities got along better in medieval Spain than they did at other times and in other places is older than that. The nineteenth century witnessed both the Romantic fascination with Muslim Spain epitomized by Washington Irving and the more scholarly projects of French and Spanish Arabists, who saw in the cosmopolitan culture of Muslim Spain the antithesis of Christian Spain, past and present p. 17). At the same time, Jews in Central Europe who were fascinated by the heights achieved by their Sephardic counterparts in medieval Spain tended to credit, among other factors, an unusually high level of tolerance on the part of the Andalusian authorities. True or not, such claims helped Jewish apologists put in greater relief the poor track record of modern European governments in the years preceding emancipation (Cohen 1991).It was the Spanish philologist and literary historian Américo Castro (1885-1972) who first used the term convivencia as part of the controversial theory about Spanish cultural identity that he launched in his España en su historia: cristianos, moros, y judíos (Buenos Aires, 1948). 1 Like so many

Creolising Conviviality: Thinking Relational Ontology and Decolonial Ethics Through Ivan Illich and Édouard Glissant

“…While for historians of the Iberian Medieval Age, this approach might not be entirely accurate and might fail to capture the complexity of these times (Manzano Moreno 2013;Soifer 2009;Szpiech 2013), from a political standpoint Castro's proposal represents, within the parameters of his time, a vision of a progressive, democratic and transcultural society (Glick 1992;Shamsie 2016;Wolf 2009). As Miriam Bodian notes in her essay "Américo Castro's Conversos and the Question of Subjectivity" (2017), this account is not without racial stereotypes, as in Castro's use of "caste" which, he argues, refers to lineage and not to biological race.…”

Hubungan Harmonis antara Muslim dan Yahudi sejak Masa Kenabian sampai ‎Masa Umayyah di Al-Andalus

“…Hubungan harmonis dan produktif antar agama di abad pertengahan seringkali ditandai dengan pasang surut, pun demikian, peradaban Islam di al-Andalus bisa menjadi saksi dan bukti bahwa keharmonisan antara Muslim dan penganut agama lain mampu bertahan cukup lama dan menjadi inspirasi kebangkitan dan berkembangnya suatu kebudayaan produktif (Vaughan, 2003;Wolf, 2009 …”

Resplendence of al-Andalus

“…This conception had its roots in the nineteenth century and is nowadays highly controversial. For further reading, see Wolf 2009;Soifer 2009. 40 Spain's medieval past had already been a matter of interest for other European countries, such as France or England, as illustrated by the many publications appearing from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards, such as Richard Twiss, Travels through Portugal and Spain, 1772-1773; Henry Swimburne, Travels through Spain,1 7 7 5a n d1 7 7 6 ;J o h nC .M u r p h y ,The arabian antiquities symbolic connotations this implied. 43 Ideologically, this contributed to the perpetuation of a conservative thesis that still considered the cultural heritage of al-Andalus inferior in the history of Medieval Spain.…”