Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (56 page)

In Córdoba, for example, under the rule of the Islamic caliphate, Christians were welcome to hold their worship services in the Great Mosque, and they did so. It was one of the grand building complexes in Europe, dating to the eighth century, proudly situated by a noble river, above an ancient Roman bridge. The mosque still stands, with its dramatic horseshoe arches and arcades, stone window grilles and battlements, although all of the Moorish elements are overshadowed now by the Christian cathedral that was built on top of the mosque in the sixteenth century.
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Muslim Córdoba was the site of what may have been the first medieval university, begun in the tenth century. The city dominated a high plateau in dramatic, rolling country. It was "built in tiers," as an early source described it, "one above the other, so that the ground of the uppermost was at the level of the rooftops of the middle, and the ground of the middle at the level of the rooftops of the lowest. All three were surrounded by walls. The palace stood in the uppermost region ... in the middle region were orchards and gardens, while the Friday mosque and private dwellings were situated on the lowest level."
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Today, the terraces of the caliph's Córdoba lie open to the sun in vast excavations. Intricate stone carvings, showing trees and leaves and patterns of intertwined vines, mark walls, gates, and the capitals of pillars. The rich blues and greens of mosaic tiles are set off by gold chips of script that elaborates the name of Allah. Ribbed vaults supporting domes, and complex tunneling that supplied water to the city, remain as evidence of premillennial Moorish engineering genius.

Jews were taught Arabic by Muslim scholars, and they mastered the Koran as well as Hebrew Scriptures. Mathematics, astronomy, and medicine were complemented by the study of philosophy, based on the entire corpus of Aristotle and much of Plato. Extant scholarly works by Jews, dating to the
convivencia
period, establish that many Jews mastered these subjects. The most familiar such figure is the Córdoba native Moses ben Maimón, whose writing proves the point: Perhaps the most revered of all Jewish sages, Maimonides wrote in Arabic, not Hebrew.

The scholar Norman Roth is one of my important sources for information on the life of Jews in Iberia. He writes, "The names cited by Maimonides in his work read like a
Who's Who
of classical and Muslim philosophy and science: Plato and Aristotle, of course; but also Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, John Philoponus, Euclid, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, and almost all of the Muslim philosophers."
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Maimonides would not have been Maimonides had he not lived in Iberia, no matter what his genius. "Were he to have been born in another land, France or Germany, for instance," Roth asserts, "he would at most have become another one of those almost anonymous rabbis who wrote endless commentaries on commentaries on the Talmud." Because his creativity and intelligence were nurtured by the richest diversity of influences in the world—among the richest in history—Maimonides became "the greatest genius ever produced by the Jewish people."
⁵

So Maimonides is a kind of measure of the value of
convivencia.
And as Muslims were the teachers of Jews, so Jews were schoolmasters to Christians, particularly in Castile and Catalonia.
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The three religious traditions influenced one another, and eventually, for a time, ethnic and creedal differences came to mean less than differences of caste and region, of social role and work. This was, in other words, a moment full of possibility, another of the roads not taken. Yet
convivencia,
that it existed at all, establishes that there is nothing monolithic about the history of Jewish-Christian relations, and nothing fated to lead inexorably to disaster. That Jews and Christians, together with Muslims, can live in amity, respecting differences while honoring commonalities—that this is no pipe dream—is proven by the fact that, for centuries, they did just that.

The richness of Iberian life in this period was partly due to its isolation from the rest of Europe—which was living through a broad cultural stasis, marked especially by its loss of the classical tradition—and, conversely, partly due to its fluent contact with the distant East, especially the thriving Islamic capital of Baghdad. That city and its environs, since the sixth-century publication of the Babylonian Talmud, had also been a center of Hebrew biblical and Talmudic scholarship.
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By the time of Maimonides, Christians and Jews held positions of political power in the Islamic regime that controlled most of Iberia. All three religious groups were embarked on similar, sometimes common programs of material and spiritual renaissance. Vestiges of
convivencia
are evident in the striking—to our eye Moorish—style of architecture that still distinguishes Spanish churches, mosques, and synagogues.

As if shaken by a continent-wide seismic shift,
convivencia
broke apart into violent imbalance around the time that the crusading fervor first swept through northern Europe. A far stricter sect of militant Muslims, who rejected Iberian intermingling and aesthetics—and the soft life of beauty reflected in the elegant Moorish style—crossed over from North Africa in about 1145, a turn in the story remembered as the Almohad Invasion. For two decades, this puritanical contingent of Muslims fought the ruling Iberian caliphates, as well as Christians and Jews, before finally establishing control, in the south and center.
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But by then, astir with a crusading fervor of their own, the Christian kingdoms in the peninsula's far north had begun the campaign of
reconquista,
with the ambition of restoring all of Iberia to Christian control. The Spanish epic poem
El Cid
dates to this period (c. 1140). Taken as a celebration of Christian resistance to Muslims, it nevertheless carries the curves of
convivencia,
since the Christian hero ends as a man in the middle, associated as much with Muslims as with his own kind.
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By the middle of the twelfth century, in the thick of the crusading era, the time of tolerance was passing. When the Christian Alfonso VII conquered Córdoba in 1146, he ordered a cross put atop the Great Mosque, in which, before the Almohads, Catholic Masses had been freely celebrated. King Alfonso declared that henceforth the mosque would be a church.
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The Muslims would recapture Córdoba in short order, and would remove the cross. They struck out at Christians and Jews alike, with unprecedented ruthlessness. Perhaps the most striking signal of the demise of
convivencia
was the decision, in 1159, by the brilliant twenty-four-year-old Maimón ides to abandon Córdoba, because Jews there were being forcibly converted or murdered by the now fanatical Almohads. Maimonides fled with his family to Egypt, where he would become famous as a physician. He never returned to Iberia. In tribute to his stature, he became known as a second "Moses the Egyptian," although he always identified himself as an Iberian.
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Christian armies decisively defeated the Almohads in 1212.
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Before long, Muslim rulers were vanquished throughout the peninsula, except for an enclave in the far south, around Granada. When Christians retook Córdoba once and for all, the cross went back on the Great Mosque, where it remained. The
reconquista
reestablished Christian dominance for the first time since the eighth century. By now, Iberia was populated by about three million people.
¹³
Many Muslims had retreated to Granada and to North Africa, while some had become Christians. A sizable minority remained where they were as Muslims. The well-established Jewish communities, totaling several hundred thousand, remained more or less in place, as Christians took over again. Aware of contemporaneous events in northern Europe, Jews in Iberia were braced.

Yet the spirit of
convivencia
in some ways held, and in some places it flourished anew. In Castile, by far the largest part of Iberia, extending in the center from Portugal to the eastern kingdom of Aragon, no one was forced to change his religion. Ferdinand III, the king of Castile from 1217 until 1252, called himself the "king of the three religions,"
¹⁴
as if coexistence had a future.

Castile's capital was Toledo, in the dead center of Iberia. The late-medieval city had a population of perhaps forty thousand, with as many as a third of them Jews.
¹⁵
The Castilian court was known for its Jewish sages and physicians. Toledo was identified with the legendary School of Translators, a century-old collaboration of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, which only now came fully into its own. In fact, the tripartite work of translation had been going on all over Spain, a natural outcome of
convivencia,
but it was an activity particularly associated with trilingual Jews. It was these translators who, in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had rendered the great works of Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroés, and Maimonides into Latin, making them available to the rest of Europe and sparking the northern renaissance.

Toledo is about an hour's drive from Madrid, and I made the trip while writing this book. The city, with its crenelated wall, dominates a mesa that rises above a dusty agricultural plain. There is something whimsical about Toledo's high prominence in the otherwise spare landscape, and it is easy to conjure the mystical impression it must have made on the medieval imagination. Once inside the wall, however, the visitor is struck by the confining narrow lanes that wind around a central square, above which loom the cathedral, municipal hall, and bishop's palace. The alleys and byways create a maze that makes the city seem small, undoing the feeling of spaciousness inspired at first sight of the hilltop enclave.

Toledo was called the Jerusalem of Spain, and some accounts trace its founding to Jews well before the birth of Christ. One conjecture has it that the name itself evolved from Hebrew.
¹⁶
Among the Christians who so positively interacted with Toledo's Jews a tradition developed that they were consulted by the Jews of Jerusalem as to whether Jesus should be put to death, and Toledo's Jews said no.
¹⁷
An indication of the vitality of Jewish participation in the life of medieval Toledo can be seen in a beautiful cluster of buildings in the western part of the city. They originated as the villa, constructed in the Moorish style in the early fourteenth century, of one of the prominent Jews of the era, Samuel Halevy (1320–1360?), who served the king of Castile as chief minister and treasurer. Halevy's house, with its multilevel tiled roofs, its colonnades, arched porticoes, and soaring central tower, is a monument to the family's power and taste, but also to a world that would cease to exist. In Halevy's own lifetime, with deadly consequences for him, a paroxysm of anti-Jewish violence would sweep Europe, set off by the Black Plague (1348) and a paranoid targeting, in particular, of Toledo's Jews. The continent-wide plague would be said to have originated in Toledo.

Ultimately, Halevy's villa became the home of the Spanish painter El Greco (1541–1614), who did some of his greatest work there. The building now serves as the El Greco Museum. Halevy would no doubt have been forgotten except for the building he constructed next door, a synagogue that served his community and that is known today as Sinagoga del Transito. The building is now a museum that commemorates the Jewish presence in Iberia. The central hall is about the size of a basketball court. With its intricately carved stonework and coffered ceiling, the place suggests the mystery to which a Jewish assembly would once have been attuned. Windows high on the wall, interspersed with blind arches, are said to repeat a pattern of the Temple; "and its windows," an inscription reads, "are like the windows of Ariel."
¹⁸
Hebrew letters line the high balustrade, and one wall features a design based on the tablets of Moses. Pillars support the Moorish arches that have ever since been a mark of synagogue architecture. Despite the distinctively Jewish cast to the original work, there is reason to believe that Muslim and Christian craftsmen and artists, along with Jews, built the building and decorated it.
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On the day of my visit, a thin trickle of tourists came and went, glancing quickly at a lost world, apparently unsure what to make of it. If there are ghosts in the place, they are lost Jews, but also knights of a military order that occupied it for a time and whose bodies are buried under the floor tiles, and Jesuits who said Masses in its niches. The building is a shrine, finally, to the melancholy history we are about to retrace. Indeed, the synagogue served as a Christian church for longer than as a center of Jewish study and prayer. As Halevy's house became El Greco's, the synagogue stands as a monument to supersessionism. A Christian belfry imposed long after Halevy's architects did their work dominates the building's exterior, and its very name derives from the one it bore as a church, El Transito de Nuestra Senora. The phrase refers to the glorification of the Virgin, but it suggests irretrievable worlds now lost.

In 1260, the School of Translators in Toledo received a royal charter from Alfonso X, Ferdinand Ill's son and successor. Under Alfonso's guidance, these scholars began to render the great works into Castilian, and a creative flowering of the vernacular followed. Jews were centrally involved in the invention of the Spanish language.

Alfonso X (b. 1221) was known as "the Wise." His reign stands in marked contrast to contemporary rulers in the rest of Europe. While Saint Louis, for example, was seeing to the burning of the Talmud in Paris, Alfonso was sponsoring its careful translation.
²⁰
Yitzhak Baer, author of the seminal
A History of the Jews in Christian Spain,
noted, "The friendly relations between Alfonso X, the Wise, and the Jews extended beyond the realm of politics. The king, himself a scholar and patron of learning, extended to Jewish scholars a hospitality not to be found in the courts of any of his contemporaries ... A versatile aggregation of Jewish scholars and scientists thus surrounded the learned king."
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When Alfonso had buried his father, he ordered the tomb inscribed with tributes in Hebrew, Arabic, Castilian, and Latin.