Medieval Iberia and Provence, the lands of Spain, Portugal, and southern France where Christian, Muslim, and Jewish civilizations met, were for several centuries the most religiously creative ground in the Western world, because here the three faiths lived, competed, and borrowed in close proximity, a coexistence later called the convivencia.
Under Muslim rule (al-Andalus), Cordoba became one of the great cities of the medieval world, and its intellectual life produced towering figures across the traditions: the Muslim philosopher and Sufi Ibn Arabi and the jurist-philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd); the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, born in Cordoba; and a Christian scholarship that translated Arabic and Greek learning into Latin, feeding the European recovery of philosophy. The region's most distinctive religious contribution was in Jewish mysticism: it was in thirteenth-century Castile and in Provence that classical Kabbalah took form, above all in the Zohar, the central text of Jewish mysticism, which appeared in Spain in that period. Iberia was also the ground of intense conflict, the long Christian Reconquista, and its dark culmination in the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and the persecutions of the Inquisition, which scattered Sephardic Jewry and its mystical traditions across the Mediterranean. The region thus stands for both the high promise of interreligious exchange and its tragic collapse.