Jonathan Ray
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814729113
- eISBN:
- 9780814729120
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814729113.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Together with the fall of Muslim Granada early that same year, the expulsion of the Jews represented ...
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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Together with the fall of Muslim Granada early that same year, the expulsion of the Jews represented ultimate failure of inter-faith coexistence for which medieval Iberia is often praised. However, the impulse to memorialize the tragedy of the expulsion should not obscure the larger story of how the Jews of medieval Iberia reconstituted their communities and refashioned their cultural identities as they transitioned to new lands and a new age. This book thus chronicles the voyage of Iberian Jewry from medieval Iberia to the wider Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century, and from a collection of relatively disconnected municipal communities to a recognizable diaspora society.This provides a reassessment of the nature and development of Sephardic society and many of its central features.Less
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Together with the fall of Muslim Granada early that same year, the expulsion of the Jews represented ultimate failure of inter-faith coexistence for which medieval Iberia is often praised. However, the impulse to memorialize the tragedy of the expulsion should not obscure the larger story of how the Jews of medieval Iberia reconstituted their communities and refashioned their cultural identities as they transitioned to new lands and a new age. This book thus chronicles the voyage of Iberian Jewry from medieval Iberia to the wider Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century, and from a collection of relatively disconnected municipal communities to a recognizable diaspora society.This provides a reassessment of the nature and development of Sephardic society and many of its central features.
Amy G. Remensnyder
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199892983
- eISBN:
- 9780199388868
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199892983.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Medieval History, World Early Modern History
This book brings together medieval Iberia, colonial Mexico, and colonial New Mexico through the largely unexplored history of the Virgin Mary as a figure of warfare and cross-cultural encounter. ...
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This book brings together medieval Iberia, colonial Mexico, and colonial New Mexico through the largely unexplored history of the Virgin Mary as a figure of warfare and cross-cultural encounter. Beginning around 1000, Mary was drawn into warfare between Muslims and Christians in Iberia, emerging as an icon of the so-called Christian reconquest, which ended in 1492. In the process, rulers of Castile and Aragon developed a Marian sense of monarchy and Mary helped define the manliness of Christian men of war. In the religiously–mixed polities of high medieval Castile and Aragon, Mary became a key figure through which Muslims, Christians, and Jews negotiated their relationships with each other, and articulated identities. Mary also became central to the Christian view of the conversion of Muslims and Jews. The Spaniards who established colonies in the Caribbean and Mexico brought with them these medieval understandings of Mary. In the New World, the conquistadors both used her in the conquest of indigenous peoples and held her out to these people in evangelical efforts, influencing how some indigenous eventually appropriated her as their own military icon. Legends about her role in the conquest of Mexico became repositories of colonial identities, Spanish and indigenous. These legends inspired men involved in the founding of seventeenth-century New Mexico. There, Mary figured prominently in how colonists, friars, and Pueblos viewed the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the re-establishment of the Spanish colony in the 1690s. Her role in colonial New Mexico reverberates in the state’s contemporary ethnic politics.Less
This book brings together medieval Iberia, colonial Mexico, and colonial New Mexico through the largely unexplored history of the Virgin Mary as a figure of warfare and cross-cultural encounter. Beginning around 1000, Mary was drawn into warfare between Muslims and Christians in Iberia, emerging as an icon of the so-called Christian reconquest, which ended in 1492. In the process, rulers of Castile and Aragon developed a Marian sense of monarchy and Mary helped define the manliness of Christian men of war. In the religiously–mixed polities of high medieval Castile and Aragon, Mary became a key figure through which Muslims, Christians, and Jews negotiated their relationships with each other, and articulated identities. Mary also became central to the Christian view of the conversion of Muslims and Jews. The Spaniards who established colonies in the Caribbean and Mexico brought with them these medieval understandings of Mary. In the New World, the conquistadors both used her in the conquest of indigenous peoples and held her out to these people in evangelical efforts, influencing how some indigenous eventually appropriated her as their own military icon. Legends about her role in the conquest of Mexico became repositories of colonial identities, Spanish and indigenous. These legends inspired men involved in the founding of seventeenth-century New Mexico. There, Mary figured prominently in how colonists, friars, and Pueblos viewed the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the re-establishment of the Spanish colony in the 1690s. Her role in colonial New Mexico reverberates in the state’s contemporary ethnic politics.
Amy G. Remensnyder
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199892983
- eISBN:
- 9780199388868
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199892983.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, World Medieval History, World Early Modern History
The Christians and Muslims of high medieval Iberia were aware that Mary belonged to both Christianity and Islam and realized that their respect for her distinguished them from their Jewish neighbors. ...
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The Christians and Muslims of high medieval Iberia were aware that Mary belonged to both Christianity and Islam and realized that their respect for her distinguished them from their Jewish neighbors. Christians and Muslims dealt with the unsettling potential for proximity offered by the “lady of the enemies,” as Granadan poet Ibn al-Jayyub dubbed Mary, in various ways. Sometimes, Mary held out the possibility of practical ecumenicism, creating a space where Muslims and Christians could ignore religious difference for a whole host of reasons – political, economic, even devotional. In other situations, she became a sharply drawn line between Muslims and Christians, a medium through which some members of these faiths could express their implacable difference and thus their inevitable bloody conflict. By the fifteenth century, Mary’s ambiguity as a woman celebrated by both Bible and Qur’an increasingly disturbed Christian ideology and was erased.Less
The Christians and Muslims of high medieval Iberia were aware that Mary belonged to both Christianity and Islam and realized that their respect for her distinguished them from their Jewish neighbors. Christians and Muslims dealt with the unsettling potential for proximity offered by the “lady of the enemies,” as Granadan poet Ibn al-Jayyub dubbed Mary, in various ways. Sometimes, Mary held out the possibility of practical ecumenicism, creating a space where Muslims and Christians could ignore religious difference for a whole host of reasons – political, economic, even devotional. In other situations, she became a sharply drawn line between Muslims and Christians, a medium through which some members of these faiths could express their implacable difference and thus their inevitable bloody conflict. By the fifteenth century, Mary’s ambiguity as a woman celebrated by both Bible and Qur’an increasingly disturbed Christian ideology and was erased.
