Iberia

Iberia is the peninsula where Christianity, Islam and Judaism occupied the same ground for the longest continuous period anywhere in Europe. Muslim armies crossed from North Africa in 711 and within a decade held most of the peninsula; the emirate and then caliphate of Cordoba made that city one of the largest and most learned in the western world by the tenth century. Christian kingdoms in the north pushed south over the following five hundred years, and the last Muslim state, the emirate of Granada, fell in 1492.

The word convivencia is used for the arrangement that held in between, and it is contested. It named a legal order rather than a friendship: Jews and Christians under Muslim rule, and later Muslims and Jews under Christian rule, were tolerated subordinate communities with their own courts and their own taxes, and the arrangement produced both sustained intellectual exchange and periodic violence. Both the philosophy of Maimonides, written in Arabic by a Jew who then had to leave, and the Almohad persecution that made him leave belong to the same century.

What the contact produced is not in dispute. Arabic and Hebrew philosophical vocabulary entered Latin through this peninsula, Jewish mysticism took its classical form here, and Sufi, Jewish and Christian mystical writing in the region borrowed vocabulary from one another in ways scholars are still tracing.

The peninsula's plural arrangement ended by decision rather than by drift, and the decisions are dated.

Granada surrendered in January 1492 on terms that guaranteed its Muslim population their religion. Those terms were abandoned within a decade: forced conversion followed, and the descendants of the converts, the Moriscos, were expelled from Spain between 1609 and 1614. The Jews of Castile and Aragon were ordered in March 1492 to accept baptism or leave within four months, and Portugal followed with a forced conversion in 1497.

The consequence for Judaism was the creation of the Sephardi diaspora, which reassembled in the Ottoman lands, in North Africa, in Italy and later in Amsterdam. It carried its own liturgy, its own legal tradition and, for centuries, its own Iberian speech, and the Ottoman cities where it settled became major centres of Jewish learning in their own right. The kabbalistic revival at Safed in the sixteenth century was largely the work of people whose families had come out of Iberia.

There was also a population that stayed and was baptised, and whose descendants were watched. Some kept Jewish or Muslim practice secretly across generations, some did not, and the Inquisition's records are the principal evidence for both, which is a difficult kind of evidence: it was produced by an institution with an interest in finding what it was looking for.