one of the most fascinating periods i think in jewish history is a brief period of about
two centuries that existed in medieval spain it's sometimes called the golden age because
of the phenomenal personalities that animated the cultural especially the literary poetic life of
the iberian peninsula between about the 10th and the 12th century there's a lot of question however
as to exactly how golden this arrow was a series of books over the last decade or so have gone back
and forth on this and so i thought i'd just very quickly give you a sense of when was this golden
era why do people call it a golden era and what are some of the criticisms to say it was not so
iei golden after all okay i happen to have given quite a few lectures on this topic and of people
in this topic in the following lecture i'd like to just take a very brief moment to speak about
three of my favorites actually three and a half of my favorites uh but i'll put in the links below
some uh directions to longer videos in which i explore the lives of these people
in a fuller length at any rate let's talk a little bit about the golden age of spanish jewry
when we last discussed the iberian peninsula it was under the control of the visigoths
who when they converted to catholicism in the year 589
initiated a bizarre reign that was characterized by a tremendous amount of anti-semitic legislation
as we discussed earlier there's a lot of questions surrounding exactly the nature
of how these decrees were implemented because we really only have the legislative side to look
at to try and examine the history but it was a period of remarkable anti-semitic legislation with
punishments like amputations and the imposition of a police state to track the movements of jews
all kinds of really strange things you wouldn't see for centuries later anywhere in europe at
any rate it was a very very nasty period we have to assume between the years 589 and 7 11
which is when the muslims entered the peninsula and conquered it in very short order along with
their rapid expanse across the southern part of the mediterranean and into southern europe as well
we don't get a lot of information about the flourishing of a you know sort of a jewish
muslim synthesis or out of this kind of cultural coexistence that will be so celebrated for the
first couple hundred years but by the time we get to the 10th century things change dramatically
one of the concepts that comes up again and again in the origin stories of this golden age is the
notion of the loyal and wise jewish adviser meaning you have like muslim rulers coming into
the era military rulers they've got to manage a a restive christian population who resents
their uh presence and the jews are served as an excellent intermediary between the interlopers
into the culture and the indigenous population they're literate they're numerate they're urban uh
there's all kinds of you know advantages to using the jews who themselves have no special connection
to the local population and especially not to the previous regime of visigoths so the jews fit that
role very nicely and over and over again you see this phenomenon of like a a muslim military
ruler coming in and needing some local support and infrastructure and jews are there to fill that gap
it's not clear at all that as some 19th century historians have argued that jews somehow betrayed
the iberian peninsula to the muslims but it is not at all outside of the realm of possibility
that when muslims came in and as their military advance required them to go further and further
north and they had to leave behind a thinner and thinner layer of administration the jews were
able to staff those positions to control the population tax them and
so on so that's probably where we have the functional origins of this interconnection
jumping ahead a little bit of course this uh is reversed over the next several hundred years in
something called the uh reconquest or reconquista and that refers to the christian movement from the
north down to the south slowly pushing the muslims back out of the peninsula as you can see in this
map here which covers the period from 9 14 to 1492 which is of course the expulsion of the jews
and shortly before that the complete conquest of the peninsula with the fall of granada
in the south but as you can see with the color coding here uh gradually over the course of half
a millennium the christians begin to slowly work their way down with significant consequences for
the jewish population as we shall discuss a little later on in the semester so speaking specifically
about the golden age what we're talking about is basically the era from khasta ibn shaproot
those are kind of the major figures who bookend this period and that dates from the 10th to
the 12th century the area in which this golden age is especially expressed is in the southern region
which is known as al-andalus the muslim region and it works within a muslim cultural ecosystem
in particular uh the attitude to poetry and that we shall see as being so significant uh i'd like
to suggest i don't think i've ever seen this term used before but maybe i can coin it unless i'm
stealing it unconsciously from someone else uh there was kind of a silver age that followed it
not nearly as amazing as the golden age but there were a few really important figures like
nah manadis or the rashbot you know some phenomenal figures who were in spain
shortly after the golden age was coming to a close and they existed within the christian cultural
ecosystem with quite a different experience in many ways as god willing we shall discuss as we go
further along in this semester so basically that's we're talking about these 200 years between the
uh the conquest of the peninsula in 7-11 it really comes to its golden period in the 10th century
up until the 12th century when the reconquista begins to slowly make its impact on this brief
and fascinating period okay now what makes it so golden perhaps one of the most significant things
is something that is known in the scholarly research as la convivencia or as i think the
spaniards we would say la conviventhia which always makes me laugh but yeah it's it means
literally the living togetherness right the co-existence which is a little bit stronger i
think in spanish the idea that these are you know uh very diametrically opposed
cultures in so many ways i mean christians and muslims and jews they have a lot to argue about
and they did argue in many ways and there was a lot of violence involved in the history between
those three parties but for some reason during those 200 years there was a tremendous amount of a
a living togetherness where they appreciated each other's cultures in ways that we don't see for
much of the period there's certainly uh several key examples of this convolvencia which is not
you know a perfectly round convention with you know jews and christians and
muslims all sharing equally it tends to be lopsided towards the muslims in terms
of political authority for example uh towards the jews in terms of fiscal activity let's say
but uh and i would say the christians are probably at the bottom end of this triangle or this circle
but nevertheless uh it does represent a step forward now there are a lot of questions about
it though is it was it really as great as we will describe in the next video in particular first of
all we should understand that one of the reasons why this happened at all is because spain is so
far away from the center of muslim culture which was in baghdad right in fact in many ways the uh
the spanish caliphate the uh the leaders of the muslim society and al anders declared themselves
a separate and independent caliphate from the uh the caliphate that was based in baghdad they were
so far away i mean we're talking about distances that took you know days weeks to travel and so it
was kind of like being in vegas and what happens in vegas stays in vegas uh there was a lot more
flexibility because they were so far from central authorities and they could act independently in
many ways that's why you see in many times a kind of relaxation of muslim orthodoxy such as
for example the consumption of alcohol which was a very big part of the kind of evening salons that
would be held where muslims and jews and christians would get together and to claim
poetry and drink a lot of wine this was something that you wouldn't see happening in baghdad
there would be some elements of this in the ottoman empire but centuries and centuries later
so the the supervisory control of orthodox islam did not have the same kind of impact on spain as
you would have in the center there would be ups and downs to this there would be invasions from
north africa from much more doctrinaire muslims who would insist on a return to some of those
values but for the golden era that we're talking about there's a lot of center versus periphery
issues which are very significant and by the way the same thing holds true for the jews
because their center of gravity intellectually was still in mesopotamia with the great academies
of surah and pumbadita themselves moving to baghdad the geoneem were based there as well
and so they're very far away from the central authorities too let us not forget as well that
although we speak about this convivencia uh it wasn't completely equal it wasn't like uh mikasa
sukasa it was a situation where the jews were definitely limited in their authority there were
some phenomenal figures who reached great heights but always subordinate to the muslim rulers there
was no question that somehow there could be an independent jewish state or anything like that
and so there were similar kind of boundaries on jews and on christians uh within their community
nevertheless placed within the larger context of what jews and christians were allowed to do in
muslim lands elsewhere or what jews or muslims were allowed to do in christian lands elsewhere
this was really a a period of great liberalism and uh flourishing of cultural activity there were
also moments of violence during this period let's not think that this was one of uniform peace
and happiness there was a rather remarkable pogrom in the southern region in 1066 uh
after the death of a very important figure named that we'll discuss god willing in the next video
his son who succeeded him was unable to live up to the expectations of the
larger population and there was literally a popular attack on him and on the jewish community
that resulted in the loss of life this was definitely not a convivencia kind of thing to do
but it just serves to illustrate that we can't view this period entirely through rose-colored
glasses and finally one of the most striking examples perhaps is the flight of maimonides
he is often considered since he was a native of southern spain he's often considered one
of the great exemplars of la convivencia but in reality the vast majority of his
uh work his scholarship his activity as a jewish leader uh occurred in egypt uh as a an adult and
as a an older individual the his period in spain was fairly brief his family fled uh when he was
still a young man primarily because of muslim persecution from those north african invasions
that occurred uh at the time so this is just kind of like caveats to the overall idea of convivencia
in the next video we're going to look at several figures who uh embodied the ideas of convivencia
finally i'd like to give you just a little bit of a historiographic perspective
on the reason why we get to this whole concept of the golden age in the first place a lot of
it has to do not so much with the 10th through the 12th centuries but with the 19th century
specifically germany in the middle to late 19th century this is a period when jews were arguing
quite strenuously for equal rights for what was called emancipation a major theme that will god
willing speak about much more in next semester um one of the important historians of that era
was this man heinrich kretz who wrote one of the first major encyclopedic histories of the jews
that has been translated incidentally into a beautiful six volume edition at the turn of the
20th century and it was the bar mitzvah present part excellence for decades at any rate um in that
context uh if you go to europe in the 19th century you see that jews have been emancipated in france
already 50 years prior in the late 18th century they had made tremendous strides similarly in um
in england and even in austria they are the tolerance patent was out and all kinds of things
were indicating that jews were getting more and more rights uh germany was not yet unified and so
there was a patchwork approach to how jews should be treated and there was also that brief-lived
revolution of 1848 that for a moment swept away disabilities and then it slammed them back down
again so jews in germany were trying very hard to make the case that they should be emancipated as
well granted equal rights equal access to colleges and universities equal access to professions and
things like that and one of the things that was part of their overall intellectual strategy was
look at spain from the 10th to the 12th centuries look at what happens when a society
gives its jews more freedom those jews suddenly are able to make phenomenal contributions
back to the society they are able to express themselves culturally they are exposed to be able
to express themselves in literature in science and diplomacy in military arts all kinds of
areas where you know jews are this untapped human resource that are going to waste because of these
artificial political disabilities that are placed on them so by sort of elevating the spanish
golden age and this noble sephardic ideal the 19th century historians really tried to create an image
of uh this perfect society as a model for 19th century germany to follow the historical reality
uh has a lot to say in support of that model but as i've tried to outline here there are some major
caveats that take away from it but at any rate now that we have a sense of why it was considered such
a golden age in the next video let's look at three figures three and a half really that exemplify the
ideals of the period and maybe you'll see why it really was so fantastic thank you very much for
watching
you