IN THE COURTS OF THE NATIONS - DataSpace - Princeton ...

actors with agency and to understand the ways in which they navigated amongst the various legal
orders available to them.
The history of Jews in the Islamic world is often told in one of two ways, reflecting two
ends of the historiographical spectrum that stretches between the poles of tolerance and
persecution. 28 The first generation of historians to engage in the scientific study of Jewish
history (members of the Wissenschaft des Judentums school) invented what Mark Cohen has
coined the “myth of an interfaith utopia.” 29 These scholars focused on medieval Spain and were
particularly interested in culture and literature as evidence of Jews’ successful assimilation into
the broader Islamic society in which they lived—a picture which reflected their own hopes of
assimilating into nineteenth-century German society. 30 In the twentieth century scholars further
developed this approach to the history of Jews in Islamic Spain and beyond; the term
“Convivencia” came to epitomize a view in which Jews flourished under the relative tolerance of
their Muslim rulers and Jews and Muslims forged close social, intellectual, and cultural bonds. 31
28
The following is heavily indebted to the ideas first articulated in Mark R. Cohen, “Islam and the Jews: Myth,
Counter-myth, and History,” Jerusalem Quarterly 38 (1986), and later reformulated in idem, Under Crescent and
Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), Chapter 1. For other
helpful historiographical discussions, see Jonathan Ray, “Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing Our
Approach to Medieval ‘Convivencia,’” Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 2 (2005); Yaron Tsur, “Israeli Historiography
and the Ethnic Problem,” in Making Israel, ed. Benny Morris (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press,
2007); Daniel J. Schroeter, “From Sephardi to Oriental: The ‘Decline’ Theory of Jewish Civilization in the Middle
East and North Africa,” in The Jewish Contribution to Civilization: Reassessing an Idea, ed. Jeremy Cohen and
Richard I. Cohen (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008).
29
Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 3-5.
30
See especially Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1949), esp. v. 3, 53-4, 234-6.
31
This term was originally used in an historical context by Américo Castro in 1948: Américo Castro, España en su
historia: cristianos, moros y judíos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1948). (On this term, see Ray, “Beyond
Tolerance and Persecution,” 1-3.) For more recent examples, see, e.g., Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain,
vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973); Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the
World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little,
Brown, 2002). Haim Zafrani portrayed the situation of Jews in Morocco as a continuation of the Golden Age of
Spanish Jewry and its idealized view of Jewish-Muslim relations: see esp. Haim Zafrani, Juifs d’Andalousie et du
Maghreb (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1996).
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