Moses Arragel’s vernacular Rabbinics in the Biblia de Alba

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Full page manuscript illumination showing Rabbi Moses Arragel presenting his completed Castilian Bible translation and commentary to his patron Don Luis de Guzmán

Rabbi Moses Arragel presents Arragel Bible to Don Luis de Guzmán, Biblia de Alba (f25v). Source: facsimile-editions.com

1420: Rabbi Moshe Arragel of Guadalajara was in a quandry. The powerful Luis de Guzmán, a high-ranking nobleman and Master of the influential Order of Calatrava invited him (and this was an invitation that the Rabbi could not refuse) to collaborate on a ground-breaking translation of the Hebrew Bible into Castilian, with an accompanying commentary interpreting both Jewish and Christian exegetic traditions. He was to work under the supervision of a Catholic priest, a Franciscan Friar who would represent the Christian interpretations, but Guzmán assured Arragel that he would have freedom to represent both traditions, provided that he gave no offense to Christianity.

This project was unique for its time (insofar as we know from the documentary record that has survived). Iberian Rabbis did not typically work in Castilian. When they did, such as the case of Rabbi Shem Tov ben Isaac Ardutiel of Carrión (known in Spanish as Shem Tov or Santób de Carrión), it was at the behest of a powerful Christian noble or king. Unlike Arragel’s translation and commentary, Ardutiel’s Proverbios morales (ca. 1330) were not meant to be a true representation of Jewish tradition, nor did he cite Jewish sources, or enter into the details of Rabbinic interpretations of Biblical texts that were by nature polemical in that they differed and at times contradicted Christian interpretations. Arragel was breaking new ground with this project.

The work is fascinating on a few levels. The glosses are a treasure trove of late medieval intellectual, rabbinical, and theological material. Arragel brings a considerable background in Rabbinics, science, and general knowledge to the project. Scholars have written excellent studies on its linguistic characteristics, its illuminations, and to a certain extent, its treatment of Jewish and Christian traditions. What I find most fascinating is Arragel’s engagement with the vernacular culture of his day: turns of phrase and colloquialisms, his use of popular verbal and literary genres such as proverbs and exempla, his tendency to explain Biblical society in terms familiar to his 15th-century audience, and his innovation in recasting rabbinic concepts and arguments in vernacular Castilian. Arragel’s Bible is the richest repository of the Iberian Jewish vernacular for the pre-expulsion period, hands down. Here I will give a few examples of his innovative use of colloquialisms, proverbs, exempla. I’ll explain how he translates the world of the Bible and the Rabbis for his 15th century Castilian readers, and make some suggestions to what is at stake, culturally and intellectually, in his doing so.

page from a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Yemeni manuscript of Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed

Page from manscript of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (Yemen, 13th-14th c.) Source: wikipedia.org

Hebrew was not in any sense a vernacular language for Iberian Jews and had not been a vernacular language since the days of King David (ca. 1000 BCE). It was a language of learning, and, like Latin for learned Christians, sometimes pressed into service as a lingua franca between Jews whose vernaculars were mutually unintelligible. When Jews wrote in Hebrew, they did not have access to the expressive repertory of the vernacular. We know, for example, that Iberian Rabbis gave sermons in the vernacular, but recorded them in Hebrew. We have a few examples of medieval Jewish verse in the vernacular, such as the versification of the Joseph story (Coplas de Yosef), or the Proverbios morales of Rabbi Shem Tov Ardutiel we mentioned above. As I have written elsewhere, these contain some very interesting examples of how Jewish writers blend vernacular Castilian and religiously Jewish textual sensibilities. But Arragel’s work shows us just how deep this particular rabbit hole goes. He is perfectly at home in the vernacular, and, like Ardutiel, free to mine the full range of vernacular rhetorical resources for his purposes as a Biblical commentator. This brings the stories and arguments alive for Castilian readers in ways that are simply impossible in Hebrew, which could not resonate in the same way for Castilian speakers.

Manuscript illumination depicting a woman in a stockade in a public square with two onlookers, one throwing eggs and the other holding a trumpet.

Public shaming in stockade (with eggs) Coutumes de Toulouse (1295) BNF Latin 9187 f.30v Source: gallica.bnf.fr

In his commentary on the Joseph story, he renders an argument by Rashi into colloquial Castilian. Rashi makes the point that “Esto asy Joseph fizo porque se non auergonçasen sus hermanos en plaça”” (Gen 45 :1) (Paz y Meliá, Biblia de Alba: Genesis 156) Rashi: “He could not bear that the Egyptians should stand by him witnessing how his brothers would be put to shame when he made himself known to them.” For Castilian speakers, the phrase “Avengonzarse en plaza” (‘being shamed in plaza,’ i.e., in public) is close to their lived experience; they have been ‘shamed in the plaza,’ and have heard people speak in exactly those terms. They have embodied experience linked to this language in ways that they do not with the Hebrew term Rashi uses, מִתְבַּיְּשִׁין (mitbayyeshín). And this is only considering Arragel’s Jewish audience. His Christian audience, save for a very few learned clerics or converts from Judaism, would have had very limited access to the commentaries of the Rabbis.  While it is true that Christian clerics read Latin commentaries, such as the highly influential Postillae of Nicholas of Lyra, that drew on Rabbinical sources, Arragel’s commentary brought the Rabbis to life for readers of Castilian in ways that must have greatly expanded their notion of Rabbinical discourse, and of Jewish tradition in general.

manuscript illumination depicting a royal feast. King and queen are seated at the center of a table loaded with dishes, flanked by servers. In the foreground an ensemble of musicians play wind instruments, drums, and strings.

A medieval depiction of a feast; Speculum humanae salvationis, London, 1485-1509; British Library, Harley MS 2838, f.45r. Source: www.bl.uk/

The story of Jacob’s vision of angels moving down and up a celestial staircase or ladder is well known. On his way from Beersheva to Haran, he beds down in the wilderness, using a stone for a pillow:

He came upon a certain place and stopped there for the night, for the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of that place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. (Gen 28:11)

The rabbis have a lot to say about this pillow (as they do about most things). Arragel’s characterization of the Talmudic Rabbis’ tendency toward over-interpretation is clear in how Arragel summarizes Talmudic interpretations of Jacob using a stone for a pillow:

E tomo de las piedras del lugar e puso a su cabeçera: Deste dezir fazen los talmudistas grande fiesta, e non lo judgan al pie de la letra… (Paz y Meliá, Biblia de Alba: Genesis 140)

And he took a stone from the area and put it under his head: The Talmudists go wild with this passage, and do not interpret it literally….

Fazer grande fiesta is attested in medieval usage in a number of texts, always in the literal sense of ‘celebrated heartily’; this is the only example I have seen where it is used figuratively, even playfully.

When Rabbis give hypothetical examples to illustrate legal arguments involving two or more parties, they often use the convention of referring to them as Reuben and Simon (Fulano y Mengano in Spanish, maybe John and Jack in English). For example, “If Reuben owns an ox that gores a donkey belonging to Simon…”

Arragel adapts this convention for his Castilian readers, replacing Reuben and Simon with Juan and Pedro (Shem Tov Ardutiel of Carrión also did this in his Proverbios morales). For example, Genesis 42:01 tells how Jacob, suffering a famine in his homeland of Canaan, learns that there are stores of grain in Egypt: E vio Jacob que hauia çiuera en Egipto, etc. (and Jacob saw that there was grain in Egypt). Obviously it is impossible to literally see all the way from Canaan to Egypt. Jewish commentators disagree as to how to best resolve this passage: some say that Jacob received a vision from God of the grain to be had in Egypt, so in a sense actually ‘saw’ it. Others say that Jacob literally saw people arriving from Egypt carrying sacks of grain. Arragel follows the interpretation of his countryman Abraham ibn Ezra (ca. 1080- ca. 1165), who says that in this case, ‘saw’ is metaphorical, in the same way that we say ‘I see’ for ‘I understand,’ framing this in terms of the perception science of his day:

por quanto syn dubda los çinco sentidos se juntan a vn lugar e ally se canbian el vno por el otro, que en veyendo la miel, la setençiamos dulçe, e en veyendo la fiel, la seteçiamos amarga, en caso que las non tastemos. En oyendo cantar a Pedro o a Juan, cognosçemoslos, avnque los non veamos estonçe, asy que con el sesto sentido que llaman el seso comun. (Paz y Meliá, Biblia de Alba: Genesis 154)

 

therefore, it is without doubt that the five senses come together in one place and there change places, so that in seeing honey, we think it sweet, and in seeing bile, we think it bitter, in the event that we do not actually taste it. When we hear Pedro or Juan singing, we know them, although we do not see them, and so it is with the sixth sense which we call common sense.

A painting of a worker driving a team of oxen trampling wheat stalks as other workers to the left and right collect the stalks to be trampled.

Using cows to trample wheat, from the Tomb of Menna, New Kingdom (wall painting) Egyptian 18th Dynasty (c.1567-1320 BC); Valley of the Nobles, Thebes, Egypt Source: wikipedia.org

Arragel’s use of vernacular language to interpret this passage doesn’t end there. To illustrate the argument of Rashi that Jacob literally saw grain in Egypt in a divinely-inspired (but not prophetic) vision, he gives the following aggadah (narrative explanation for a Biblical passage, meant to illustrate the sense of a passage but not authoritative in rabbinical argument):

otros dizen que vn rrio de Egipto a Chanaan yua, e Joseph, sintiendo que sus hermanos e padre en persecucion de pan serian, que echara por el rio pajas con espigas e que llegaron a Chanaan. (Paz y Meliá, Biblia de Alba: Genesis 129)

 

Others say that there was a river flowing from Egypt to Canaan, and that Joseph, knowing that his brothers and father would be looking for bread, threw straw with spikes into the river and that they arrived in Canaan.

It’s hard to know who the ‘others’ are to whom Arragel refers. Usually when he says this what follows is an interpretation not found in the commentaries of the Rabbis. This explanation is not found in any Biblical commentary; it is, however, found in the Coplas de Yosef, a 14th-century Castilian Jewish versification of the Joseph story:

Ya’aqob en esa tierra, allá donde estaba,
al río se fuera y las aguas miraba:
mucha paja viera que en el río andaba,
esta paja fuera que derramó Yosef
(Girón-Negrón and Minervini 141, st. 76)

Jacob in that land [Canaan], where he dwelled,
went to the river and looked at the water:
he saw a lot of straw floating in the river,
it was straw that Joseph had scattered

Apparently, both the author of the Coplas de Yosef and Arragel were drawing on a local midrash (interpretation of a Biblical verse) that, while unattested in any prior Jewish commentary, has its source in a Castilian folk legend (later collected from a 20th century informant), explaining the origin of the name of the town, Tedeja (Girón-Negrón and Minervini 249 n 74–78). Here, the straw floating down the river announces the victory of Christian forces over their Muslim opponents that took place upriver from Tedeja:

Les echaron al río [las pajas] para ver la señal de lo que iban a hacer. Cuando llegaba el agua del río con las pajas es que habían ganao la batalla. Que ha habido una batalla ahí, sí, porque han salido muchos restos ahí en eso. La batalla fue en Tedeja. Y dijo el rey moro: ‘¡Ahí te dejo!’ y por eso se llama Tedeja (Pedrosa 94–95, no. 72)

 

They threw [the straw] in the river to see the sign of what they were about to do. When the river water with the straw arrived, they had won the battle. [Informant: Yes, there was a battle there, they found the remains of it. The battle was in Tedeja]. The Muslim king said: “I leave you [te dejo] there!” And that is why it’s named Tedeja.

In addition to material drawn from folktales, Arragel also makes good use of refranes (popular sayings; proverbs) in his explanations of Biblical passages. In Genesis 39, Potiphar’s wife unsuccessfully attempts to seduce Joseph, then tells Potifar that it was Joseph who tried to rape her. The rabbis distinguish between what she said and what she did, making the point that there is a big difference between saying something and actually doing it:

Fazer e dezir dos cosas son: asy que ella non auia de dezir saluo: esto e esto me dixo tu sieruo; pero dixo fizo, por lo qual raby Salamon [Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, aka Rashi] pone quel su marido estando con ella a lo que ya sabedes, e era tanto como que le dizia que se auia echado con ella. (Paz y Meliá, Biblia de Alba: Genesis 151)

 

Doing and saying are two different things: so, she should have said ‘your servant told me such-and-such; but instead she said ‘did,’ to which Rabbi Solomon [ben Isaac of Troyes, aka Rashi, ca. 1050-ca.1120] posits that as her husband was with her, which you already know, and it was as if she had told him that he had slept with her [by force].

Here Arragel deploys a refrán that is attested in Castilian works both Christian (the anonymous El Cavallero Zifar, ca. 1300) and Jewish (Shem Tov Ardutiel’s Proverbios morales, ca. 1330), as well as in the proverb collection by the Iñigo López de Mendoza, the Marquis of Santillana, Refranes que dizen las viejas tras el fuego (‘Refranes that old ladies tell around the fire’), which I mention just because the title is so cool.

A poster on a telephone pole announces: "Lost Chicken, goes by the name FeFe. If found, please call Melissa. Huge reward will be given!"

Lost chicken poster, Photo: Mark Krynsky 2013. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/krynsky/10768955643/

My favorite of Arragel’s refranes rabínicos (‘Rabbinical proverbs’) is in his discussion of the rape of Dina by Prince Hamor of Shechem (Gen 34). The tale inspired not only a medieval Castilian ballad that continued to be sung by Sephardic Jews into the 20th century, but also a 17th-century play by the famous Lope de Vega. Jacob’s only daughter Dina sneaks out of the house to hear the singing of the local women in the street. Prince Hamor, son of the King of Shehem, sees her and sexually assaults her. The King offers to marry Dina to his son (ostensibly to legitimate the assault, to which Jacob agrees). However, her older brothers Reuben and Simon (the actual ones, not the legal fiction placeholders in the example above) aren’t having it. Having agreed to join the Israelite religion prior to marrying Dina, Prince Hamor and all his men were circumcised. The day after the circumcision, while they were still quite sore and indisposed, Reuben and Shimon take the opportunity to attack them, and avenge the attack on their sister by putting them all to the sword. You can see why this episode inspired so many narrative interpretations.

But we are here to talk about Arragel’s clever use of refranes. Rabbis tend to frame the tale as an admonition for women and girls to stay at home due to the danger that awaits them in the street. Arragel sums up his discussion of the passage saying:

Nota que la muger e la gallina por sallyr de casa se pierden, e ençerradas onestamente estar deuen. (Paz y Meliá, Biblia de Alba: Genesis 159)

 

Note that women and hens often get lost when they leave the house, and should rather remain chastely locked away [at home]

We find this refrán again in Santillana’s collection:

La muger [y] la gallina por andar se pierde[n] ayna. (Santillana 94, no. 374)

The woman and the hen, roaming about, often become lost.

Arragel’s work is greatly enriched by his use of vernacular language, turns of phrase, and popular sayings. He deftly uses the expressive resources of vernacular Castilian to enrich and enliven his unique work of Biblical commentary, making it more relevant to his medieval Castilian audiences. For modern readers, it is a unique window into how medieval Iberian Jews read Biblical and Rabbinical texts through the lens of contemporary language and culture.

Works cited

  • Girón-Negrón, Luis M., and Laura Minervini. Las coplas de Yosef: entre la Biblia y el Midrash en la poesía judeoespañola. Gredos, 2006.
  • Paz y Meliá, Antonio, editor. Biblia de Alba: Éxodo. 1899, http://bdh.bne.es/bnesearch/detalle/bdh0000171563.
  • —, editor. Biblia de Alba: Genesis. 1899.
  • Pedrosa, José Manuel. Héroes, Santos, Moros y Brujas : Leyendas épicas, históricas y mágicas de la tradición oral de Burgos : Poética, comparatismo y etnotextos. Elías Rubio Marcos, 2001.
  • Santillana, Iñigo López de Mendoza. Refranes que dizen las viejas tras el fuego. Edited by Hugo O. Bizzarri, Edition Reichenberger, 1995.

 

Chivalric Aljamiado Biblical Tales

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engraving from first edition of Amadis de Gaula (1508) showing the knight Amadis mounted on his horse

Los cuatro libros de Amadís de Gaula, Zaragoza: Jorge Coci, 1508 (Source: spanisharts.com)

In a previous post (nearly nine years ago!) I wrote about the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of a Muslim crusader hero imagined by a Spanish Morisco writer in their Arabic-script version of the chivalric romance Paris y Viana (ca. 1560). In this post I’d like to explore how other Morisco writers drew on the conventions of chivalric literature in their retellings of stories from the Hebrew Bible (via the Qur’an and its commentaries).

Following their conquest of Muslim-ruled Granada in 1492 CE, Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile reneged on their guarantees of religious freedom to Spanish Muslims and forcibly converted them to Christianity. Many continued to practice Islam for generations, despite their communities’ lack of formal religious leadership and Islamic education. These crypto-Muslims, called ‘Moriscos’ (‘Moor-like people’) were seen as neither authentic Muslims nor Christians. In an effort to provide some form of Muslim education for a population that increasingly spoke and understood only Spanish, and with limited access to Islamic institutions, their fuqahāʾ (spiritual leaders) produced a unique literature known as Aljamiado—Spanish in effect transliterated into Arabic script (Chejne 1983; Galmés de Fuentes 1996; López-Morillas 2000, 54–57).

Stories from the Hebrew Bible (often mediated through Qur’anic retellings) were popular among the Peninsula’s Muslims (Vespertino Rodríguez 1978; 1983; Pascual Asensi 2008; 2007; Wood 2020; Pauw 2021). Aljamiado versions of the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Joseph, Moses, and others offer a lens into the cultural life of late Spanish Islam as it negotiated with the dominant Christian culture (Busto Cortina 2021, 399). Their shared vernacular language and culture served as a medium for Morisco writers and audiences to represent this negotiation. Aljamiado retellings of stories from the Hebrew Bible demonstrate Morisco engagement with local Castilian and Aragonese language and culture, reflecting contemporary vernacular practices (colloquialisms, folkloric material and literary genres).

Iberian Muslims/Moriscos wrote and recited vernacular versions of Qur’anic narratives of Biblical figures. The texts we see here are are vernacular versions and adaptations, for the most part, of Arabic texts from the authoritative collections of al-Kisāʾi, al-Ṭabarī, and al-Thaʿlabī, with some also found in the collection of the Andalusi author al-Ṭarafī (Tottoli 1996).

Morisco authors and audiences were also familiar with the popular literary traditions of the times. and one Morisco poet famously wrote thousands of lines in imitation of the ballads of  Lope de Vega (the ‘Shakespeare’ of Early Modern Spain) (Asín 1933; Cid 2020). They transcribed popular romances such as París y Viana into Aljamiado (Menaldi 2020), and drew on the narrative resources of chivalric literature (which was wildly popular at the time: think Star Wars) in writing their own versions of Biblical tales.

image of manuscript page of Poema de Yusuf

Manuscript of the Poema de Yúçuf
Source: spanisharts.com

The Poema de Yusuf (‘Poem of Joseph’) is a fourteenth-century Aljamiado versification of the Joseph story found in the Qur’an (12, Surat Yusuf).  It casts the figures at Pharaoh’s court in medieval terms, imagining them as medieval knights and ladies. We read references to the ‘vassals’ of Pharaoh (Johnson 1974, 69), and a dialogue between Joseph and Benjamin (who does not recognize his brother, believing him long dead) reads:

Do you recognize me, squire?
He replied: ‘No, by my faith, sir knight.’

‘Conoçesme, escudero?’
Yel le dixxo: ‘No, a la fe, caballero.’
(Johnson 1974, 83, st. B246)

Such borrowings from (Christian) chivalric culture transposed the concepts and values of chivalry onto an Islamic context. The “Dialogue of Moses and God” imagines the discussion between Moses and God on Mount Sinai. The description of Moses as he receives the law at Sinai recalls allegorical descriptions of a knight’s kit, in which each item of the kit represents a different aspect of knighthood. Here’s an example from the late 13th century Catalan Book of the Order of Chivalry by Ramon Llull  (Llibre de l’orde de la cavalleria):

Unto the knight is given a sword which is made in the shape of a cross to signify that just as our Lord Jesus Christ vanquished on the Cross the death into which we had fallen because of the sin of our father Adam, so the knight must vanquish and destroy the enemies of the Cross with the sword. And since the sword is double edged, and Chivalry exists in order to uphold justice, and justice means giving to each one his right, therefore the knight’s sword signifies that he should uphold Chivalry and justice with the sword…. The lance is given to the knight to signify the truth, for the truth is straight and does not bend, and the truth goes before falsehood. And the lance-head signifies the power that the truth has over falsehood, and the pennant signifies that the truth reveals itself to all…. The chapel-de-fer is given to the knight to signify shame…. The hauberk signifies a castle and rampart opposite vices and misdeeds… spurs are given to the knight to signify the diligence, expertise, and zeal with which he professes the honour of his Order…. The collar is given to the knight to signify obedience… the mace is given to the knight to signify strength of courage…. (Llull 2013, 66–67)

With appropriate substitutions for his office as prophet, Moses is similarly outfitted in the “Dialogue of Moses and God”:

Musa came and wore upon his head the crown of messengerhood and nubū’a (prophecy),[1] and upon his body wore the robe of tranquility; on his waist the belt of loyalty, and around his neck the sword of ad-dīn [religion], and in his right hand he wore the ring of chastity, and below him the mount of obedience, and in front of him the mounts of truth and promise, and in his right side a guardian of Paradise and to his left a statue, and the fire of desire threw sparks in his heart…

vino Mūça i traía sobre su kabeza la corona de la mensajería i de la annubua (profecía), i sobre su kuerpo la rropa del sosiego, i sobre su çintura la korrea de la lealtad, i por su kuello la espada del addīn (religión) y-en su mano la derecha puesto el anillo de la kastedad, i debaxo d-él la kabalgaduras del kunplimiento, i delante d-él las kabalgaduras de la verdad i de la promesa; y-a su mano la derecha un portero i la figura a su mano la içkierda, i el fuego del deseo echaba purnas en su koraçón” (Vespertino Rodríguez 1983, 168)

The structured inventory and allegorical descriptions of the kit are the same, but with the values of Islamic prophethood substituted for those of Christian knighthood. These adaptations of the language and ideology of Castilian chivalry in Aljamiado Biblical tales give us a good sense of the extent to which Moriscos felt comfortable claiming parts of that literary culture for their own use.

Joseph the Minister of Egypt sits on a throne commanding his brothers who do not yet recognize him

Joseph and his brothers from the Morgan Picture Bible (Paris, ca. 1250) MS M.638, fol. 6r (Source: themorgan.org)

Morisco adaptation of chivalric conventions is even more pronounced in the later Aljamiado prose version of the Joseph story, the Legend of Joseph (Leyenda de Yusuf, ca 1500), written as chivalric literature was mounting in popularity, a few years before the publication of the blockbuster bestseller Amadís de Gaula.  In fact, the Legend of Joseph‘s English translator Michael McGaha calls it “a Morisco Amadís” (McGaha 1997, 164).

The Legend of Joseph is an expansion of the Joseph story as retold in al-Kisāʾī’s Qisās al-Anbiyā (‘Tales of the Prophets’), but the narrator of the Legend is much freer than al-Kisāʾī in their depiction of material culture and psychological states. This includes the detailed descriptions of courtly settings so common to chivalric romance. When the enslaver Malik is preparing the high-priced Joseph for sale, al-Kisāʾī’s version simply states “he dressed Joseph in finery, adorned him most magnificently, and set him on a dais” (1978, 172). The Legend of Joseph, by contrast, paints in rich detail a scene drawn from the pages of medieval Arthurian literature:

he dressed him in a shirt of very thin linen, and in green camlet breeches, and a yellow brocade burnoose, and a necklace with two gold chains, and in the middle of each chain a white pearl that made his face shine like the moon on the fourteenth night of the month. And he put ten rings on his fingers with their red rubies. And at that time men dressed just like women. He put on him bracelets such as kings wear, and he put on him a headdress of gold garnished with seed pearls, and he gave him a scepter like the scepters of kings, and a horse saddled for him with a golden saddle and with silver stirrups and bridle. (McGaha 1997, 182)

bištile una kamiša de lino muy delgado y-unos saraweleš de chamellot berde y-un albornos de brokado amarillo y-un kollar kon doš koloreš de oro, en medio de kada kollar una perla blanka ke relumbraba della šu kara komo la lluna la noche katorzena, i pušole diez anilloš con šuš yemaš y -aliakūtaš koloradaš.  Y-era akel tienpo ke še atabiyan loš onbreš komo laš mugeres. i pušole manillaš de rreyeš i hizo enšilar para el una kabalgadura kon la šilla de oro, i šuš eštriboš i freno de plata. (Klenk 1972, 27–28)

From these examples it is clear that Morisco writers adapted the motifs and conventions of the chivalric culture of the times in their specifically Muslim retellings of Biblical tales. In this, Moriscos are not unlike other minority groups whose group identity is based on both commonalities with the majority as well as practices that mark difference.

Thanks to Donald Wood and Andrea Pauw for pointing me toward useful sources and making suggestions to improve this post. Some of the material in this post appears in Wacks, David A. “Aljamiado Retellings of the Hebrew Bible.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-022-00251-1. Author’s Open Access postprint version available at: https://doi.org/10.17613/5vtm-8c09.

Works cited

  • Al-Kisāʾī, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allah. 1978. The Tales of the Prophets of Al-Kisaʾi. Translated by W.M. Thaxton. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
  • Asín, Jaime Oliver. 1933. “Morisco de Túnez, admirador de Lope.” Al-Andalus 1 (2): 409–50.
  • Busto Cortina, Juan Carlos. 2021. “La historia de Nūḥ (Noé) en textos aljamiado-moriscos.” Forma Breve: Revista de Literatura, 12, 16: 389–400.
  • Chejne, Anwar G. 1983. Islam and the West: The Moriscos. Albany: SUNY.
  • Cid, Jesús Antonio. 2020. “El Romancerillo del morisco Juan Pérez-Ibrahim Taybili. Romances nuevos memorizados antes de 1609 e incluidos en el «Tratado de los dos caminos» (Túnez, c. 1630-1640).” Bulletin des Sciences Mathématiques 122 (June): 161–80.
  • Galmés de Fuentes, Álvaro. 1996. “La lengua de los moriscos.” In Manual de dialectología hispánica, edited by Manuel Alvar, 111–18. Barcelona: Ariel.
  • Johnson, William Weisiger, ed. 1974. The Poema de José: A Transcription and Comparison of the Extant Manuscripts. University, MS: University of Mississippi.
  • Klenk, Ursula, ed. 1972. La Leyenda de Yusuf. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer.
  • Llull, Ramon. 2013. The Book of the Order of Chivalry. Translated by Noel Fallows. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press.
  • López-Morillas, Consuelo. 2000. “Language.” In The Literature of Al-Andalus, edited by Maria Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells, 33–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • McGaha, Michael D. 1997. Coat of Many Cultures: The Story of Joseph in Spanish Literature, 1200-1492. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.
  • Menaldi, Veronica. 2020. “Transformative Translations: Morisco Modifications in Aljamiado Version of París y Viana.” La Corónica 48 (2): 153–79. https://doi.org/10.1353/cor.2020.0003.
  • Pascual Asensi, Jorge. 2007. “Las Isrāʾīliyyāt o ‘historias de los judíos’ en la tradición literaria aljamiado-morisca: Taḥrīf, moriscos y polémica anticristiana.” In 30 años de mudejarismo: Memoria y futuro: 1975-2005: Actas del X Simposio Internacional de Mudejarismo, Teruel, 14-16 de septiembre de 2005, 605–14. Teruel: Centro de Estudios Mudéjares-Instituto de Estudios Turolenses.
  • ———. 2008. “Y tenía della un fijo que le decían Palayṭūn. Un caso de masīḥiyya en un relato de tradición aljamiado-morisco (Ms. Junta 8, fols. 73r-81r).” Anaquel de estudios árabes 19: 159–74.
  • Pauw, Andrea. 2021. “The Hadith de Yúçuf.” In The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity, edited by E. Michael Gerli and Ryan D. Giles, 439–56. London: Routledge.
  • Rabadán, Mohamad. 1991. Poemas de Mohamad Rabadán. Edited by José Antonio Lasarte López. Zaragoza: Diputación General de Aragón, Departamento de Cultura y Educación.
  • Tottoli, Roberto. 1996. “Le Qisas al-anbiya di Tarafi.” Naples: Università di Napoli.
  • Vespertino Rodríguez, Antonio. 1978. “Las figuras de Jesús y María en la literatura aljamiado-morisca.” In Actas del Coloquio Internacional sobre Literatura Aljamiada y Morisca, edited by Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes, 259–312. Madrid: Gredos.
  • ———. 1983. Leyendas aljamiadas y moriscas sobre personajes bíblicos. Colección de literatura española aljamiado-morisca. Madrid: Gredos.
  • Wood, Donald W. 2020. “‘Tengo feuza en la piyadad de Allāh’: Piety and Polemic in an Aljamiado-Morisco ‘Companion in Paradise’ Narrative.” Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim culture in confluence and dialogue 26, 2020 (1): 22–48. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340059.

 

Fighting over scripture: polemical retellings of the Hebrew Bible in medieval Iberia

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Lately I’ve been looking at how retellings of the Hebrew Bible by medieval Iberian Jews, Christians, and Muslims reflect the mutual influence and tension between the three traditions (one on Adam and Eve, another on shared Biblical storyworlds). Here I am focusing on how the religious debates of the age play out in these texts, or rather: what do these retellings show us about how Medieval Iberians argued over which of these three faiths was supreme?

Rabbi debates Priest under arches of Church interior

Nahmanides debates Friar Paul in the 1263 Disputation of Barcelona, from the graphic novel ‘Debating Truth’ by Nina Caputo and Liz Clarke (Oxford UP 2016)

Medieval Iberians of all religions engaged in polemics with their spiritual rivals. In the later Middle Ages, actual live disputations and debates (and some shouting matches that ended in fistfights or worse) fueled a genre of polemical treatises meant to legitimize one tradition at the expense of others. In the age of Christian crusade against Granada and an increasingly strident campaign to convert Muslim and Jewish subjects of Christian monarchs, these polemics were both increasingly reflective of daily practice and increasingly engaged with the actual exegesis, doctrine, and practice of rival groups, rather than shadowboxing a spectral abstraction of Christians, Jews, or Muslims.

While explicitly polemical treatises written expressly against one or another of the traditions put scripture in service to theological arguments, the polemical retellings of the Hebrew Bible we are about to see instead deploy theological arguments to reinforce their interpretation of scripture, privileging the narrative. Scholars of polemics point out that the polemic spirit infused many genres, especially biblical commentary (Talmadge 17; Trautner-Kromann 5), and we see these examples in that line of thinking. We are dealing with polemical Biblical narratives that demonstrate an awareness of and engagement with their sibling traditions. This engagement takes various forms, specifically in the representation of rival traditions, and through polemical representations of specific doctrines and practices meant to legitimize one tradition at the expense of the others.

fifteenth-century painting of feast with one man seated by himself to the right

‘The Feast Given by Joseph for his Brothers’ Francesco Morandini (1549). The Walters Art Museum art.thewalters.org. As in the General estoria, Joseph sits to one side by himself

One way of representing a given religious tradition is to identify a medieval religous group with a Biblical character or characters. The 13th-century Castilian universal history General estoria, compiled by Alfonso X of Castile, retells the story of Joseph in Egypt as an allegory for contemporary laws mandating that Jews and Christians not eat together. In the retelling, Joseph seats his Israelite brothers at tables separately from the Egyptians dining with them, explaining that Egyptian law forbade Jews to eat at the same table as Egyptians (Alfonso X I:8, xxi, 453), thus projecting the contemporary polemical atmosphere backward in time onto the Biblical text:

he ordered the tables set, his to one side, as if we were a man from a different religion and a strange land, and that of the Egyptians, who ate with him on his side, as befits natives of the land, and that of his brothers on their side, as befits foreigners, for at that time in Egypt it was an infraction of the law and as nonsensical that Egyptians eat with Jews who were not of their religion

mandó poner las mesas, la suya apartada, assí commo de omne d’otra ley e de agena tierra, e la de los de Egipto que comién con él en su cabo, assí commo de naturales del logar, e la de sos hermanos a su part, assí como de avenedizos, ca por quebrantamiento de ley e por cosa sin razón tenién estonces los de Egipto de comer ellos con los judíos que non eran de su ley. (Alfonso X I:8, xxi, 453)

We can see a similar process at work in the Jewish retelling of the Joseph story in the fourteenth-century Castilian Coplas de Yosef, which repeatedly refers to individual Israelites as judíos (‘Jews’) as opposed to Israelites or ‘Sons of Jacob,’ and collectively as judería (‘group of Jews’ and also ‘Jewish neighborhood’) (Minervini and Girón-Negrón 171, st. 216a, 173 n 216a).

left panel: moses holds three tablets, with one falling to ground. Right panel: moses holds two tablets

stills from ‘History of the World, Part I’ (dir. Mel Brooks, 20th Century Fox, 1981)

In Muslim retellings of the Hebrew Bible, representation of Jews or Biblical Hebrews (standing in for contemporary Iberian Jews) reinforces the doctrine of taḥrīf (corruption of the Hebrew scriptures by Jews and Christians) and the moral and spiritual inferiority of non-Muslims in general. The doctrine of taḥrīf is allegorized in the sixteenth-century Aljamiado Dialogue of Moses with God on Mount Sinai, written for clandestine Muslims living under the prohibition of Islam in the age of Inquisition. Their Moses comes down from the mountain with ‘seven [not two] tablets of pearls and coral, on which the Torah was written’ (“Siete tablas de perlas y coral, en que ellas estaba escrito el at-tawrah” (Vespertino Rodríguez 174). This reinforces the traditional Muslim view that the Jews changed the Torah after it was received at Sinai.

two women studying torah at a table

Students studying Torah at Midreshet Aviv in Tel Aviv (timesofisrael.com 2013)

At other times, these retellings shift their focus to specific ritual practices, representing these in polemical ways to exalt one’s own or discredit those of others. In the 14th-century Jewish versification of the Joseph story, the Coplas de Yosef, Joseph asks his brothers to travel back to Canaan and prove to his father that Joseph is still alive by reminding his long-lost father Jacob of a study session the two had when Joseph was still living at home. The anachronic representation of Joseph studying Torah with Jacob (the events of the Joseph story in the Bible occur before those of the book of Exodus from which Jacob and Joseph here read) is meant as a bona fide to prove Egyptian Joseph’s identity both as a Jew (who studies Torah) rather than an Egyptian, and as the living brother of Jacob’s sons. He reminds his brothers:

He who loved me, my father the great scholar,
when he sent me to get you, and sent me away from his side, at the time, I read with him from a very precious book [Exodus]

Aquél que me deseava, mi padre el gran letrado,
que cuando [a] vós me inviava espartióme de su lado, estonces con él meldava en un livro muy preçiado [Éxodo]” (Minervini and Girón-Negrón 175, st. 229).

This type of representation and instruction in ritual practice and prayer through Biblical narrative takes on a more crucial role in the Morisco community in the sixteenth century. With few opportunities for formal organized religious education, Moriscos depended in part on Aljamiado Biblical legends to reinforce Islamic doctrine and ritual praxis in context of persecution and Inquisition (Wood 43). In the 15th-century aljamiado Leyenda de Yusuf (‘The Legend of Yusuf’), the angel Gabriel visits Joseph in the pit into which his brothers have thrown him and teaches him Muslim prayers (Klenk 16–17; McGaha 174).

interior of one-room mosque at summit of Mount Sinai

Interior of Mosque at the summit of Mount Sinai (photo: Premiero, 2007, wikipedia.org)

In the Diálogo de Moisés (‘Dialogue of Moses’) written in the same period, Moses ascends the mountain and spends forty days purifying himself spiritually before receiving the law. The scene describes him performing Muslim prayer, using the Arabic terms to describe the act of prayer: ṣalla (prayer), rakʿa (prostration), and sajada (to prostrate one’s self):

he went up to Mount Sinai and performed aṣ-ṣala in two rakʿas, and when he was sajjada’ed, Allah taʿāla approached him and said….

Subió al monte de Turiçina’a (Sinai) y hizo assala (oración) en el dos arrak’as (postraciones), y como estaba aççajado (postrado), acercólo Alla ta’ala, y díjole…” (Vespertino Rodríguez 168)

These examples of the representation in retellings of the Hebrew Bible of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as well as their rituals and practices, demonstrates the extent to which the practices of the three traditions were at least as interdependent in their struggles with one another as they were in their common languages and vernacular culture. Against the backdrop of public disputations and written treatises reflecting this activity, polemical retellings of the Hebrew bible served as a common narrative stage for the drama of the three religions.

Works cited

  • Alfonso X. General estoria. Edited by Borja Sánchez-Prieto, Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2009.
  • Klenk, Ursula, editor. La Leyenda de Yusuf. M. Niemeyer, 1972.
  • McGaha, Michael D. Coat of Many Cultures: The Story of Joseph in Spanish Literature, 1200-1492. Jewish Publication Society, 1997.
  • Minervini, Laura, and Luis Girón-Negrón. Las Coplas de Yosef. Entre la Biblia y el Midrash en la poesía judeoespañola. Gredos, 2006.
  • Talmadge, Frank. “Introduction.” The Book of the Covenant of Joseph Kimḥi., translated by Frank Talmadge, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1972, pp. 9–26.
  • Trautner-Kromann, Hanne. Shield and Sword: Jewish Polemics against Christianity and the Christians in France and Spain from 1100-1500. Mohr, 1993.
  • Vespertino Rodríguez, Antonio. Leyendas aljamiadas y moriscas sobre personajes bíblicos. Gredos, 1983.
  • Wood, Donald Walter. “‘Tengo feuza en la piyadad de Allāh’: Piety and Polemic in an Aljamiado-Morisco ‘Companion in Paradise’ Narrative.” Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim culture in confluence and dialogue, vol. 26, 2020, no. 1, 2020, pp. 22–48, https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340059.

This post is a version of a paper given at the 2022 meeting of the Medieval Academy. Thanks to Brian Catlos for organizing the panel on “Religious Texts and Confessional Integration in a Plural Mediterranean” (a session sponsored by the Mediterranean Seminar).

Shared Storyworlds in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Retellings of the Hebrew Bible in Medieval Iberia

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Adam and Eve from the Alba Bible

Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden in the Alba Bible (15th c.)

Medieval Iberians of all three religions participated in a common culture of retellings of material from the Hebrew Bible that fused the doctrines of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity with the vernacular languages and cultures common to all three groups. This shared storyworlding is expressed in a body of texts that includes versifications, chronicles, translations, art, and exegesis. Here I will discuss how the use of a vernacular common to all three religious groups shapes the creation of a shared storyworld that brings together Jewish, Muslim, and Christian audiences, at times through Biblical traditions, languages, and vernacular culture.

Cain bites Abel on neck

Cain bites Abel on neck, Alba Bible (15th c.)

It makes sense that vernacular retellings of the Hebrew Bible, as opposed to those written in classical languages of a given religious group (Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Latin) were the most accessible to members of all three groups who shared a common language. This is not true in every circumstance, however. Not all Granadan Muslims, for example, were speakers of Castilian in the year 1300 (when Andalusi Arabic was still dominant), and so would not comprehend retellings in Castilian. Most Jews were not likely to hear Castilian or Catalan Biblical tales in sermons by Christian priests except when they were mandated to attend sermons preached by Dominicans and Franciscans. However, there are many retellings that are linguistically, culturally, and situationally accessible across groups, and this access makes it possible for these groups to develop a shared understanding of the storyworld of the Hebrew Bible.

picture of Story World create-a-story kit

Storyworld Create a Story Kit (source: https://www.candlewick.com/)

What is a storyworld? The idea of storyworld grows from the reader reception theory of the 1970s and 80s in which the object of study is not only the text, but rather extends to the experience of the audience as part of the constitution of the literary work. That is, the text is only one part of the work. We can think of the storyworld as a collaboration between text and audience. This approach is useful for studying the interactions between different religious traditions, because the focus on audience experience helps us conceptualize the continuity of experience between texts and audiences representing distinct religious traditions but shared literary experiences.

One of the earlier theorists of the storyworld, Seymour Chatman, posited the binary of discourse and story, in which the discourse refers to the text, and the story is “the continuum of events presupposing the total set of all conceivable details actually inferred by a reader [audience]” (Chatman 28; Thatcher 28). For the narratologist David Herman, storyworlds are simply “the worlds evoked by narratives” (Herman 143).  María Ángeles Martínez builds on these ideas, adding that “storyworlds are mental models of situations and states of affairs which are linguistically or multimodally prompted by narrative discourse” (Martínez 28).

What does a storyworld do? How is it a useful tool for reading retellings of the Hebrew Bible? Scholars of contemporary media use it as a construct to study audience interaction with coherent multi-platform or ‘transmedial’ narrative worlds (Ryan), such as Star Wars narratives that proliferate across film, novels, graphic novels, and videogames.

cover of Lego Star Wars videogame showing lego minifig characters holding light sabers

Lego Star Wars video game (source: https://starwars.fandom.com/)

The Bible already does this by lending coherence to its many books (‘Biblia’ is the Greek plural for ‘book’) and the multiple, sometimes contradictory traditions on which it draws. The canonical and apocryphal books of the Hebrew Bible texts are the base, and the various retellings in theater, legend, chronicle, and verse expand and innovate. Storyworlds provide us with a conceptual frame to organize and provide coherence for our readings of the individual texts, and a lens through which to view questions of how narrative works.

I’ll give a few examples to show three different ways in which this happens in the texts: (1) the expression of emotional states, (2) the description of shared material culture, and (3) the use of genres, tropes, and forms common to vernacular narrative genres across religious traditions.

manuscript illumination showing Abraham about to behead Isaac while angel descends from heaven to stop him

The Binding of Isaac, in Les anciennes hystoires rommaines, MS Royal 16 G VII, f. 28, 14th c. British Library (source: thetorah.com)

One story very familiar to all three groups is the story of the aqedah or binding of Isaac (Ishmael in Islamic tradition) told in Genesis 22.  We know the story: God commands Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. Abraham complies, and just as he is about to bring the knife down on Isaac’s throat, God sends an angel to stop him, telling him that he has passed God’s test.The 15th-century Valencian biblical play Sacrifiçi de Isaac (Sacrifice of Isaac) takes some dramatic liberties with this scene, taking it in a more burlesque direction, and adding more affective detail in the representation of both the Angel and Abraham, couched in familiar vernacular tropes of badgering and annoyance:

Angel [in the voice of an old lady]: Abraham! Abraham!
Abraham: What do you want, sir?

L’Àngel, a to de ‘Vexilla.’: “Habram! Abram!”
Habram: “Què vols, senyor?” (Huerta Viñas 128)

The voice of the Angel is cast in the misogynist trope of the meddling older lady, and Abraham’s response is not the obedient “here I am” of the bible, but rather què vols?  the Valencian equivalent of “whattaya want, already” of the stereotyped man chafing at a female questioning his actions.  I argue that it would be far more difficult to communicate these affective states in Biblical Hebrew or Latin, and that it is the vernacular medium that opens the traditional text to this affective texturing of the story, a vernacular experience that is shared by Jews, Christian, and Muslims in the street watching the drama.

antique hetchel for processing wool or flax (18th c.?) (source: pinterest.com)

Elsewhere authors of biblical retellings use material culture as a reference point in describing things that might be unfamiliar to audiences. The 13th-century Castilian General estoria, compiled under the direction of Alfonso X of Castile, in an excursus in the Joseph story on the Nile river adapted from Pliny, describes the crocodile (cocodriz): The compilers write that

 

on both jaws are many strong teeth, that are fashioned and positioned just like they are on the iron combs used to process wool.

en amoz los carrirellos á muchos dientes e muy Fuertes, e tiénenlos assí texidos e puestos eguales como están los dientes en  los peines de fierro que lavran la lana. (Alfonso X I:8, xiv, 435-436)

Here the compilers draw on the vernacular material culture, one shared across religious groups, to help audiences perhaps not personally familiar with crocodiles to populate parts the Joseph storyworld.

workers preparing bread from ancient Egyptian mural

And Jacob saw there was grain in Egypt
Senet’s Tomb (TT60), Luxor, Egypt, 20th c BCE (source: https://stravaganzastravaganza.blogspot.com/)

Our sources also share folkoric tropes and motifs drawn from the vernacular culture shared by Muslims, Jews, and Christians. The retelling of the Joseph story in the fourteenth-century Coplas de Yosef, a Hebrew aljamiado versification in mester de clerecía tells of how Jacob learns about the stores of grain in Egypt during the famine in his homeland of Canaan:

Jacob, there in that land where he dwelled [Canaan],
Went to the river and looked at the water:
He saw a lot of straw floating along in the river,
The same straw that Joseph had spilled [upriver in Egypt].

Ya’aqob en esa tierra, allá donde estaba,
al río se fuera y las aguas miraba:
mucha paja viera que en el río andaba,
esta paja fuera que derramó Yosef.
(Girón-Negrón and Minervini 141, st. 76).

While Genesis 42:1 relates only that Jacob “saw there was grain in Egypt” (וַיַּ֣רְא יַעֲקֹ֔ב כִּ֥י יֶשׁ־שֶׁ֖בֶר בְּמִצְרָ֑יִם), Rabbinic sources provide various explanations: Jacob saw it in a vision (Bereshit Rabbah); Jacob lost his prophetic vision after Joseph was sold and only saw the ‘hope’ of bread in Egypt (Rashi); Jacob literally saw men with wheat and asked them, then understood that they had bought it in Egypt (David Qimhi). None of these account for the novel solution of the Coplas de Yosef, but the editors of the Coplas, Laura Minervini and Luis Girón-Negrón, locate the motif in a folktale collected in Burgos, Las señas de la batalla:

They threw the straw in the river for them to see the sign of what they were going to do. When the river water with the staw reached them, they knew that they had won the battle.

Les echaron al río [las pajas] para ver la señal de lo que iban a hacer. Cuando llegaba el agua del río con las pajas es que habían ganao la batalla. (Pedrosa 95; Girón-Negrón and Minervini 249 n 74–78)

This motif is adapted in the Coplas as a novel interpretation of Genesis under the influence of regional vernacular culture shared across religious communities, and its use in building out the storyworld of the Joseph narrative connects Jewish, Muslim, and Christian speakers of Castilian familiar with it from oral tradition [I have written about the transmission of narrative across religious groups via oral tradition here and here].

Hopefully these few examples begin to paint for you the picture of a community of Biblical interpretation at once divided by religious tradition and bound together by common vernacular language and culture, one that facilitated the practice of a shared Biblical storyworld. Stay tuned for more in future posts on this topic!

Works cited

  • Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Cornell University Press, 1978.
  • Girón-Negrón, Luis M., and Laura Minervini. Las Coplas de Yosef: Entre La Biblia y El Midrash En La Poesía Judeoespañola. Gredos, 2006.
  • Herman, David. Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Ohio State University Press, 2012.
  • Huerta Viñas, Ferran. Teatre Bíblic: Antic Testament. Editorial Barcino, 1976.
  • Martínez, María-Ángeles. Storyworld Possible Selves. De Gruyter, Inc., 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=5156565.
  • Pedrosa, José Manuel. Héroes, santos, moros y brujas : Leyendas épicas, históricas y mágicas de la tradición oral de Burgos : Poética, comparatismo y etnotextos. Elías Rubio Marcos, 2001.
  • Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today, vol. 34, no. 3, Sept. 2013, pp. 361–88.
  • Thatcher, Tom. “Anatomies of the Fourth Gospel: Past, Present, and Future Probes.” Anatomies of Narrative Criticism: The Past, Present, and Futures of the Fourth Gospel as Literature, edited by Tom Thatcher and Stephen D. Moore, Brill, 2008, pp. 1–35.
  • Ukas, Catherine Vool Rytell. The Biblia Rimada de Sevilla: A Critical Edition. University of Toronto, 1981.

This post is a version of a paper given at the 2022 MLA Convention, in the panel “New Currents in Medieval Iberian Studies” organized by the Medieval Iberian LLC Forum and presided by Robin Bower.

 

 

Textbook for a study abroad program that never happened

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photo of student group in Madrid in 2013

2013 participants on an excursion to Madrid

In 2013 I served as visiting faculty for a now-defunct study abroad program in Oviedo, Spain. My family and I spent six months living, working, and attending school in Asturias under the auspices of GEO (Global Engagement Oregon), then known as AHA. It was a great experience, so much so that when the program was discontinued, I decided to develop a new, faculty-led summer program at GEO’s Oviedo Center for students at the University of Oregon and GEO partner universities. I led a group of Spanish majors in August 2014, and again in 2015. I taught two 4-credit courses in the month of August, catering to Spanish majors looking to complete upper-level coursework. I redesigned the program in August 2019, this time with a group of (mostly) Spanish minors whose majors occupied most of their time during the academic year but who were excited at the prospect of satisfying their minor requirements and experiencing a linguistic and cultural immersion. The program was a success. It enrolled fully, and students reported a positive experience.

I’d planned to repeat the program in Summer 2020, and so spent Fall 2019 and Winter 2020 recruiting furiously. It paid off, and by March enrollment was full.

In anticipation, I’d prepared a new course reader that was focused on content related to the program site visits. This way, students would read about a site, visit it, and complete assignments meant to integrate the readings and their experiences on site. I’d had some success with this approach in past iterations of the program, but this time I really focused on making the readings directly relevant to the excursions and integrating medieval readings with modern readings on related cultural and historical issues.

The challenge in preparing these materials is that it is difficult to find texts on these topics that are linguistically appropriate to advanced intermediate learners of Spanish. Much of what is available relative to, for example, the region’s architecture, is written for specialists, or for adult native speakers of Spanish. As a result, the reader is a bricolage of sections of wikipedia pages, newspaper articles, books, and other sources heavily edited and glossed for non-native student readers.

public service poster from Asturian health authority; women pointing to head. Caption: The virus doesn't think, but you shouldThen COVID happened. The program was canceled, and the reader, which I’d spent so many hours preparing, was suddenly useless, at least for 2020. Hopefully I’ll use it in 2022.

I’d like to share it with you, in the hopes that it is useful to you, or perhaps it will inspire others to do likewise. The texts are all under an open license, Creative Commons BY-SA-NC, meaning that anyone is free to use, duplicate, modify, and publish for non-commercial purposes.

union made badge

 

I also added a ‘union made’ badge to the materials, to let readers know that the author enjoyed union protections, and that union membership strengthens academic freedoms and provides the kind of stable employment conditions that create favorable conditions for the creation of Open Educational Resources.

What follows is a guided tour of the reader’s units, to give you an idea of how they support site-specific student learning. You can start with the table of contents, that also has a link to the course syllabus.

The first site visit is the Roman Baths in Gijón, so I prepared a selection of Strabo’s Geography describing Lusitania, to help students see that Asturias was part of the Roman Empire and what that meant for Asturians at the time, as well as for current-day Asturians’ understanding of their own regional history. I paired this with an article about a nearby excavation of a Roman-era site, to help then make the connections between past and present.

group photo in front of the Holy Cave of Covadonga

2019 participants visit Covadonga

The next excursion was to the Santa Cueva de Covadonga, (and to the Iglesia de Santa Cruz in nearby Cangas de Onís) where according to legend took place a battle between Umayyad troops and a band of fighters led by Pelayo, a local warlord (the Arabic account, interestingly, says that no such battle occurred). This battle has become part of Spain’s foundational narrative, much like the “Shot heard ’round the world” from the US Revolutionary War. The legend is included in the 10th-century chronicle of Asturian King Alfonso III. I paired this with a news article on how the president of Spain’s right-wing Partido Popular has used Pelayo as a symbol of modern nationalism.

The Chronicle of Alfonso III also contains a section on the construction of some of the area’s most well-known pre-romanesque monuments. We visited the interpretive center dedicated to Asturian pre-romanesque architecture (Centro de Recepción e Interpretación del Prerrománico Asturiano). In preparation for this visit we read the corresponding section of Alfonso III’s chronicle, together with a chapter I adapted from a book on Asturian pre-romanesque architecture. I included a section on architectural terminology to give them some vocabulary to discuss the monuments.

students hiking the Camino Primitivo

2019 participants on the Camino Primitivo

Next we were to hike a section of the Camino Primitivo (the older route of the Camino de Santiago connecting Oviedo to Santiago via Lugo) ending up in the town of Grado, so we read Berceo’s Milagro of the Pilgrim to give them some sense of the very important culture of pilgrimage in the region and its role in the development of literature in the vernacular (here medieval Castilian). I added a short piece from ABC news featuring a US soldier en route to Afghanistan showing a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe he’d gotten for protection (just as Berceo’s pilgrim called on the Virgin for protection).

After that we were scheduled to see the relics in the Cámara Santa of the Cathedral of Oviedo, so we read the Leyenda de San Toribio that explains their putative origin and how they ended up in Asturias.

student group photo in front of the Oviedo sinagogue

2019 participants at the synagogue

Then we were to visit the local synagogue and do a unit on Jewish history, so we read an article on a genealogical study of Asturias (according to the study the region with the highest Sephardic genetic profile), and a poem by medieval Hispano-Hebrew poet Judah Halevi translated into modern Spanish.In honor of our planned visit to the Asturian collection of the Biblioteca de Asturias we read about officiality and the 17th c. debate between Oviedo and Mérida (written in Asturian). We also planned for Ethnographer and author Alberto Álvarez Peña to give a presentation on the Asturian language (as he had in past iterations of the program).

The visit to the local mosque was paired with a news article on Spain’s first online Arabic-language newspaper, a unit on al-Andalus and selections from Andalusi poets Wallada and Ibn Zaydun translated into modern Spanish.

Finally, Aljamiado expert Pablo Rozas Candás was to give a talk on Moriscos and aljamiado literature so here’s the unit on Moriscos and Doncella Arcayona, accompanied by a news article on a 2002 petition to the Spanish government by a Moroccan historian advocating for a right of return for descendants of Muslims expelled from Spain in the 17th century.

This post began life as a twitter thread that you can read here.

Many thanks to GEO Program Coordinator Liz Abbasi, GEO Oviedo Site Director Silvia Pérez, and the students who participated in the 2019 program.

An Open Access Online archive of Premodern Iberian and Latin American primary texts for the classroom

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landing page of Open Iberia AmericaAnyone who has taught panoramic survey courses of literature knows the frustration of working with published textbooks. I’ve argued both sides of the question in my blog: [pro-textbook] [anti-textbok]. Ultimately no one textbook can serve the curricular and pedagogical needs of any one instructor in any given class. Bound printed textbooks are shaped by market considerations and tend toward highly canonical selections from Castilian authors that no longer reflect the literary history practiced by most scholars of Iberian literatures (I talked about this lag between research and pedagogy at the MLA back in 2008). Curricular aims and time schedules vary considerably by institution and by instructor. It is extremely difficult to find a textbook of medieval Iberian literature that satisfies the pedagogical interests of the instructor and the economic interests of the student.

Amazon dot com page showing prices for renting and purchasing Voces de España

Print textbooks in general are becoming more expensive, outpacing inflation and adding increased financial burden to university students who are bearing ever-increasing debt loads. In addition to their cost, traditional print textbooks are inflexible, forcing instructors —many of whom are already time starved, with high teaching loads and increasing service burdens— to subordinate their own pedagogical interests and strengths to the materials and approaches offered by traditional print textbooks. This state of affairs is one in which market forces are distorting the way in which we represent Iberian cultures to our students.

Most instructors working in the field end up either adopting a traditional print textbook, supplementing with photocopied course packets and from other texts or of their own edition. Many of us are constantly reinventing the wheel. As a result, there is a tremendous amount of pedagogical material being developed that might well be put in the service of the wider community of teachers and learners of premodern Iberian cultures, under an open license that permits the broadest possible diffusion without concern (or the performance of concern) for copyright fees.

There has been talk of addressing this issue, at least the curricular issue, by collaborating on a newer, more inclusive teaching anthology, a sort of literary companion to Remie Constable’s Medieval Iberia. This is a wonderful idea, one whose time came a while ago. However, many colleagues, myself included, will find it difficult to commit to such a project, which by its nature demands the involvement of specialists in the many languages involved over several years and to the tune of many, many, hours. A further disincentive is that such work is not properly rewarded by most research institutions, so that one’s limited time for research (which is rewarded, in theory) becomes more limited.

As a compromise (or perhaps a cop-out), I proposed a different model of online resource, one that offers maximum flexibility to instructors, minimal costs to students, and a manageable time investment on the part of faculty.

Open Iberia/América is a collection of short selections of premodern Iberian and Latin American texts in pedagogical editions modeled after the editorial practices of commercial anthologies. Editors select a short text or excerpt which they gloss for undergraduate readers (the target population is undergraduate students in third-year courses in US universities) write short introductions, study questions, and provide a basic bibliography for further reading.  The commitment is low, and the texts can be one that you are currently editing or studying. The collection is edited by subject experts, and is available under a Creative Commons open access license that allows users to download, copy, distribute, alter, republish the units provided they attribute the source.

Audience? How does the format determine the audience?

photo of film audience with large question mark superimposed

source: pixbay.com

I imagined the audience as instructors and students of university classes in Hispanic literatures and perhaps history, religious studies, and other related topics. I also imagined it might be used by high school instructors of these topics in the US, UK, and the Spanish-speaking world. Each text is published in two versions: one with the text in the original language accompanied by an introduction, translation, and notes in English, and another version with the introduction, translation, and notes in Spanish. This way each can be used in courses in which the language of instruction is either English or Spanish. In courses taught in Spanish for non-native speakers of Spanish in the English-speaking world, the students have the option to consult the English-language version as a support. However, Open Access publications have an open-ended audience; anyone with an internet connection is able to access and download the texts, so this might include interested general readers, high school students, and instructors and students at low-resourced institutions worldwide. Some of the units in the collection cut across disciplinary areas, so that, for example, my unit on Isaac Cardoso could be taught in a course on Judaic Studies in English or Spanish; the unit on Ramon Muntaner could be taught in a History course in either language, and so forth.

Anthology or Archive?

title page and table of contents of Antologia de Poetas Hispano-Americanos published in eighteen ninety three

In planning this project, I had to think what shape it would take, and why. I wanted it to respond to the needs of the instructors and students, or at least my understanding of their and our needs, but I also wanted colleagues to be motivated to contribute. A print anthology is closed, in the sense that the editor or editors plan a determined number of contributions, solicit them, and publish them. Their editorial vision shapes the collection, which in turn determines the parameters of how one might use it in the classroom. However, for this project, I wanted to take advantage of digital publishing tools that would allow us to create an open-ended collection or archive rather than a closed anthology. This way we could keep adding to it indefinitely, and the collection could grow in response to the interest level and focus of the contributors. In balancing the needs of the imagined instructors and the interests of the contributors, I’m hoping to have a sustainable project that will refresh itself with new contributions and still provide a core of canonical frequently taught texts. So my hope is basically that instructors will come for Libro de Buen Amor and Celestina and stay for Ibn Hazm and Ramon Muntaner.

Editorial

Because one of the aims of the collection is to be linguistically inclusive, I needed to convene an editorial committee with specialization in each of the languages of the Spanish-Speaking world. I recruited colleagues in these fields whose duties would include promoting the project and soliciting contributions, reviewing proposals, and editing contributions. Here is the team I came up with. I had the great luck to have two colleagues here at the University of Oregon who are specialists in Nahuatl, and the first contribution in Nahuatl is in the pipeline. I would like to expand the Latin American area, and am looking for two new editors, one in Peninsular Early Modern and another in Latin American Early Modern or Colonial.

Technology and Copyright

image of page of a contribution showing text and footnotes

Rather than predicate the project on significant funding for design and implementation, I decided to go with the simplest possible scenario. The units are edited in Microsoft Word and deposited as .docx or .rtf files to Humanities Commons, the scholarly repository and networking platform developed by the MLA, but now operated jointly by a number of scholarly societies in the Humanities and housed at Michigan State University.

logos of Humanities Commons and Academia dot E.D.U. juxtaposed

Humanities Commons a not-for-profit, Open Access repository, and I would like to take a moment here to plug it and to shine some light on the shortcomings of the elephant in the room, Academia not edu. Academia, though far more popular than Humanities Commons, is the Amazon of the scholarly repository world. It exploits a legal loophole for peer-to-peer sharing in order to (1) do an end run around copyright protections and (2) monetize our research. If you upload your work to Academia, you probably do not have permission to share the publisher’s pdf on a website.

It’s unlikely that your publisher is going to send you a cease and desist for posting a single article, and Academia reaps the benefits. By contrast, Humanities Commons is a true scholarly repository. You must hold the rights to whatever you post there. This means that unless you have the express permission of your publisher, you cannot post the publisher’s pdf of your article, and must instead post what is called a postprint of your work, which is essentially the corrected typescript of the article that you send to the publisher. This you can do if your publisher’s open access policy allows it. Most commercial publishers allow this form of Open Access publishing, and journals published by academic societies such as La corónica have their own policies, but if you are in doubt you should ask.

Base texts and rights

manuscript image of Cantar de Mio Cid next to title page of Isaac Cardoso's Excelencias de los Hebreos

In any event, what does this legal state of affairs mean for Open Iberia/América? It means that we must hold the rights to the primary texts we publish in it. This can be accomplished by using an original transcription of a manuscript (such as Matthew Bailey’s transcription of Cantar de Mio Cid), or by transcribing an out-of-copyright print edition (such as my transcription of Isaac Cardoso’s Excelencias de los hebreos). In some rare instances, such as Elizabeth Wright’s edition of Juan Latino’s poetry, we were able to get the express permission of the publisher of her edition of his poetry. The same is true for images: if the image is available Open Access or is out of copyright, one can use it without permission, but in some cases it was necessary to secure express permission from the archive or library where a manuscript was stored. Collections are less wary to sign over permissions for texts and images to be used in a non-commercial work, but the gold standard is to use base texts and images that are already licensed as Open Access or that are out of copyright.

Promotion and Budget

photo of man pulling out pants pockets to indicate there is nothing in them

Because we have no publisher and no need to recuperate costs, and no advertising budget, actually no budget whatsoever, I have not given a good deal of thought to promoting the project beyond announcing new units on my twitter and on the Mediber Listserve. I imagine some folks find the collection through keyword searches. Recently I went and added units to their respective Wikipedia pages in order to perhaps get some more traffic, but honestly it’s not a huge priority for me. A casual search reveals that it’s been included in a number of resource guides.

Ambition

Currently we have published 12 units, and there are another 10 or so in production. To be honest, I have no concrete plans for the future; I can imagine us adding some 5-10 units per year. Anything more than this would not be sustainable on my end, and might make the collection unwieldy.  If at some point I should decide to secure funding for a zoomier interface and design I might upgrade the site.

list of units currently in production

 

Usage

These numbers tell us how many times each unit has been downloaded from Humanities Commons, but nothing more. We have little to no idea who has been reading or teaching these texts, and why. I’d love more information, but have no idea how I could go about collecting it.

table of usage statistics for published units

 

Please get in touch with me if you are interested in contributing to Open Iberia/América. 

This post is a version of a paper given at the 2021 MLA for the Digital Medieval Iberia panel. Thanks very much to presider Matthew Bailey.

 

The Curse of Ham in Medieval Iberia and the Enslavement of Black Africans

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image of manuscript of Crónica dos feitos da Guiné

Gomes Eanes de Azurara, Crónica dos feitos da Guiné (BNF Port 41 f. 1r)

Modern capitalism has its origins in the institution of chattel slavery, in particular the enslavement of Black Africans. As we know, all institutions require complicated symbolic systems to legitimate them and reinforce their power in society. Enslavers attempt to justify and support their actions with robust symbolic systems. One of the ways in which Europeans justified the enslavement of Black Africans was the Curse of Ham, or the idea that Black Africans are descended from Ham, who was cursed among his brothers for not covering his father’s nudity, and for not abstaining from sex with his wife while sheltering on the ark for forty days. In order for this Biblical legend to justify the enslavement of Black Africans, two things have to happen. First, Ham must be identified with Black Africans, and second, actual Black Africans must be identified as slaves.

Scholars frequently cite the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, by Gomes Eanes de Azurara, written in 1453, as the first documented example of these ideas coming together as a justification of Early Modern slavery. In it, Azurara identifies Black Africans living in Guinea as the descendants of Ham, whose slavery is a result of the Biblical Curse of Ham:

And here you must note that these Blacks, given that they are Muslims like the others, are in any event the slaves of the latter by ancient custom, which I believe to be because of the curse that Noah cast upon his son Ham after the flood, by which he cursed him, that his generation be made subject to all the others of the world.

E aquí haveis de notar que estes negros, posto que sejam mouros como os outros, são porém servos daqueles por antigo costume, o qual creio que seja por causa da maldição que depois do dilúvio lançou Noé sobre seu filho Cã, pela qual o maldisse, que sua geraçao fosse sujeita a todalas outras do mundo… (Zurara 85; Tinhorão 51)

Azurara links the two curses of Ham: (1) Blackness and (2) Slavery in what is considered a pivotal moment for the theory of race in Europe, one shaped by the incipient Portuguese slave trade. This ideological turn is one of the ideas that unlocks the possibility of modern chattel slavery and consequently the development of modern capitalist world systems, so it is worth drilling down a bit into the ideological landscape of race and of interpretations of the story of the sons of Noah and in particular, the curse of Ham.

What is the genealogy of this idea on the Iberian Peninsula? How do we get from the Biblical Ham to the beginnings of Biblical justifications of slavery in the Early Modern period that were shaped by and in turn reinforced the transatlantic slave trade?

We’ll begin with the text in the Hebrew Bible, then trace the development of the Curse of Ham in medieval sources, focusing on Iberian writers and artists.

The question of the geographical distribution of the sons of Noah and their relative skin tones is post-biblical. The Biblical Curse of Ham deals strictly with enslavement. As a punishment for his disrespect and disobedience, the descendants of Ham (through his son Canaan) are cursed to be slaves to the descendants of Shem and Japheth:

May God enlarge Japheth,
And let him dwell in the tents of Shem;
And let Canaan be a slave to them. (Gen 9:20-29)

It’s clear to see how this story was used in the Biblical context to justify the Israelite subjugation of the Canaanites in their conquest of the Promised Land, but less so how it came to justify the enslavement of Black Africans. For this, two things need to happen: First: Ham needs to be Black. Second, Blackness needs to be associated with slavery.

How does Ham become black?

The idea develops over time. In sources from antiquity there is no clear link between skin color and slavery. Late antique Rabbinic traditions such as those of R. Huna and R. Joseph (fourth century) in Genesis Rabbah distinguish between blackness on the one hand, and slavery on the other, but do not conflate the two (Goldenberg, Curse 168). In his study of the Curse of Ham in Jewish tradition, David Goldenberg argues that over time, as slavery in the Mediterranean began to be associated increasingly with Black Africans, Ham’s twin curses of Blackness and slavery became more common (Goldenberg, Curse 174).

Medieval Jewish and Islamic traditions attribute the blackness of Ham’s descendants as God’s punishment for his disobedience and sexual incontinence, two characteristics stereotypically attributed to Black Africans by white supremacist pseudo-science. According to these traditions, although Noah and Noah’s sons were commanded to abstain from sex with their wives during their time on the ark, Ham and his wife ignored the ban and as a punishment God turned Ham’s semen black, which would ensure that his son Canaan, and in turn all of Canaan’s children, would be born Black. This is repeated in a number of influential sources known to Iberian authors, who in turn introduce their own innovations to the legend.

The Muslim commentator Ibn Mutarrif Al-Tarafi, writing in Sevilla in the eleventh century, repeats the tradition that Ham’s semen turned black as a punishment for disobeying God on the Ark, but changes Ham’s crime from having sex with her during a period of mandated abstinence to beating her, swapping out sexual incontinence for domestic violence as supposed characteristics of Black Africans:

Qatada relates that there were only eight people on the Ark: Noah, his wife, his three sons Shem, Ham, and Japeth; Ham hit his wife on the Ark and for this reason Noah asked God to turn his seed black, and that is the origin of the Blacks (al-Tarafi 69)

Another variation of the legend found in the Talmud that circulated in the Iberian Peninsula states that there were three of the ark’s passengers who were cursed for violating the abstinence order: the dog, the crow, and Ham. The dog’s punishment was to remain attached to his partner after coitus, the crow’s was to spit during coitus, and Ham’s was for his seed and therefore his descdendants to turn Black (Goldenberg, Black and Slave 52). The first Western Latin reference is found in the 1245 Extractiones de Talmut, a Latin translation of key passages of the Talmud meant to serve as a resource for anti-Jewish polemicists. Luis Girón-Negrón observes some fifty years later, this legend makes its way into the Libro del Cavallero Zifar. Interestingly, here the author conflates the name Ham (Cam) with that of the dog (can) (Wagner 37; Girón-Negrón 284).

Noahic geographies and race

twelfth century T.O. map, British LIbrary

T-O Map Etymologiae 12th c. British Library, Royal 12 F. IV, f.135v

Later medieval copies of Isidore of Seville’s 7th-century Etymologies feature maps that associate the continents with the sons of Noah: Japeth with Europe, Shem with Asia, and Ham with Africa, and Medieval Arabic sources typically associate Ham with contemporary Black Africans. The influential Persian historian Al-Tabari (9th c), whose work is widely cited in al-Andalus, confirms this tradition in his History that Ham’s son Canaan is the progenitor of the  “Blacks, Nubians, Fezzan, Zanj, Zaghawah, and all the peoples of the Sudan” (al-Tabari 2: 11).

Christian sources, some of which draw at least partially on Arabic geographers, likewise bring different agendas to bear on the legend. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, in his De Rebus Hispaniae, composed around 1250, notes that the sons of Ham occupy Africa, but reserves part of Asia, normally apportioned to Shem, to the sons of Japhet. His comment “that which the sons of Ham and Japhet possessed in Asia was by way of war.” This is a reference to Crusade, for he also details that the sons of Japhet also possessed the “mountains Amano and Toro, of Cilicia and Siria, that are in Asia, and all of Europe to Cádiz of Hercules, at the farthest reaches of Spain” (Jiménez de Rada 62). Cádiz was at the time still under Muslim rule, and would be for another decade, and the Crusader siege of Antioch was in 1098, but grew to great symbolic prominence as a model for holy war on the Peninsula.

Map indicating locations of Taurus and Nur Mountains in Asia Minor

Taurus and Nur Mountains source: Google Maps

The compilers of Alfonso X’s universal history, the General estoria, begun in the late thirteenth century and completed during the reign of Alfonso’s son Sancho IV in the early fourteenth, further develop the Noahid legacy in the context of military and political struggle between Christians and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula:

Whereas, anyone who wishes to know from where this great and longstanding enmity between Christians and Muslims may here see the reason; for the Gentiles and Christians that are alive today come primarily from Shem and Japhet, who populated Asia and Europe. Yet still, despite the fact that some of the descendants of Ham have become Christian, either by preaching or forcefully as prisoners or slaves. And the Muslims come principally from Ham, who populated Africa, but there are some of them descended from Shem or Japhet, who by the false preaching of Muhammad become Muslims, whereby we have, according to this right and privilege that our father Noah granted to the descendants of Shem and Japheth, that wherever the Muslims may be in whichever other lands, that because they are Muslims, are all from Ham, and if we might take from them their property through combat or by any type of force, and even capture them and make them our slaves, that we commit no sin or error in so doing. And should we cease to fight them it should only be out of our better judgment or if by chance we are not prepared because of their greater numbers… (Alfonso X 1: 91)

Here the compilers of the GE build on Jiménez de Rada’s crusader geography with a bit of crusader theology, reinforcing the bulls of crusade that supported military efforts against Islam first in the Iberian Peninsula and later in the Eastern Crusades. Still, there is no reference to Blackness per se, only to the association of Muslims with Africa.

Miniature of Banquet of Balthazar in Alba Bible

Banquet of Balthazar, Alba Bible (source: Wikipedia)

It is not until the Biblia de Alba, compiled over a century after the General estoria, but still some years before Azurara’s chronicle, where we see one of the first explicit links between Ham, Blackness, and slavery. Completed in 1433, some twenty years before Azurara’s Chronicle of Guinea, The Biblia de Alba or Biblia de Arragel was a collaboration between Rabbi Moshe Arragel and an anonymous Christian cleric or clerics and is unique in its ecumenical approach to combining Christian and Jewish commentaries on the Torah.[1] In any event, Arragel equates the offspring of Ham’s son Canaan with the Muslim Black Africans of his own day. He writes: “And Canaan was a a slave of slaves, and some say that they are the Black Muslims, who are slaves wherever they be” (“E Chanaan fue siervo de siervos. Algunos dizen que son los moros negros, que do quier que cativos son”) (Paz y Meliá f. 33r; Goldenberg, Black and Slave 108 n 7). The miniature that illustrates this passage (below) depicts Ham with stereotypically Black African features, and is the first such depiction of Ham I was able to identify.

Miniature depicting sons of Noah from Alba Bible

MS Alba Bible f 33r. Courtesy Fundación Casa de Alba (Goldenberg 111)

These examples together form a fairly clear trajectory of a theory of race used to justify the enslavement of Black Africans. Just as soon as Iberians began the exploration of West Africa and began to develop what would in the space of decades become a full blown global slave trade, Iberian writers expanded on previous uses of the Curse of Ham to identify Black Africans as the descendants of Ham bearing the curse of enslavement, and to locate these Black Africans in actual time and space building on existing geographic traditions and by the time of Azurara, on actual Black bodies in real time.

Works Cited

  • al-Tarafi, Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Mutarrif al-Kinani. Storie dei profeti. Translated by Roberto Tottoli, Il melangolo, 1997.
  • Alfonso X. General estoria. Edited by Borja Sánchez-Prieto, Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2009.
  • al-Tabari. The History of Al-Tabari: An Annotated Translation. Translated by Franz Rosenthal, vol. 1, SUNY Press, 1989.
  • Carasik, Michael, editor. The Commentator’s Bible: Genesis. Translated by Michael Carasik, Jewish Publication Society, 2018.
  • Girón-Negrón, Luis M. “La Maldición Del Can: La Polémica Antijudía En El Libro Del Caballero Zifar.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool), vol. 78, no. 3, 2001, pp. 275–95.
  • Goldenberg, David M. Black and Slave: The Origins and History of the Curse of Ham. de Gruyter, 2017.
  • —. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton University Press, 2005.
  • Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo. Historia de los hechos de España (De Rebus Hispaniae). Translated by Juan Fernández Valverde, Alianza Editorial, 1989.
  • Jordão, Levy Maria, editor. Bullarium patronatus Portugalliae regum in ecclesiis Africae, Asiae atque Oceaniae: bullas, brevia, epistolas, decreta actaque Sanctae Sedis ab Alexandro III ad hoc usque tempus amplectens. Ex Typographia nationali, 1868.
  • Paz y Meliá, Antonio. Biblia de Alba. 1899.
  • Phillips, William D., Jr. Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
  • Tinhorão, José Ramos. Os negros em Portugal: uma presença silenciosa. 3a edição., Caminho, 2019.
  • Wagner, Charles Philip, editor. El libro del cavallero Zifar (El libro del Cauallero de Dios). University of Michigan, 1929.
  • Williams, John. “Isidore, Orosius, and the Beatus Map.” Imago Mundi, vol. 49, 1997, pp. 7–32.
  • Zurara, Gomes Eanes de. Crónica da Guiné. Edited by José Bragança, Livraria Civilização Editora, 1973.

This post is a version of a paper given at the 2021 MLA for the New Currents in Medieval Iberian Studies panel. Thanks very much to presider Simone Pinet.

A Moroccan Jewish nightclub artist sings sáetas to the Virgin in León: Aicha la Hebrea

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Looking for a 14th-century Hebrew bible from Spain on the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, I stumbled on Prof. Chris Silver’s curated collection of inter-war recordings of Andalusi music from Maghrebi singers. 

El Mamak 1930
source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France gallica.bnf.fr

One of them caught my attention: Cheikha Aicha ‘La Hebrea’, a Moroccan Jewish singer who in 1930 recorded a cover of Lili Labassi’s El Mamak for Columbia Records. What immediately stands out about this singer, who according to Silver “has barely left an archival trace,” is her nickname: ‘La hebrea.’ At first I thought she might have been from a Moroccan Ladino-speaking family, but in a Jewish setting where everyone is Jewish it’s unlikely that someone would be nicknamed ‘La hebrea’ (‘the Jewess’). That would be more likely if you were the only Jew around, for example, in a Spanish-speaking country whose citizens were prohibited from practicing Judaism, like, Spain.

Ideal Concert hall, Sevilla 1919
source: en.todocoleccion.net

As it turns out, this appears to have been the case, and Aicha ‘La Hebrea’ had a storied career as a singer and bohemian around town in Spain during the 1920s and 30s, where she made a name for herself as a popular singer of flamenco and other Spanish genres. As early as 1921 she is billed as “la artista moruna rutinaria Aicha La Hebrea” (the usual Arab singer Aicha La Hebrea) for a show at Ideal Concert in Seville in 1921 (Eco artístico (Madrid) vol 13, no. 376, Feb 28, 1921).

Circo Cuayás, Las Palmas (1939) source: http://galloscanarias.blogspot.com

She worked in Seville until at least 1925, when she toured Cádiz and the Canary Islands. A Seville newspaper again describes her as a singer of “beautful Arab songs” mixed with a “repertoire of Andalusian couplets”:

Después de haber actuado en Sevilla una corta temporada, marchó a Cádiz, embarcando para Canarias, para actuar en el Circo Cuayás, de Las Palmas, la original cancionista Aicha la Hebrea, que a sus bonitas canciones moras une un repertorio de coplas andaluzas que dice de manera magistral
El Liberal (Sevilla) Aug 4, 1925.

Plaza del Llano, Cantillana 2012
source: https://foursquare.com/

During Semana Santa 1927 she headlined a show put on in the Plaza de Llano in nearby Cantillana. She was billed as a singer from León and sang a set of “aires regionales, fandanguillos, canciones y sáetas.”

In the late 20s she lived in León in Northern Spain, where she sung at the Café Iris and was involved with the dwarf actor Nicolás. In 1929 she caused tremendous upset when she (as a very popular bohemian singer of ill repute in religious circles) sang a sáeta to the Virigin Mary from the balcony of the Café Iris. The Leonés bohemian personality Genarín worked as her valet for a while, before being struck dead by the city’s first garbage motor-truck. 

Leonés actor Nicolás
source: www.ileon.com

She also sang sáetas in the 1928 Holy Week processions in nearby Benavente, singing from the balcony above the Café de la Rúa, where she had also sung. Apparently the crowd of Aicha’s fans gathered in front of the bar was so large that the penitents carrying the Virgin could not get close enough to the bar for the Virgin to “hear” Aicha’s song. The local bishop objected to popular singers participating in the processions (p. 24)

In León she starred in the first film shot in that city by local photographer Winicio Testera Pérez, titled “Aicha la Hebrea,”  fragments of which can be found in the Filmoteca of Castilla y León. In 1929 she co-starred, with her paramour Nicolás, in the silent film Más vale llegar a tiempo.

still from film ‘Más vale llegar a tiempo’ (León 1929)

In 1933 She sang at the Kursaal Olimpia club in Sevilla, for the Seville Amateur Boxing Club, together with such singers as Angelita Cao ‘La Entrerrianita’ and Ildara Povi. (ABC Edición Andalucia Feb 4, 1971, p. 58)

Carlos Martín Ballester lists her among flamenco singers that recorded 78s in Spain. 

 

Medieval Iberian retellings of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden

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Medieval Iberia was a hotbed of cross-cultural medieval literary activity. Jewish writers adapted Arabic poetics to give birth to a new Hebrew poetry. Muslim poets penned elaborate Arabic poems based on popular Spanish lyrics. Christian writers pioneered the use of the vernacular to tell Saints’ lives and write court histories. One tradition all three religions had in common was the Hebrew Bible: all three groups retold its stories in both their classical (Latin, Hebrew, Arabic) and vernacular languages. Medieval Iberians of all three religions participated in a common culture of biblical retellings that fused the doctrines of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity with the languages and cultures common to all three groups.

Illumiated page from Cloisters Bible

They have this in common
(Cloisters Bible, Castile, 14th c. Source: wikimedia.org)

In all of these retellings we see the influence of the unique circumstances of the Medieval Iberian coexistence (sometimes peaceful, at other times violent) of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity in the creation of a specifically Iberian Biblical storyworld. The creators and audiences lived in a world in which the three traditions were conscious of one another and competed for supremacy: their visions of the Biblical world were at once a product of their distinct religions and of the shared reality in which they lived.

I’ve written previously on the General estoria’s (13th c.) retelling of the Song of Songs, the Abraham and Sarah story, and more generally on the influence of rabbinic literature on the emergent vernacular fiction in the General estoria. In this series of posts I’d like to both narrow the focus of each to a single episode, and broaden the scope to include multiple Iberian sources from Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions.

Illuminated manuscript page showing Adam and Eve with fig leaves covering genitals

Escorial Beatus
(Escorial, Biblioteca Monasterio, Cod. & II. 5) (source: wikimedia.org)

The story of Adam and Eve addresses in narrative form some of the most fundamental human social issues, from family life to the establishment of an agricultural society. The tale of the awareness gained by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and subsequent expulsion from the garden is an allegory for the development from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural society, technology, and the complications that this changes precipitates. 

Jewish sources frame the Adam and Eve story as the blueprint for the human relationship with God, with creation, and as a model for heterosexual family life, and to a lesser extent to explain the role of human error and its consquences. Muslim sources emphasize Adam’s role as the first prophet in a line that end with Muhammad. Christian sources follow the Church’s doctrine of supersessionism, by which Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible point toward redemption in Christ. 

Here I’d like to take a look at three versions of the tale of the expulsion from Eden, from the General Estoria (Castile, 13th c.), the Compendi historial de la biblia (Catalonia, 15th c.), and the Misteri d’Adam i Eva (Valencia, 15th-16th c.). In these works we see very different approaches to brining Biblical narrative to vernacular audiences, and get some sense of how Jewish, Muslim, and Chrstian traditions of the Hebrew Bible shared space in the Medieval Iberian biblical imagination.

Image of Homer and Marge Simpson as Adam and Eve, with Mr Burns as the serpent

Retellings
“Simpsons Bible Stories” (The Simpsons, Season 10, Episode 18, 1999) (source: wikimedia.org)

The General estoria is the universal history of Alfonso X, begun in the mid-thirteenth century and completed by Alfonso’s son Sancho IV at the end or the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century. As part of its history of the world from the earth’s creation to the time of Jesus it includes large sections of a number of biblical books, supplementing the biblical text primarily with the twelfth-century biblical interpretation of French scholastic Petrus Comestor, titled Storia scholastica, and with material from Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, but also with material drawn from Muslim scholarship, Jewish biblical commentary, and a wide selection of Christian apocrypha. 

The chief concern of the compilers of the General estoria seems to be to enrich the telling of the tale with historical and geographical information, but also with details that explain the motivations of the characters and that flesh out the details of the material world in which they live. 

Still from One Million Years BC with Raquel Welch and John Richardson dressed in animal skins

“and clothed them”
Raquel Welch and John Richardson in One Million Years B.C.(dir. John Chaffey, 1966) (source: Chroniques du Cinephile Stakhanoviste)

When Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden, they need clothes to survive in their harsh new reality. After God explains to them the consequences of their disobedience in eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (exile, childbirth pain, grueling subsistence farming), Adam names Eve, and before showing them the door, “the Lord God made garments of skins for Adam and his wife, and clothed them” (Gen 3:21). According to the GE, it is Adam’s contemplation of the skins of the (dead) animals that leads him to realize the fact of his own mortality:

When he threw them out of Paradise, he gave them leather garments made from the skins of dead herd animals that had been alive. And here the gloss says that Adam had never before seen a dead animal, nor knew what death was, and that he then understood that the skins he wore had come from living animals that were now dead, and from this perceived something: that likewise, he himself would die.

E cuando los echava del paraíso dioles unas pelliças fechas de pellejas de ganados muertos que fueron vivos. E diz aquí la glosa que Adam nuncua aún viera cosa muerta ninguna sin sabié qué era muerte, e que entendiesse que de cosas vivas fueran aquellas pieles que él vistié, e eran ya muertas, e que apercibié de sí algo por ello. E esto es que assí morrié él (Alfonso X 1:10)

This makes God, and not Adam and Eve, into the first technologist, showing them how to manipulate their environment to improve their chances of survival, a matter to which the GE is very attentive in its subsequent accounts of the development of a range of technologies by Adam and Eve and their descendents.

Saudi man wearing traditional wreath (source: boredpanda.com)

However, looking at the various sources to which la glosa might refer (the Glosa ordinaria, the Postillae of Nicholas of Lyra or of Hugh of St. Cher), none spells out in such detail Adam’s deduction of his own mortality. Here is where the compilers of the General estoria jump in. They explain that if the animals whose skins Adam wore were once living and now were dead, he deduces that himself would one day die. This novelizes Christian theology that links the exile from the garden with the origin of human mortality.

Elsewhere the General estoria draws on Muslim sources in fleshing out the details of Adam and Eve’s experience. While Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve cultivate the land after their expulsion, it is silent on the particulars. What did they cultivate? Where did they get the seeds? Again, the General estoria addresses this gap in the narrative, this time drawing on the work of “Arab sages”:

According to the writings of the Arab sages who write on the matter, they say that upon the expulsion from Paradise, Our Lord also gave Adam and Eve seeds of grains and legumes and the other things that they would sow and reap in the land they made their living.

E segund que fallamos en escritos de arávigos sabios que fablaron en las razones d’estas cosas dizen que en aquella echada del paraíso que dio otrossí Nuestro Señor Dios a Adam e a Eva las simientes de los panes e de las legumbres e de las otras cosas que sembrassen en la tierra e cogiessen dond se mantoviessen” (Alfonso X 1:11)

These details are found in writing of al-Tabari (9th c.) and al-Tha‘labi (11th c.), both of whom recount a number of traditions in which Adam arrives on earth after the fall wearing a wreath with leaves and seeds from 30 different fruit-bearing plants, or various versions of how he brought grains of wheat to earth, sometimes assisted by the Angel Gabriel (al-Tabari 296; al-Tha’labi 60–62). 

These details about the seeds of agricultural practice (horrible pun intended) serve the General estoria’s goal of accounting for all aspects of human history, not just those that relate to theological issues. Alfonso X employed a number of Christians, Jews, and Muslims at court, and famously translated several Arabic works into Castilian. It is hardly surprising that Jewish and Muslim sources found their way into his works of history.

Corpus Christi procession (Granada, 2013) (source: flickr.com mcsgranada)

Later Christian Iberian retellings are more doctrinaire than the Genera estoria. The fifteenth-century Catalan Compendi historial de la biblia, or ‘Collection of bible stories,’ which sermonizes the action quite heavily. The text deals explicitly with the Adam and Eve’s sin as both a source of human fallibility and an opportunity for redemption in Christ, probably due to the popularity of the Adam and Eve plays during the festival of Corpus Christi, when the consecrated host was paraded through the streets in a procession that included dramatized biblical scenes.  

The narrator introduces the episode of Adam and Eve focusing on Adam’s first sin, the original sin, that of pride, and subordinates all of the Seven Mortal Sins to it. In this way, it brings the biblical tale in line with Catholic theology of sin:

Adam committed the first major sin, which in itself contains the seven mortal sins, that have attached to his entire lineage. The first is pride, in wanting to be equal to our Lord [by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil].

Adam feu .i. peccat maior que tot lo mon, en lo qual encloy .vii. peccats mortals en que hach a esser envolcat tot lo seu linatge. Lo primer es superbia, quant volch esser egual ab nostre Senyor (Serra 9)

Likewise, the narrator glosses God’s words to Eve as she and Adam are expelled from the garden, including the uniquely Christian doctrine that her punishment includes not only the pain of birth but also the sin of conception itself:

And with these words that our Lord said to Eve (that she would birth in pain), we understand that if she had not sinned that women would conceive without sin and birth without pain.

E per aquesta paraula que nostre Senyor dix a Eva, que infantaria ab dolor, se enten que si no hagues peccat que devia la fembra concebre sens peccat e enfantar sens dolor (Serra 10)

The dramatization of this scene in the Valencian drama Misteri d’Adam i Eva (staged as part of the Corpus Christi festival to this day) uses the sources of dramatic dialogue, rather than sermonizing narration, to emphasize women’s deceitfulness and absolve Adam of his complicity, both ideas that were developed in Christian sermons and misogynist literature of the times. 

Adam and Eve float in procession of Corpus Christi (Valencia, 2017)
(source: elvalenciano.es)

Here the author puts the serpent’s lie “you will not die” into the mouth of Eve, who not only gives her husband the forbidden fruit, but actively tricks him into eating it, a detail absent from the biblical text. Eve mocks Adam, asking him why God would provide them with a garden and all the plants and animals within it only to set them up for a fatal punishment?  Why would God, who has provided us with all this, kill us? She even protests that Adam must not think much of her if he won’t even believe her in this:

What’s it to you? Can’t you see that our all-powerful God, in order to scare us innocents, to punish us, told us ‘you will die’? How can you believe that God did not know that I would sin on this day? I’ll say no more; if you don’t want to [eat it], I don’t care, now that I know and clearly understand how little you must think of me. Are you so blind that you cannot see that he has given us life, property, and such standing, that he would neither kill us nor take any of this away from us?

Què us costarà? / ¿No veu que nòstron Déu omnipotent, / per espantar-nos, inosens, / per castigar-nos, / nos dix ‘morreu’? / ¿Com creu que ignorava Déu / que io avia  / de pecar en aquest dia? / No os vull dir més; / si no voleu, no m’i do rés, / que ara conech, / i molt clarament entenc, / quant m’estimau. / ¿Tant sego sou que no mirau. / que qu·ms à dat / vida, béns y tal estat, / no·ms matarà / ni res de asò ens disparagà?” (Huerta Viñas 112–13, ll. 196–213)

This harangue of Eve’s is familiar to us from misogynist literature that portrays women and hysterical, fickle, and verbally aggressive. In fact, this is a well known stereotype in the literature of 15th-century Valencia (see, for example, Jaume Roig’s Spill) that would resonate with popular audiences of the times (Archer). However, for me what most stands out about the dramatic version is how the resources of the genre are brought to bear in making the doctrinal point using the popular language and misogynistic tropes of the day.

In all three examples we see how the texts respond to the biblical narratives using the intellectual and cultural resources of the communities to which they are addressed, and depending on their purpose and the ideology, shape the retelling to reinforce different aspects of the same tale. The General estoria is concerned more with human history and civilization, and therefore places more emphasis on technology and its effects on the development of human society. The Compendi historial de la biblia, as a homiletic and didactic text, seeks to reinforce Christian readings of the Tanakh that connect the narratives to Christian doctrine. The Misteri d’Adam i Eva  does likewise, but is more popular in its disposition and so uses more colloquial language and broader comic tropes as one might expect from a popular drama. All draw on the learned and popular culture of their times in the novelization of the Biblical text, and as we see in many cases, this culture does not hesitate to share resources across religious groups, especially in the case of the General estoria, with its liberal use of Muslim and Jewish scholarship to present a textured retelling of the Biblical text. 

Works cited

  • Alfonso X. General estoria. Edited by Borja Sánchez-Prieto, Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2009.
  • al-Tabari. The History of Al-Tabari: An Annotated Translation. Translated by Franz Rosenthal, vol. 1, SUNY Press, 1989.
  • al-Tha’labi, Ahmad ibn Muhammad. Qisas Al-Anbiya (Lives of the Prophets). Brill, 2002.
  • Archer, Robert. The Problem of Woman in Late-Medieval Hispanic Literature. Tamesis, 2004.
  • Huerta Viñas, Ferran. Teatre Bíblic: Antic Testament. Editorial Barcino, 1976.
  • Serra, Guillem, translator. Compendi historial de la Biblia: que ab lo títol de Genesi de Scriptura. A. Verdaguer, 1873, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/21384135.html.

Material from this post was adapted from talks planned for, but, thanks to COVID-19, not given at the Committee for Comparative Literature of the University of Denver and the Mediterranean Studies Group at the University of Colorado.

The Other Averroism: The Maimonidean Controversy and The Copenhagen Maimonides

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Copenhagen Maimonides f7, Introduction of translator Samuel ibn Tibbon

Copenhagen Maimonides f7, Introduction of translator Samuel ibn Tibbon

As a diasporic civilization, Judaism is a moveable world in itself. Heinrich Heine famously quipped that the Torah is a portable homeland, and so Jewish culture provides us with an excellent example of how texts, artifacts, and ideas travel and are transformed in different contexts.

The case of the Copenhagen Maimonides is exemplary of this condition. While the grand narrative of the movement of Aristotelian thought in Europe focuses on the Parisian Averroist controversy of the thirteenth century, the dissemination of Aristotelian thought in the Jewish communities of Spain and France provides a fascinating complement with which to nuance or enrich the story of Averroism in the Latin West.

Just as the Andalusi thinker Muhammad ibn Rushd worked to reconcile the natural philosophy of Aristotle with Islamic revelation, so too did his near-contemporary, the Andalusi Jew Musa ibn Maimun, known to European Jewry as Moshe ben Maimon and to the Latin West as Maimonides, for the Jewish world. His groundbreaking writings on the relationship between Greek philosophy and Torah ignited a centuries-long controversy in Europe’s Jewish communities that in some ways has never ended.

The Copenhagen Maimonides is textual and material witness to this culture war between Maimonideans and traditionalist Jewish scholars who vied for influence and power during the Middle Ages. The fourteenth-century Catalan manuscript of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed is illuminated by the atélier of Ferrer Bassa, a fourteenth-century Catalan Christian artist, no doubt well familiar to our colleagues in Art History, whose cv includes works such as Maria of Navarre’s Book of Hours, and the Anglo Catalan Psalter. This material and aesthetic enmeshment of Jewish and Christian material culture is emblematic of the threat Maimonidean Aristotelian thought posed to more traditional approaches to Jewish revelation that sought to isolate, or protect (depending on your position) Jewish thought from the intellectual and social culture of the dominant Christian majority.

This manuscript is an emblem of the cultural moment of the Jewish elites in southern France and Spain in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in that it brings together the questions of internal divisions within Jewish communities as well as their relationship with the dominant Christian majority and the extent to which Jews shared cultural values with their Christian neighbors.

Ibn Rushd aka Averroes

Fresco of Averroes by Andrea de Bonaiuto

Fresco of Averroes by Andrea de Bonaiuto (14th c.) (source: wikipedia.org)

Muhammad ibn Rushd lived in al-Andalus in the twelfth century, during the Almohad period. He was a judge for the Almohad Caliph and was responsible for a number of commentaries on the works of Aristotle, that had been circulating in Arabic for some two hundred years by his time. His major achievement was to reconcile Aristotle’s natural philosophy with Islamic doctrine. He argued that philosophy was not only permissible within the framework of Islam, but necessary to knowing God’s creation and God’s will. He drew criticism both from neoplatonists and from those opposed to the study of natural philosophy, but perhaps due to the variety of acceptable approaches to Islamic law, did not suffer persecution for his more unpopular ideas.
Ibn Rushd’s natural philosophy was very influential in the Latin West, where translated a number of his works into Latin in during the thirteenth century. Scholars of these works attracted criticism. While Rome did not consider Aristotle’s works in principle to be heretical, some of the conclusions Ibn Rushd drew, particularly those regarding the nature of the relationship between the individual and God, were condemned.

Musa ibn Maimun aka Rambam aka Maimonides

Statue of Maimonides in his hometown, Cordova

Statue of Maimonides in his hometown, Cordova (source: wikipedia.org)

The most influential interpreter of Aristotelian natural philosophy in Jewish world was Musa ibn Maimun, known in Hebrew as Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, by his Hebrew acronym RAMBAM, or as Maimonides in Latin. Maimonides was born in Cordova during the so-called Tafia period that followed the disintegration of the Andalusi Umayyad Caliphate but later fled persecution at the hands of the Almohads to North Africa where he lived for some time. Eventually he made his way to Fustat where he served as nagid or leader of the Jewish community as well as court physician to the Ayyubid Sultan, Saladin. He wrote revolutionary works in a number of fields, but is best known for his works of biblical and talmudic commentary characterized by his signature rationalist approach to interpreting Torah. His most influential works are the Kitab al-Siraj, Sefer ha-Mishnayot in Hebrew, a commentary on the Mishna; the Mishne Torah, a comprehensive codification of Jewish law, and the Dalálat al-Ha’irin, Moreh Nebukhim, or Guide for the Perplexed, his synthesis of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Jewish doctrine. It is the Royal Library’s fourteenth-century copy of the Guide that concerns us today, but a bit about Maimonides’ other influential works will help to set the stage for the scope of his influence in Jewish civilization in general.

The Maimonidean Controversy

The work of Maimonides had been very influential in Jewish thought on the Iberian Peninsula since his lifetime. His works were at the center of the curriculum for Jewish elites in Castile and Aragon. French Jews who were at a further distance from Maimonidean thought and who had not adopted a rationalist approach to the study of Jewish revelation found his works and interpretations of his works more problematic. At the core of the debate is a struggle between philosophy and theosophy. Rationalists under the banner of Maimonides argued that philosophy, and the exercise of God-given human reason was the best way to know God, by observing his creation and arriving at logical conclusions regarding the nature of the divine and of the relationship between the human and the divine. Traditionalists rejected philosophical approaches to revelation as heretical in favor of a theosophical approach by which all knowledge is a product of divine revelation, and that everything that is permissible can be learned by study of the Torah and its commentaries. This debate will seem familiar to many; it is the great-great-grandparent of current debates regarding creation, and the role of revelation in the organization of society.

Banned in Montpellier

Portrait of Maimonides with banned symbol covering his face

source: wikipedia.org

It’s important to remember that the backlash against some of the interpreters of Maimonides was directed not against the work or person of Maimonides himself, but rather against later interpretations of the Guide that were understood to threaten traditional doctrine in Maimonides’ name. Even the most ardent opponents of Maimonideanism did not object to Maimonides as an authority, or even to many of his propositions that were certainly provocative to more conservative interpreters of Jewish tradition. Eventually these concerns gave rise to two groups of Rabbis spread across Provence, Aragon, and Castile, who advocated for or against these later interpretations of Maimonides’ natural philosophy.

In the first quarter of the thirteenth century, Rabbi Solomon ben Avraham of Montpellier and his students were concerned that interpreters of Maimonides were abrogating Jewish law for their own purposes, all the while hiding behind Maimonides’ authority (Silver 150–51). In 1232 he promulgated a ban on Maimonides’ Guide. In so doing he ignited a controversy. Another group of Maimonists formed not far away in Lunel, enlisting influential rabbis in Castile and Aragon for support. In the same year, they issued a ban on anyone interfering with the teaching of philosophy. Jewish communities in Aragon signed on to it, and a line was drawn in the sand (Silver 151). Each side enlisted the greatest minds of their generations to support their cause. The Catalan Rabbi Nahmanides, who would later debate the Dominican Friar Paul before King Jaume I himself, tried to reconicle the two sides, but was not successful (Silver 165).

In Aragon in particular, the Controversy mapped onto tension between religious and secular leadership (Silver 166), with the Mamonists coming down on the side of secular leadership and the anti-maimonists on the side of the rabbinate. As the controversy developed, the nexus between religious and temporal issues remained at its center.

Diagram of kabbalistic sefirot or divine emanations

Diagram of kabbalistic sefirot (divine emanations) (source: wikipedia.org)

The Maimoideans eventually prevailed, while the traditionalists dedicated themselves to the study of Kabablah or Jewish mystical theosophy, developing important centers of its study in Provence, Aragon, and Castile. Traditionalists continued to agitate against philosophy, especially in Provence., where Rabbi Solomon Ibn Adret wrote a ban against Provençal Maimonists in 1305 on the grounds that their allegorical interpretation of the Bible violated Jewish tradition (Forcano 94).

The Copenhagen Maimonides in its cultural context

Fourteenth-century Castile and Aragon saw a good deal of cultural commonality between Jewish and Christian élites. Jews spoke the same languages as their Christian neighbors, and Jewish élites, dependent as they were on good graces of their king, were avid consumers and producers of many of the cultural practices of the court. Typically, the closer individual Jews were to court, the more assimilated they were to the culture of the dominant majority in matters other than religion.

An iconic cosmopolitanism

Photo of cosmopolitan cocktail

source: wikipedia.org

However, despite the very real philosophical and doctrinal debates that surrounded interpretations of the Guide, the book itself became iconic of Jewish cosmopolitanism and a willingness to engage with the non-Jewish world. Just as their detractors painted Maimonists as free-thinkers and assimilationists who favored secular leadership over the rabbinate, so too did cosmopolitan Jewish elites look to the Guide not only as an important source of information, but also as a symbol of their role as mediators between temporal power and the Jewish communities. For them, it was natural that the Rabbi who brought together Greek science and Torah should be an icon of their own cultural position between the Christian court and the Jewish community. It is in this light that we must understand the Copenhagen Guide. It signaled cosmopolitanism and sophistication. As a tangible artifact illuminated by a Christian artisan, it was an emblem of the Jewish notable’s role in the political economy of the times.

The Cophenhagen Maimoinides

The manuscript is richly illuminated and bound with the introduction of the translator Samuel ibn Tibbon, as well as the translator’s glossary of Aristotelian terms in Hebrew. It contains a number of marginal illuminations as well as some larger historiated illuminations, all of which are clearly identifiable as the work of the atelier of Ferrer Bassa, a Christian Catalan artist who also illuminated the Anglo-Catalan Psalter, the Book of Hours of Maria of Navarre, and the Catalan Micrography Mahzor (NLI MS Heb 8º6527), a prayer book for the Jewish high holidays. In Castile and Aragon at this time, Jewish artisans sometimes worked on Christian art and in some cases, Christian artisans produced works of Jewish art. The Copenhagen Guide is one of these examples.

A new Maimonides?

Folio 227v of the Copenhagen Maimonides held by the Danish Royal Library. Maimonides is pictured seated before four students with his hand pointing toward the work's title

Copenhagen Maimonides, Danish Royal Library Cod Heb 37, f227v

The manuscript’s patron was Menahem Betzalel, a Jewish physician in the service of Peter IV of ‘the Ceremonious’ of Aragon. The king also patronized works by the atélier of Ferrer Bassa, and so Betzalel’s commission of the Guide reinforced his relationship to the king and the culture of the court. As a royal physician himself, Betzalel may have imagined himself a new Maimonides, and his possession of the deluxe manuscript of the Guide may have signaled this identity to members of the Jewish community of Barcelona.

Evangelist Remix

The symbols of the four evangelists, Matthew is an angel, Mark a winged lion, Luke a winged bull, and John an eagle, are placed at the four corners of the Hebrew word for introduction, 'hakdamah'

Reuse of traditional symbols of Evangelists to illustrate discussion of Ezekiel’s vision (Cod Heb 37 f. 403v)

However, it in the redeployment of Christian iconography that this manuscript is remarkable and perhaps unique among Hebrew illuminated manuscripts of the time. In the Guide, Maimonides discusses the vision of Ezekiel described in chapter 1, verses 4-28. In the Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible, the animals that form this fantastic beast are imagined as representing the four evangelists Matthew is an angel, Mark a winged lion, Luke a winged bull, and John an eagle.  This allegory of the evangelists was a common image in medieval Christian iconography. In the Maimonides Guide, the illuminator uses a historiated miniature of the Christian icons to illustrate Maimonides’ discussion of the vision of Ezekiel. Chapman points out that Bassa had previously used this illumination in both the Anglo-Catalan Psalter and the Hours of Maria of Navarre, but replaced the banners featuring the names of the Christian saints traditionally associated with the animals (drawn from the Revelations) with the Hebrew word Hakdamah, or “introduction.” Its use in a Jewish manuscript demonstrates for Chapman the manuscript’s cultural ambivalence, but for me it is suggests a kind of openness or self-confidence in adapting materials across confessional groups provided they are not in direct conflict with religious doctrine. While it would be problematic for a Jewish manuscript to attribute sainthood to followers of Jesus, there’s nothing wrong with drawing a fanciful version of the vision of Ezekiel to make the ideas of the Torah more real for Jewish readers; this is simply exegesis, and midrash is full of these kinds of gestures.

In closing, the Copenhagen Maimonides tells two interrelated stories. The first is that of the Movable World, in this case, the journey of Aristotelian natural philosophy from Athens to Baghdad to Cordova to Barcelona. The second is that of the medieval Iberian Jewish communities who adapted and transformed Aristotle’s ideas through the lens of their own experience. For them, the controversy stirred by Ibn Rushd’s and Maimonides’ interpretations of Aristotelian natural philosophy were embedded in broader issues facing the communities: the brittle relationship with the Church and the preaching orders, the social implications of conflicting schools of exegesis, the balance of power between secular and rabbinic leadership within the Jewish community, and, for the elites, the challenge of living as a powerful member of a religious minority negotiating between the royal court and the kahal, or Jewish community.

Bibliography

  • Brown, Stephen. “The Intellectual Context of Later Medieval Philosophy: Universities, Aristotle, Arts, Theology.” Routledge History of Philosophy Volume III: Medieval Philosophy, edited by John Marenbon, Routledge, 2003, pp. 188–203.
  • Chapman, Katherine Woodson. Image and Identity : Re-Reading the Illustrations of the Copenhagen Maimonides. S.M.U, 2009.
  • Forcano, Manuel. “La lletra apologètica de Jedàia ha-Peniní de Bésiers.” Anuari de filologia. Secció E. Estudis hebreus i arameus, vol. 6, 1996, pp. 93–104.
  • Kogman-Appel, Katrin. Jewish Book Art Between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain. Brill, 2005.
  • Leaman, Oliver. Averroës and His Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 1988.
  • Sánchez, Tomás Jesús Urrutia. “Saber de sabios y saber de profetas: la controversia maimonideana y Sem Tob Ibn Falaquera.” Revista española de filosofía medieval, no. 16, 2009, pp. 57–68.
  • Silver, Daniel Jeremy. Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean Controversy, 1180-1240. EJBrill, 1965.

This post is a version of a conference paper I gave at the 2019 meeting of the Centre for Medieval Literature, “Shared Worlds,” held in Copenhagen at the David Collection and the Danish Royal Library. My thanks to the Centre for their invitation to participate.