Mark D . Meyerson : A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth - Century Spain

University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. This book focuses on the final century of the history of the Jewish community of Morvedre, a town located in the kingdom of Valencia, itself part of the fed-erated Crown of Aragon. The story of the Jews of Morvedre begins in 1248, with Jewish settlers' convergence on the town in the wake of King Jaume I's conquest of the region from the Muslims. The story ends as do all histories of the Jews of medieval Spain: with the Jews abandoning their homes and departing for new lands in the summer of 1492, in compliance with the edict of expulsion. 1 Morvedre's old Jewish quarter still stands in mute testimony to the Jews' previous existence and exile. The town itself, however, is no longer called Morvedre but Sagunto. In 1868 it reverted to a form of its old Roman name, Saguntum, as if to draw attention to its Roman antiquity at the expense of its medieval past, when the town was peopled by Muslims and Jews. Indeed, while the stark and magnificent Roman arena readily brings the town's ancient glories to mind, the rather ordinary architecture of the former Jewish quarter can almost make one forget that Jews ever lived there at all. Yet for a historian intent on recovering the Jews of medieval Morvedre from oblivion, the narrow streets of the Jewish quarter do resound with Jewish voices—or at least they can be made to do so through careful archival reconstruction and with a healthy dose of imagination. The Jewish voices and bodies must be, as it were, conjured, for in merely viewing the streets and houses of the Jewish quarter the visitor can hardly believe that in the century prior to 1492 it was the home and hub of a vital and flourishing Jewish community. The closed quarter with its narrow streets might suggest restriction and oppression , a harried and degrading Jewish existence for which the expulsion was the natural conclusion, the emphatic punctuation to decades of despair. Such an impression, however, would be far from the truth. The …