Interreligious Encounters in Polemics between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond

Peer reviewe

Polemical Comparisons in the Apology against the Christian Religion by Muhamad Alguazir (c. 1610)

This essay analyses the comparisons made in the Apology against the articles of the Christian Religion by Muhamad Alguazir (c. 1610). Alguazir, a Morisco from Pastrana (Spain), was one of the Moriscos living at the court of sultan Mawlay Zaydan (1608–1627). The polemical treatise he wrote was sent to Maurice of Orange shortly after the conclusion of a treaty of friendship between Zaydan and the Dutch (in 1610) and translated into Latin. The polemic had a two-pronged later influence: on European debates about the Trinity; and it was used by Anti-Trinitarians and by German Lutherans in their polemics against them, on the one hand, and by Moriscos living in Tunis, viz. the expelled Toledan Morisco Juan Pérez aka Ibrahim Taybili, on the other. We study the transformations that the polemic underwent according to the translations and the religious transfers

Polemical Encounters

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Antoni Biosca i Bas, Thomas E. Burman, Mònica Colominas Aparicio, John Dagenais, Óscar de la Cruz, Borja Franco Llopis, Linda G. Jones, Daniel J. Lasker, Davide Scotto, Teresa Soto, Ryan Szpiech, Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld, and Carsten WilkeFrom the high Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, Christian efforts to convert groups of Jews and Muslims, Muslim efforts to convert Christians and Jews, and the defensive efforts of these communities to keep their members within the faiths led to the production of numerous polemics. This volume brings together a wide variety of case studies that expose how the current historiographical focus on the three religious communities as allegedly homogeneous groups obscures the diversity within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities as well as the growing ranks of skeptics and outright unbelievers.Featuring contributions from a range of academic disciplines, this paradigm-shifting book sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual dynamics of the conflicts that marked relations among these religious communities in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond.Peer reviewe

Samuel Pallache: Koopman kaper en diplomaat tussen Marrakesh en Amsterdam

In the late fifteenth century, many of the Jews expelled from Spain made their way to Morocco and established a dynamic community in Fez. A number of Jewish families became prominent in commerce and public life there. Among the Jews of Fez of Hispanic origin was Samuel Pallache (circa 1550-1616), who served the Moroccan sultan as a commercial and diplomatic agent in Holland until Pallache's death in 1616.In Samuel Pallache, his world is viewed as a microcosm of early modern society, one far more interconnected, cosmopolitan, and fluid than is often portrayed. Pallache's missions and misadventures took him from Islamic Fez and Catholic Spain to Protestant England and Holland. Through these travels, the authors explore the workings of the Moroccan sultanate and the Spanish court, the Jewish communities of Fez and Amsterdam, and details of the Atlantic-Mediterranean trade. At once a sweeping view of two continents, three faiths, and five nation-states and an intimate story of one man's remarkable life, Samuel Pallache is history at its most compelling.Peer reviewe

Interreligious Encounters in Polemics between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond

This book discusses the “long fifteenth century” in Iberian history, between the 1391 pogroms and the forced conversions of Aragonese Muslims in 1526, a period characterized by persecutions, conversions and social violence, on the one hand, and cultural exchange, on the other. It was a historical moment of unstable religious ideas and identities, before the rigid turn taken by Spanish Catholicism by the middle of the sixteenth century; a period in which the physical and symbolic borders separating the three religions were transformed and redefined but still remained extraordinarily porous. The collection argues that the aggressive tone of many polemical texts has until now blinded historiography to the interconnected nature of social and cultural intimacy, above all in dialogue and cultural transfer in later medieval Iberia.Peer reviewe