BOOKS

h God, not more books on Spain!

Reviewers rejoice as their incomes soar but euphoria is replaced by exhaustion, as, stunned in mind, they grapple with topics as diverse as the Segovian cuisine and the status of women in the new Spain. The two books under review will jolt them out of their torpor. They shine out in the dross released by Columbus, Expo 92, etc.

Richard Fletcher is a distinguished historian and accomplished writer with the gift of making complex historical happen- ings comprehensible to his readers without losing a sense of their complexity. No historical period is more bafflingly complex than the subject of his new book: Moorish Spain from the conquest of 711 to the fall of the last outpost, Granada, in 1492. As Fletcher candidly admits, it is a work of haute vulgarisation and it sometimes slips into a pop mode.

The Moorish conquest of Romanised Visigothic Spain was a lightning affair. One explanation that Fletcher advances is that whereas it took the Roman legions 200 years to conquer the scattered Iberian tribes, a unitary state can collapse like a pack of cards under the shock of foreign assault. Moorish Spain fell to the intermit- tent Christian onslaught for the opposite reason: riddled with tribal and ethnic con- flict — rough Berber soldiers against the 'Arab' political and intellectual elite — it failed to create a unitary state, to use an anachronistic term. The Christian king- doms wasted much time squabbling with each other, but they were relatively coher- ent feudal monarchies, capable in extremis

of joint action. .

Thus the Moorish conquest was followed by a fitnah — an anarchic period of destructive tribal and ethnic warfare. The Ummayad emirs — later Caliphs — of Cordoba forged unity by brute force in the tenth century. Their capital became the greatest and most civilised city in the West. But another fitnah destroyed the creation of the Ummayads. Berber and Arab gener- als as 'party kings' set themselves up as rulers of three dozen or so statelets. The courts of the party kings are vividly described by Fletcher, who sees the name 'party' as singularly apt for these bon viveurs and patrons of poets. But their divisions opened the door to Christian

raids. The party kings bought off Christian kings with protection money in gold; when gold was in short supply 'protection' became conquest — a familiar pattern in later imperialisms.

To stave off being gobbled up piecemeal by the Christians, the party kings called in the armies of the Islamic fundamentalists

Corruption or expulsion

Raymond Carr

of Morocco, the Almoravids. For these ascetic puritans the party kings had forgot- ten the Koranic precepts. 'Their minds occupied by wine and song', they had become the clients of infidel Christian kings. Lapsed Muslims must be purified by conquest.

In the 14th century the great Tunisian scholar, Ibn Khaldun, sought to explain the advances of the Almoravids. A harsh desert environment bred a tough military caste and, once tribal feuding was supplanted by the unity imposed by a fierce fundamental- ist faith, they were irresistible. 'Vast and powerful empires', he concluded, 'are 'Cos 1 got Friday on my mind.' founded on religion'. But puritanism of the desert was undermined by the 'soft' civilisa- tion of Andalusia. A new cycle begins. A fiercer puritanical sect, the Almohads, dis- place the Almoravids. Once they in their turn were 'corrupted', Moorish Spain lay open to Christian crusaders. Could it come to pass that the fundamentalist zealots of today will be corrupted tomorrow by the 'soft' civilisations of the West?

What was the legacy of Moorish Spain? Its artistic achievements, which stood out from the surrounding 'barbarism' of Chris- tian Europe, are stupendous and subtle: emissaries from the north were literally dazzled by light reflected from a mobile bowl of mercury in the vast palace complex of Madinat-az-Zahra. These achievements range from the great tenth-century Mosque of Cordoba to the delicate ivory carvings of Cuenca and the masterpieces of the potters of Valencia. While these artisan skills were inherited by the West, as is evident in the interiors of that most Christian of archi- tects Gaudi, European architecture speaks in what John Summerson calls the classical language.

For Fletcher, it is the intellectual debt that Europe owes to Moorish Spain that is most important. 'Modern science', he argues, begins in 13th-century Europe, 'based firmly on the plinth furnished by translations from the Greek and Arabic'.

This was possible because the classical texts on medicine, mathematics and astronomy, supplemented by the original contributions of native savants, were transmitted to Europe via Moorish Spain. Aquinas may be

inconceivable without Aristotle via Aver-

roes; but it is, perhaps, pushing it a bit far to claim that we must trace the industrial revolution back to the Toledan translators.

We are the heirs of Greece not of Bagh- dad, and we must be grateful to Moorish Spain for transmitting and enriching the classical legacy. Fletcher rejects any Romantic vision. He is a no-nonsense man. For all its refinement there is a spike of tribal ferocity in Moorish culture. Al Mutamid, party king of Seville, himself an accomplished poet, hacked his political rival and fellow poet to pieces with a sword presented by Alfonso VI. Christian kings were not above political murder. But they rarely did the job themselves.

What are we to make of convivencia the unfortunate Spanish term for the 'living

together' of Christians, Muslims and Jews in Moorish Spain and their mutual inter- course which made possible the work of the translators? Muslim rulers might have Christian concubines. Christian kings might dress in 'Arab' costumes and employ Mus-

lira doctors, Christian knights might fight Christian kings in Moslem armies as did that consummate opportunist, El Cid. Christians were tolerated as 'people of the book' and might attain high office; but they remained second-class citizens. The two cultures made no sustained effort to under- stand each other — hence the importance of Jews as intermediaries — and remained stuck in stereotypes: Muslims rejected pork, Christians believed in absurdities such as the Trinity. Convivencia withered away once the Arab fundamentalists arrived to treat Christians as enemies of the faith and when the Christians staged in the Crusades of the Reconquest their com- plementary version of the Jihad.

Convivencia and its breakdown is a major theme of the essays on the Sephardic Jews (i.e. Jews from Spain) edited by Professor Kedourie. In the 13th century Jews were better off in Muslim and Christian Spain than anywhere else in Europe: 'court Jews' could attain influential positions as finan- cial experts. But as Professor Mackay, in a splendid essay points out, a grudging toler- ation of Jews in Christian Spain was com- bined with outbursts of hostility. All the old accusations of popular anti-Semitism ritual child murder, desecration of the Host — which, once the church accepted trans- substantiation was the torture of Christ's body — surfaced in the pogrom which swept over Andalusia in 1391. Many terri- fied Jews converted and were known as New Christians or conversos. Envy of their success in church and state stirred up old suspicions. Were these New Christians gen- uine Christians? Did they practise Judaism in private? Were they engaged in some great conspiracy to undermine Spain from within? As long as Jews existed as a com- munity to attract backsliders, conversos were potential traitors. To remove the infection Jews must either convert or be expelled. Hence the expulsion decree of 1492.

With the expulsion the Jewish problem as such ceased to exist. But mass compulso- ry conversion threw up a new batch of con- versos. Prominent in the campaign against conversos was the low-born archbishop of Toledo, typical exponent of popular anti- Semitism. Aristocrats are natural interna- tionalists; they marry across cultural frontiers; the common people, threatened by the success of ethnic rivals, are nature's envious xenophobes when prodded by fanatical priests or politicians. Violent anti- Semitism works upward in societies where aristocrats may practise a politer version. The campaign against conversos trans- formed persecution of false beliefs into a racist enterprise. No amount of conversion could wipe out the taint of Jewishness. It was a matter of 'purity of blood', a genetic stain that persisted from generation to generation, a belief encouraged by Jewish ritual and social self-ghettoisation. A play of the time praises a 'noble dog' who could smell out Jews in Christian clothes. Hunted down by the Inquisition, under constant threat of denunciation, those Sephardi who could do so fled abroad, above all to Holland and the Ottoman empire.

As these essays — some admirably lucid, some irritatingly opaque — demonstrate, the expulsion decree of 1492 remains a matter of controversy as to its purposes and consequences. The argument that expulsion snuffed out a potential bourgeoisie capable of building a modern economy for backward Spain assumes that capitalism cannot flourish without Jews to lubricate its works. For the Jews them- selves, expulsion was a traumatic experi- ence. Not surprisingly, they saw Spain as a `satanic' power, destined to destruction by the wrath of an avenging God. This Jewish contribution to the Black Legend, which presented Spain as the cradle of the Inquisition, rooted in Spanish minds the idea that Jews, sheltered by infidel Turks and heretic Dutch, were the masterminds behind some international conspiracy directed against Spain.

Two fine essays trace the achievements of Sephardi refugees in the Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic. In Amsterdam they flourished on trade with the Spanish colonies and Spain itself: they built a splendid synagogue, established schools and charities to care for the poor. Once safe in the Netherlands, New Christ- ians reverted to Judaism as their enemies had always argued they would, given the chance. Orobio de Castro (1617-87), descendant of four generations of New Christians, confessed that, to survive, he had 'presented a Christian appearance' in Spain. Once safe in Amsterdam he came out of the closet: 'a true Jew is what I shall be'. Other Sephardi felt less at ease in a community where restoration and preser- vation of rabbinic norms were seen as essential to the survival of Judaism itself. Kabbalists who brought their esoteric mys- ticism from Spain, rejected the arid legal- ism of the rabbis; Spinoza their teachings in toto.

The lesson of these essays seems to be that no amount of assimilationist zeal can stave off disaster. Convivencia is always fragile. There is always the prospect of another 1391 when, as befell Joseph Abra- ham in Valencia, louts in hoods armed with cudgels will break down the doors, beat up the men and rape the women. There is always the 'noble dog' to smell out assimi- lated Jews. Nowhere is safe. Take the fate of the Sephardi settled as refugees in the

Ottoman Empire. Tolerated there, they were safe only as long as their hosts sur- vived intact. The anti-Semitism that erupt- ed when the Greek army entered Salonika in 1912Was a prelude to the fate of Jews in the intransigently nationalist successor states of the Ottomans.

But there is another lesson. Jews are the great survivors of history. The Sephardi, driven out of Spain, recreate their commu- nal life in Amsterdam, Salonika and Lon- don. Individual Jews may perish in the fires of the Inquisition and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But the Jewish people difficult to define as it may be — proves indestructible.