January Journal: Jewish history

[liv]

angelofthenorth asked me about Jewish history that resonates the most. This is going to be a short post, partly because I'm away for nou's Croydon Fun Weekend and haven't got much time online. Also partly because I really don't know very much history; my history is anecdotes and stuff I happen to have read popular books or historical fiction about.

The period I'm most drawn to is Spain under Muslim rule, approximately from the 8^th century through the 13^th. I have no doubt at all that my picture of it is romanticized and simplified. Still, I love the idea of a formally and legally multicultural society, where Jews became scientists and doctors and philosophers and poets, sometimes all of these. The fact that all of those were honoured positions at all already appeals to me, and I particularly connect to the idea that for a few centuries and in one small region at least, Jews were able to attain those honoured positions. The engagement of that culture with Classical thought and experimental science within a monotheistic framework is something that's appealing to me anyway, as well as the inclusion of Jews and Jewish scholarship within that.

A lot of Islamophobic right-wingers and Islamophobic New Atheists worry about "dhimmitude" and treat "sharia law" as a terrible bogeyman. But my understanding of dhimmi status is that Jews were, yes, a lower grade of citizens and subject to extra taxes, but they were in fact citizens rather than being either the direct property of the king or legitimate, even encouraged targets for slaughter and forced conversion. When the Christian world caught up several centuries later to the idea of people being citizens rather than subjects or otherwise feudally owned, of having rights in a democratic society enforced by a just, status-blind legal system, it took a long time for Jews to be "emancipated" and granted equivalent status. And in many countries it only took a couple of generations before those rights were revoked.

Even if my idea of Al-Andalus is glamourized, the period has still left us a legacy of some amazingly beautiful liturgical poetry and some works of religious philosophy which are still hugely influential today. I love the architecture and the music too, the way it's mostly Moorish with a European flavour, the clear influence of how much Muslim Spain was at a major crossroads of civilization with all kinds of international trading links. I don't think it was the greatest epoch for women's lib, but at least it was a society where it was a good place to be Jewish and a good place to be intellectual, (and to some extent a reasonable place to be gay, I think, though my gay history is even more patchy and anecdotal than my Jewish history).

I did a school project on this period for RE, because I was excused from the term when the rest of the class were learning about Judaism. And I've visited some of the surviving and historic Jewish sites in Spain, particularly Toledo but also Córdoba. If I ever did study Jewish history properly, this is the context I'd want to concentrate on, even though I know that detailed study always takes the shine off what seems to me as an ignorant lay person like a really romantic and admirable culture.

[January Journal masterlist]

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

You're more or less correct about Al-Andalus. The trick would be to ensure your descendants left before the Reconquista, because things turned abruptly very nasty when the Christians moved in, with forced conversions and so on for Jews and Muslims alike.

[daharyn]

I think I have a book recommendation, vaguely based on this: I would love to hear what you think of this graphic novel. I liked it a lot, but I don't know much about Jewish history.