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
