Roth, N. Jews, Visigoths and Muslims in Medieval Spain. Cooperation and Conflict (Review Gampel, B. R.)

1012
Reviews
as they guide the reader toward the modern issues that are most interesting, most fruitful
for student reading and future research. Rigby's book is meant to be more complicated, to
probe deeper beneath the surface; neither of the others moves as far from the customary
historical agenda. While Rigby might have had his say in a simpler fashion, there is no
denying that this book is a worthwhile, energetic, and challenging statement about social
structure, conflict, and change. It is invariably suggestive, sometimes provocative and novel.
JOEL
T.
ROSENTHAL,
State University of New York, Stony Brook
Jews, Visigoths and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Cooperation and Conflict. (Medieval Iberian Peninsula, Texts and Studies, 10.) Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1994. Pp. vii, 367. $65.75.
NORMAN ROTH,
The title of this volume suggests that the book might be concerned solely with that short
time period, arguably in the early eighth century, when Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims lived
together as identifiably separate entities on the Iberian Peninsula. In fact, the work comprises a number of subjects in medieval Spanish history. It contains a chapter on the Jews
in Visigothic Spain, one on the history of Muslim Spain generally, and a series of chapters
on the Jews of Muslim Spain with occasional references to Jewish-Muslim relations during
the years of Christian hegemony after the thirteenth century. The variety of topics presented
prevents the author from offering the reader a unified treatment of medieval Spanish history
or of the relationships that the Jews had with Muslims and Christians.
Indeed, the material in the first chapter does not find an echo in the rest of the volume.
Therein Roth attempts to explain the Visigoths' extremely harsh treatment of the native
Jewish community by stressing the influence of negative Byzantine attitudes toward Jews
and Judaism. In this essay the author's style, which pervades the entire work, is immediately
apparent. The sections within each of the chapters are often unconnected, and the author
begins the discussion of some topics as if the reader is conversant with its major themes
and the important literature.
In the two chapters on the Jews of al-Andalus under Umayyads and Taifas, and Almoravids and Almohads, Roth demonstrates that he has assiduously read through the Muslim
and Jewish sources and attempts to correct any erroneous impressions that may have been
left behind in the secondary literature. It appears at times that the identification of mistaken
ideas rather than any larger synthetic picture is the motivating energy behind the volume.
Still, any scholar who wishes to read about Jewish courtiers, including Hasdai ibn Shaprut
or Samuel ibn Naghrillah (the author's preferred spelling), will benefit from the full footnotes and the focused treatment that Roth has accorded these oft-discussed Jewish leaders.
Much less work has been done on the Jews under Almoravids and Almohads, and here
Roth attempts to give a fresh reading of the Jews' status in a time when the sources are
few and the common understanding of these years is that the Jews were unrelievedly persecuted.
In the chapter entitled "Cities, Economy and Slavery" the subjects are treated in an even
more atomized fashion, and the little evidence that does exist is not treated with sufficient
regard to the geographical area from which it pertains or to the time period from which
the data were culled. In his last two chapters, "Jews and Muslims: Cooperation and Conflict" and "Jewish Polemics against Islam," the author's vision is more readily apparent as
he seeks to devalue any evidence about less than positive relations between Jews and Muslims and stresses the truly remarkable examples of cultural sharing between the two communities.
A word of caution: readers will need to inure themselves to the author's boastful descriptions of his own scholarly triumphs and his general, although not constant, disdain
Reviews
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for scholars who have preceded him and who have laid the groundwork for much of what
he is able to discuss. This reader is appreciative of the detailed footnotes, although the
contributions of Roth's contemporaries, even when essential, are often given less than their
deserved recognition. Clearly Roth believes he has expressed the last word on the subject
of Jews and Muslims in medieval Iberia: "It is unlikely that any significant new source
material relating to the Jews and the Muslims in Spain will emerge in the future. With the
possible exception of some minor details, this is likely to be the best view we shall have of
the situation" (p. 232).
BENJAMIN
R. GAMPEL, Jewish Theological Seminary of America
F. RUIZ, Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile. (Middle
Ages Series.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Pp. xvi, 351; blackand-white figures, maps, tables. $46.95.
TEOFILO
According to Ruiz's study of the medieval Castilian economy and society, the peasants of
Old Castile lived a hard life, barely surviving in the face of a harsh climate, meager soil,
and trying masters. Such a view could be applied to many medieval regions, but Ruiz's
study emphasizes the peculiarities of Castilian life, in particular the key role of towns and
the circumstances that made the crisis of the fourteenth century different from what happened in northern Europe. First, using the case of the Premonstratensian house of Santa
Maria la Real de Aguilar de Campoo and building on the work of Jose-Angel Garcia de
Cortazar y Ruiz de Aguirre, the author describes the rural economy and untangles the
terms of Castilian tenancy, which ranged from the virtually free proprietorship of peasants
on royal land to the close dependency of peasants on private domains. Next, Ruiz describes
the urban centers of Castile, which were significant for their role in long-distance trade and
as regional markets, both conclusions owing much to Ruiz's own published research on
Burgos. Preconceptions of a static manorial economy are challenged by the evidence for
an active land market in which peasants are documented selling their small holdings. From
the mid-thirteenth century, the urban non-noble knights (caballeros villanos), who came
to dominate the cities, were the most active buyers in this market, accumulating land and
probably leasing it back to peasant farmers. Ruiz makes the striking point that the market
turned on a tax advantage. The transaction was profitable to the new lords because they
had received tax exemptions from the king for their support against the great magnates. It
benefited the former peasant proprietors, now sharecroppers and tenants, because they
were protected by the landlords' exemptions.
The analysis of the relationships of town and country owes much to studies of northern
Europe, such as the work of Zvi Razi and Ambrose Raftis on market forces in medieval
English communities, but Ruiz argues reasonably that the circumstances of the Reconquest
mean that nothing was exactly as it would be in the north. The first difference is that
Castilian landlords were troubled by abandoned villages and a dearth of tenants from the
late thirteenth century, when northern Europe still had abundant labor. According to works
such as Bernard Reilly's recent survey of medieval Iberia, the abandoned villages were a
sign of agricultural success as fewer farmers used better methods to feed a stable population,
and marginal lands were turned to more profitable use as pasture. Ruiz argues that there
is no evidence for three-field rotations, extensive use of horse plows, or other signs of
enhanced productivity imported from northern Europe, and thus low productivity persisted. For Castilian landlords, poor returns were exacerbated by the migration of labor in
the mid-thirteenth century to the lands newly gained in Andalusia. The depopulation caused
by the Black Death of 1348 was therefore a minor contributor to an ongoing problem. In
the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, as the decline in rental income became a

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State University of New York, Stony Brook

R. GAMPEL, Jewish Theological Seminary of America

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