Don Yllán and the Egyptian Sorcerer: Vernacular commonality and literary diversity in medieval Castile

In this article the author compares the exemplo of Don Yllán and the Deán de Santiago -no. 11 in Don Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor (ca. 1335)- with an earlier Hebrew analogue found in the Hebrew Mešal Haqadmonī (ca. 1285) of fellow Castilian author Isaac ibn Sahula. A thorough analysis of the rhetorical and narrative style of both versions reveals that the two tales shared a common source in Castilian oral tradition. The appearance of the tale in an earlier Hebrew text from Castile (the only other known version in any language) calls into question the originality of Don Juan Manuel's most famous exemplo, suggesting a productive interplay between a common oral tradition in Castilian and coexisting literary traditions in Hebrew and Castilian.En este artículo, el autor compara el exemplo de Don Yllán y el Deán de Santiago -n.° 11 en el Conde Lucanor (ca. 1335) de Don Juan Manuel- con una versión anterior en la obra hebrea, Mešal Haqadmonī (ca. 1285) de otro autor castellano, Isaac ibn Sahula. Un análisis cuidadoso del estilo narrativo y retórico de ambas versiones revela que las dos comparten una fuente común en la tradición oral castellana. La aparición del cuento en un texto hebreo anterior de Castilla (la única versión conocida en cualquier otra lengua) cuestiona la originalidad literaria del más famoso exemplo de Don Juan Manuel, y sugiere un intercambio productivo entre una tradición oral común castellana y tradiciones literarias hebreas y castellanas coexistentes

Sefarad

From its linguistic origins as a Biblical land of great wealth across the sea, to its more recent nostalgic imaginary as a lost Golden Age of Mediterranean Jewish culture, Sefarad has been as much an idea as a physical place, a lens through which Iberian Jews have interpreted their world, first in al-Andalus, then in Christian Iberia, and later in the Sephardic communities they established around the world following their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula at the turn of the sixteenth century. The idea of Sefarad was a product of the culture of al-Andalus, or Arab Islamicate Spain. During this period of Muslim sovereignty, Andalusi Jewish communities enjoyed the rights of dhimmi, subject religious minorities, to practice their religion and organize the affairs of their communities. This institutional autonomy allowed Andalusi Sepharadim to develop a uniquely Iberian culture within Andalusi society, one shaped by Islamicate and Rabbinic habits of thought but also by Hispano-Romance vernacular culture. As Iberia transitioned to Christian rule, Sepharadim found opportunity as mediators for Christian monarchs ruling an Islamicate society. Once most Muslim elites had left the Iberian Peninsula, the Sepharadim became the interpreters of the Andalusi intellectual legacy, which they disseminated in their writings, their religious practice, and their artistic production. After their expulsion from the Peninsula at the turn of the sixteenth century, the Sepharadim, now in a diasporic network in communities aross the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, continued developing these practices in addition to speaking their own dialects of Spanish that continued to evolve over time in both written and spoken forms. In modernity, the idea of Sepharad continues to inspire a variety of historical and cultural visions of what Iberian Jewish life was and will be in the future

Romance of Evast and Blaquerna by Ramón Llull

Wacks, David A. “Romance of Evast and Blaquerna by Ramón Llull (Review).” La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, vol. 47, no. 1, 2018, pp. 122–24. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cor.2018.0022

Review of Calderwood, Eric. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture

Wacks, David A. Review of Calderwood, Eric. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture. Cambridge: The Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2018. ISBN 9780674980327. 400pp. Comparative Literature, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 460-462

Canonicity and Medieval Hispanic Studies

Since the 1980s, there has been much discussion of the question of the literary canon. Our colleages in English have been particularly outspoken on the question (Charles Altieri 1990; Jan Gorak 1991 and 2000; John Guillory 1993; Gregory Jay 1997) and in recent years, Hispanists such as José María Pozuelo Yvancos and María Rosa Adrada Sánchez (2000) and Wadda Ríos-Font (2004) have made important interventions. And despite recent thought-provoking essays by María Rosa Menocal and John Dagenais in the Cambridge History of Spanish Literature interrogating the idea of medieval ‘Spanish’ literature, medieval Hispanists have not directly addressed the problem of canonicity in our field, particularly in its pedagogical dimension. What is our mission as instructors of the pre-modern literature(s) of the Iberian Peninsula? What criteria do we use in determining what to teach? If they are geographic, do we teach the literature of the kindgoms that later became Spain? Or only that of Castile and Leon? Should we teach works that have been accepted as canonical, or try to include others? These questions only beget more. If we are critical of the idea of a canon, what is our resopnse? Do we retrofit it by inserting authors more demographically representative of medieval Iberia or who worked in languages other than Castilian? In doing so, are we still validating the idea of a literary canon, and if so, is this problematic? All these questions point up the ambiguity of our pedagogical mission as university instructors of medieval Iberian literature. In this presentation, I will invite you to help me examine some of the basic assumptions and ideological underpinnings of much of our teaching, and in particular our approach to the ‘survey’ course

Vernacular Anxiety and the Semitic Imaginary: Shem Tov Isaac ibn Ardutiel de Carrión and his Critics

Shem Tov ibn Isaac Ardutiel (Santob de Carrión) lived in the fourteenth century, period of intense vernacularization of literary practice in Castile. Shem Tov has long been imagined as a model of multiculturality, and the lasting impact of his diglossic literary legacy is undeniable. He is a compelling case study of the role of Hebrew literature in the age of Hispano-Romance vernacularity. Shem Tov writes at a time when Spanish Jewish authors voice considerable ambivalence about the practice of vernacular literature. In this essay I offer a new reading of Proverbios morales and his Hebrew Debate between the pen and the scissors as veiled critiques of Castilian literary practice and a defense of Hebrew in an age of vernacularization. The ambivalence and anxiety that characterized Jewish approaches to the vernacular are mirrored by modern critics of the literature of Spain’s Jews. Spanish criticism of Shem Tov’s work is revealing of conflictive modern Spanish attitudes toward the role of Jewish authors in a national literary legacy. In the second part of this essay I demonstrate how the anxieties that characterized Jewish-Christian literary relations in 14th century Castile are still alive and well in 19th and 20th century Spanish scholarship

Aljamiado retellings of the Hebrew Bible

Stories from the Hebrew Bible were popular among the Iberian Peninsula’s Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Beginning in the 14th century, Muslims and Moriscos retold these stories in Aljamiado texts in Spanish or Aragonese written in Arabic characters. These fictionalized retellings drew on vernacular language and literary forms common to Christians and Muslims, and are a lens through which to study the cultural life of late Spanish Islam in its negotiation with the dominant Christian culture. The vernacular language and culture shared by Moriscos and Christians was a powerful medium for creating fictional Biblical storyworlds, mental models of the reality represented by the Biblical narratives. These retellings both exalt Islamic beliefs, traditions, rituals, and doctrines in the face of social marginalization and persecution, while at the same time validating their experience as speakers of Spanish and Aragonese and as participants in a vernacular culture shared between Moriscos and Christians

Whose Spain is it, anyway?

The Iberian Peninsula during the Latin Middle Ages was home to large populations of Muslims and Jews. During the period we like to call the Middle Ages, much of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the entire peninsula was under Christian rule, and Judaism and Islam were officially banned. Consquently, the very rich cultural legacies of Peninsular Judaism and Islam did not form part of Spanish or Portuguese national patrimony, and became instead the classics of the Arab and Jewish worlds. This essay examines how the formation of Modern of Spanish (and Portuguese) national identity, predicated on non-Islam and non-Judaism, affected the study and reception of the medieval cultural production of Iberian Muslism and Jews

Las excelencias de los hebreos (Amsterdam 1679)

This is a pedagogical edition of a selection of Las excelencias de los hebreos (Amsterdam 1679), in .pdf format with an English-language introduction and notes, with the original text in both the original Castilian and English translation. Las excelencias de los hebreos (Amsterdam 1679) is a treatise describing the positive characteristics (excelencias) of the Jewish people and a containing a refutation of common anti-Jewish calumnies (calunias) written by Isaac Cardoso (b. Fernando Cardoso, Trancoso, Portugal 1603 - d. Verona, Italy 1683). Excelencias is an apology or pro-Jewish treatise meant to educate its readers on Jewish history and practice, and to combat typical anti-Jewish ideas that were very widespread in Europe since the Middle Ages, and that persist to this day. In this excerpt, the tenth and last of the calumnies leveled at leveled at Jews that he addresses in the work, Cardoso refutes the blood libel often aimed at aimed at Jewish communities living in majority Christian societies from the Middle ages to the present day. This is the accusation that Jews murder Christian children and use their blood to make the unleavened bread that is eaten ritually on the holiday of Pesach, or Passover. As Cardoso explains in this text, these accusations are in contradiction to Jewish law, which forbids the consumption of blood of any sort, and condemns murder and human sacrifice in no uncertain terms. It is also worth pointing out that the accusation of drinking the blood and eating the flesh of a human sacrifice is structurally similar to the sacrament of communion, in which believing Catholics drink wine that according to the doctrine of transubstantiation has become the blood of Christ, and eat a wafer that according to the same doctrine has become his flesh. No such parallel is to be found, however, in Jewish ritual

Francisco Núñez Muley, Memorial (Granada, 1566)

Núñez-Muley abstract The Edict of 1567, or Anti-Morisco Edict, was promulgated by Spanish King Philip II on January 1, after being approved in Madrid on November 17, 1566. Its purpose was to eliminate specific Morisco customs, such as their language, dress, and dances. Núñez Muley’s Petition is an attempt to persuade Christian authorities to delay enforcing the 1567 Edict. The author lists each of the prohibitions and refutes their effectiveness. He compares Morisco customs to those of other Christian and Muslim communities in the Mediterranean and argues that the prohibitions will not eradicate any putative Islamic practices but instead erase Morisco cultural identity. Moriscos, he claims, are sincere Christians and loyal subjects who support the king’s decisions. This unit contains a Spanish-language introduction and notes by Lisette Balabarca Fataccioli, and the original Spanish text, followed by a short bibliography of suggested readings