No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of
medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of
the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands
of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for
two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a
large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and
municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray
reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious
boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the
peninsula and beyond.
The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high
degree of openness, mobility, and interaction with both Christians
and Muslims. Ray's view challenges the traditional historiography,
which holds that Sephardic communities, already fully developed,
were simply reestablished on the frontier. In the early years of
settlement, Iberia's crusader kings actively supported Jewish
economic and political activity, and Jewish interaction with their
Christian neighbors was extensive.
Only as the frontier was firmly incorporated into the political
life of the peninsular states did these frontier Sephardic
populations begin to forge the communal structures that resembled
the older Jewish communities of the North and the interior. By the
end of the thirteenth century, royal intervention had begun to
restrict the amount of contact between Jewish and Christian
communities, signaling the end of the open society that had marked
the frontier for most of the century.
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