"Testes sunt ipsi, testis et erroris ipsius magister" : el musulmán como testigo en la polémica cristiana medieval

Varios autores cristianos del siglo XII (como el converso Pedro Alfonso de Huesca y el abad de Cluny, Pedro el Venerable) atacaron la tradición musulmana junto con la judía. Sin embargo, en la segunda mitad del siglo XIII hay un cambio notable en la manera en que los autores cristianos comparan a los judíos y a los musulmanes. A partir de la obra antijudía del dominico catalán Ramon Martí, se habla de los musulmanes y de los textos islámicos como "testigos" que afirman la verdad del dogma cristiano a través de la fe islámica en Jesús como profeta verdadero y la adoración de María en la tradición musulmana. Este artículo hace un estudio de esta nueva retórica, que se repite en varias obras antijudías del siglo XIV, como el Mostrador de justicia del converso Alfonso de Valladolid y la obra polémica en latín del dominico Alfonso Buenhombre. Se conjetura aquí que esta imagen menos negativa del islam sólo se encuentra en las polémicas antijudías entre 1250 y los primeros años del siglo XV, y que el discurso antijudío cambió en el contexto de la crítica anticonversa que se produjo a mitad de este siglo. En el nuevo contexto del siglo XV, la imagen islámica de Jesús ya no sirve como herramienta cristiana contra los judíos, y el discurso polémico de los cristianos vuelve a criticar el islam tal y como se había hecho en el siglo XII.Various Christian authors of the twelfth century (such as the convert Pedro Alfonso of Huesca and the abbot of Cluny Peter the Venerable) attacked Muslim tradition together with Jewish tradition. In the second half of the thirteenth century, however, there is a notable shift in the way that Christian authors compare Jews and Muslims. Beginning in the anti-Jewish work of Catalan Dominican Ramon Martí, authors describe Muslims and Islamic texts as "witnesses" that affirm the truth of Christian belief in the Islamic faith in Jesus as an authentic prophet and the adoration of Mary in Muslim tradition. This article studies this new rhetoric, which is repeated in various anti-Jewish works of the fourteenth century such as the Mostrador de justicia of the convert Alfonso de Valladolid and the Latin polemical work of Dominican Alfonso Buenhombre. It is argued that this less negative image of Islam is only found in anti-Jewish polemic between 1250 and the beginning of the fifteenth century, when anti-Jewish discourse changes in the context of the anti-converso crisis that appears in the middle of the century. In the new context of the fifteenth century, the Islamic image of Jesus no longer serves as a Christian tool against the Jews and the polemical discourse of the Christians again criticizes Islam in the same way it did in the twelfth century

From Founding Father to Pious Son: Filiation, Language, and Royal Inheritance in Alfonso X, the Learned

The influence of King Alfonso X of Castile (reg. 1252–1284) has been so wide that modern historians have stressed Alfonso’s foundational role as a ‘father’ of many Castilian cultural institutions and areas of writing, including prose literature, science, the legal code, and vernacular historiography. This paper argues that the modern focus on Alfonso’s foundational, ‘fatherly’ role, while logical in the context of modern literary historiography, is at odds with Alfonso’s own medieval view of himself as a ‘son’ and heir, one who inherited rather than founded cultural institutions. It proposes that a reorientation of Alfonsine studies according to this medieval worldview, one focused less on Alfonso’s innovations and foundations and more on his continuty with and dependance on his forebears, will permit a clearer portrayal of Alfonso’s importance in medieval literary history. To this end, it explores Aflonso’s representation of himself as the ‘son’ of his father, King Fernando III, in the prologues to his scientific translations, in his encomium of his father known as the Setenario, and in song 292 of his Cantigas de Santa María. A reading of these examples is offered as a first step towards the study of filiation and ‘sonship’ in the vast Alfonsine historiographical and legal corpuses

Musulmanes retóricos: el Islam como testigo en la polémica cristiana anti-judía en occidente

Although twelfth-century writers such as Petrus Alfonsi and Peter the Venerable of Cluny attacked Muslim ideas about Jesus and Mary, polemical authors of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries sometimes presented the same ideas in a positive light, describing the Muslim as a “witness” to the Jews of the truth of Christian ideas. In texts by the Dominican Ramon Martí, the Qur ̕ān itself serves as a “proof” of Christian doctrines about Jesus and Mary and in texts such as the Mostrador de justicia of Abner de Burgos/Alfonso de Valladolid, Muslims are described as “Nazarenes.” The study of these images allows us to distinguish between the representation of Muslims in anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic texts. This article proposes that the representation in anti-Jewish texts was more determined by the norms of those texts than by the ideas about Islamic sources contemporary anti-Muslim writing itself.Aunque los escritores del s. XII como Pedro Alfonso y Pedro el Venerable de Cluny atacaron las ideas musulmanas sobre Jesús y María, los autores polémicos de los ss. XIII y XIV a veces presentaron las mismas ideas de manera positiva y describieron al musulmán como un 《testigo》 de las ideas cristianas ante los judíos. En los textos del dominico Ramon Martí, el Corán mismo sirve como una 《prueba》 de las doctrinas cristianas sobre Jesús y María y en textos como el Mostrador de justicia de Abner de Burgos/Alfonso de Valladolid, a los musulmanes se los describe como 《nazarenos》. El estudio de estas imágenes permite distinguir entre la representación de los musulmanes en los textos anti-judíos y su representación en los textos anti-islámicos. Este artículo sugiere que, en los textos anti-judíos de los ss. XIII y XIV, son más determinantes las normas de la polémica anti-judía que el juicio sobre el islam que se observa en la polémica anti-musulmana

La disputa de Barcelona como punto de inflexión

Desde hace tiempo, la Vita coaetanea (1311) se usa como un documento clave en la fijación de la cronología de la vida y la obra de Llull. Este artículo se propone una lectura de la Vita como una especie de narrativa de conversión parecida a otras narraciones o marcos narrativos (tales como las de Abner de Burgos / Alfonso de Valladolid, Petrus Alfonsi o Samaw’al al-Maghrebi) que se pueden encontrar en los escritos polémicos producidos por judíos, cristianos y musulmanes. Al leer la Vita no como una exposición de hechos históricos sino como una intencionada construcción narrativa de los cimientos intelectuales y espirituales del Art de Llull, se plantea un cuestionamiento sobre los motivos polémicos del autor al dictar este texto en vísperas del Consejo de Viena, donde Llull abogó con éxito por la creación de escuelas de idiomas en numerosas universidades europeas. Varios detalles de la Vita reflejan la postura polémica general de Llull en contra de la orden dominicana, entre ellos la sugerencia de que sus primeras visiones y su cambio de actitud coinciden con el período de la Disputación de Barcelona, organizada por los dominicos en 1263 para demostrar su nuevo método de argumentación basado en textos judíos. A diferencia de la Disputación y los escritos posteriores del dominico Ramon Martí (m. después de 1287) y Alfonso de Valladolid (h. 1260-h. 1347), quienes siguen la nueva metodología de citar las autoridades textuales, la Vita tiene la función de autorizar a Llull a perseguir su singular método de argumentación, basado en las razones necesarias en lugar de autoridades textuales. Teniendo esto en cuenta, se puede entender el período de la Disputación de Barcelona como un punto de inflexión en la historia de la polémica cristiana, donde coinciden la inauguración del nuevo método de los dominicos, el comienzo de la carrera polémica de Martí, el inicio del Art de Llull y el nacimiento de Alfonso de Valladolid.The Vita coaetanea (1311) has long been used as a key document in the construction of a chronology of Llull’s life and work. This article proposes to read the Vita as a kind of conversion narrative similar to other narratives or narrative frames (such as those of Abner of Burgos/Alfonso of Valladolid, Petrus Alfonsi, or Samaw’al al-Maghrebi) found within polemical writing between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. By reading the Vita not as a statement of historical fact but as a careful narrative construction of the intellectual and spiritual foundation of Llull’s Art, it is possible to ask what Llull’s polemical motives may have been in dictating this text on the eve of the Council of Vienne, where Llull succeeded in lobbying for the creation of language schools at various European universities. Many details in the Vita reflect Llull’s larger polemical stance against the Dominican order, including the suggestion that Llull’s original visions and turn of heart correspond to the same period as the Disputation of Barcelona, which the Dominicans organized in 1263 to highlight their new anti-Jewish argumentation based on original Jewish texts. In comparison with the Disputation and with the subsequent writing of Dominican Ramon Martí (d. after 1287) and Alfonso of Valladolid (ca. 1260-ca. 1347), both of whom follow its methodology of citing textual authorities, Llull’s Vita serves to authorize Llull to pursue his unique method of argumentation, one based not on textual authorities but on necessary reasons. In this light, the period of the Disputation of Barcelona can be seen as a turning point in the history of Christian polemical writing, being at once the debut of the new Dominican method, the beginning of Martí’s polemical career, the beginning of Llull’s Art, and the birth of Alfonso of Valladolid

The Original is Unfaithful to the Translation: Conversion and Authenticity in Abner of Burgos and Anselm Turmeda

Ryan Szpiech (“The Original is Unfaithful to the Translation: Conversion and Authenticity in Abner of Burgos and Anselm Turmeda”) contributes a study of two authors, Abner of Burgos (Alfonso of Valladolid), who converts from Judaism to Christianity, and Anselm Turmeda (Abdallah al-Turjuman), who converts from Christianity to Islam. Szpiech draws productive parallels between the authors’ conversions and the translations of their confessional texts. In both cases the two experiences (unconverted/converted, ‘original’/translation) establish competing authorities that are metaphorical for the ‘uncloseable gap between text and experience.’Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64932/1/eHumanista.Original.Translation.Szpiech.pd

Ancestry-Dependent Enrichment of Deleterious Homozygotes in Runs of Homozygosity.

Runs of homozygosity (ROH) are important genomic features that manifest when an individual inherits two haplotypes that are identical by descent. Their length distributions are informative about population history, and their genomic locations are useful for mapping recessive loci contributing to both Mendelian and complex disease risk. We have previously shown that ROH, and especially long ROH that are likely the result of recent parental relatedness, are enriched for homozygous deleterious coding variation in a worldwide sample of outbred individuals. However, the distribution of ROH in admixed populations and their relationship to deleterious homozygous genotypes is understudied. Here we analyze whole-genome sequencing data from 1,441 unrelated individuals from self-identified African American, Puerto Rican, and Mexican American populations. These populations are three-way admixed between European, African, and Native American ancestries and provide an opportunity to study the distribution of deleterious alleles partitioned by local ancestry and ROH. We re-capitulate previous findings that long ROH are enriched for deleterious variation genome-wide. We then partition by local ancestry and show that deleterious homozygotes arise at a higher rate when ROH overlap African ancestry segments than when they overlap European or Native American ancestry segments of the genome. These results suggest that, while ROH on any haplotype background are associated with an inflation of deleterious homozygous variation, African haplotype backgrounds may play a particularly important role in the genetic architecture of complex diseases for admixed individuals, highlighting the need for further study of these populations

Scrutinizing History: Polemic and Exegesis in Pablo de Santa María's Siete edades del mundo

Post-edit, pre-print pdf fileThis essay considers the growth of historiographical writing in fifteenth-century Iberia within the context of mass conversions of Jews to Christianity. It takes the writing of the convert Pablo de Santa María (ca. 1351-1435) as a test case for considering the emergence of historiographical writing directly informed by the events of 1391, in which many thousands of Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity. By reading Pablo’s poem Siete edades del mundo (Seven Ages of the World) in light of his biblical exegesis and anti-Jewish polemic, it is possible to show how issues relevant to Pablo’s conversion, including his exegetical polemic with Judaism, directly affect his historiographical writing and shape his use of standard tropes of fifteenth-century Castilian historiography. This suggests that, while there may be no uniquely “converso voice” in history writing, some fifteenth-century historiography is clearly informed by issues of particular relevance to conversos. At the same time, it implies that some fifteenth-century Christian historiography, like that of Sephardic Jews after the expulsion of 1492, grew from earlier historiographical and polemical traditions that transcend any single catalyzing event such as the trauma of 1391.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64833/1/ME.16.1.POSTEDIT.PREPRINT.Szpiech.pd

Human Migration, Population Divergence, and the Accumulation of Deleterious Alleles: Insights from Private Genetic Variation and Whole-exome Sequencing.

Private genetic variants---genetic variants found only in a single population in a sample---have been highly informative for studies of evolutionary history. This dissertation uses theoretical modeling and empirical analysis of private genetic variation to understand human demography. I derive theory for analyzing the size distribution of private microsatellite alleles and develop a rarefaction approach to analyze private-allele sharing. Furthermore, I investigate genome-wide patterns of deleterious variants, which are often private. Through the analysis of whole-exome sequences, I describe how potentially deleterious coding variants accumulate and concentrate in inbred genomes. First, I introduce the concept of generalized private alleles and develop a method to count them while correcting for differences in the number of individuals sampled. I use this method to analyze worldwide human populations and observe an excess of alleles shared between Africa and Oceania. The results support the theory of a coastal migration out of Africa into Oceania separate from the migrations responsible for the majority of the ancestry of the modern populations of Asia. Next, I explore how population-genetic parameters affect the size distribution of private microsatellite alleles under a two-population coalescent model, assuming the symmetric stepwise mutation model. Using this framework, I theoretically predict that private microsatellites occur in the tails of the allele size distribution more frequently as genetic differentiation between populations increases. Empirically observing this phenomenon in human populations, I conclude that the model accurately describes patterns of private microsatellite alleles in diverged populations. Finally, I analyze how the genome-wide distribution of runs of homozygosity (ROH) underlies patterns of deleterious variation. Whereas short and intermediate ROH are generated by isolation or bottlenecks, long ROH are likely the result of recent inbreeding. I find that long ROH harbor disproportionately more deleterious homozygotes than is predicted solely by genomic ROH coverage, indicating that inbreeding contributes an abundance of deleterious variation to ROH. This dissertation expands our knowledge of human population genetics and develops novel theoretical and methodological frameworks to study human migration and population divergence from private genetic variation. Furthermore, it provides insights into the accumulation and concentration of deleterious variation.PHDBioinformaticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/96095/1/szpiechz_1.pd