Research
My varied interests on the history of the Jews in the past hundred years, genocide studies, and the persecution of minorities in the Middle Ages have combined with my love of languages into a specialization in the history of Christian-Jewish relations in the Crown of Aragon in the late medieval period.
The Holocaust has sparked renewed interest in the study of European Jewry, especially during the Middle Ages, when Europe arguably became a “persecuting society.” Among the Jews of medieval Europe perhaps none are better documented or can tell us more about Christian-Jewish interaction than the Jews of the Iberian peninsula. The Jewish presence in Iberia pre-dates the destruction of the Temple in the first century AD and evidence suggests this community was quite sizeable by the early fourth century. Christianization, the Jewish presence and the Islamic conquest of 711 introduced the peninsula to a degree of religious diversity unparalleled in western medieval Europe, making the region ideal for the study of religious minorities in the past.
The study of Christian-Jewish relations in Iberia has been marked by crucial recent developments. Scholars have started to move away from an analysis based on a dichotomy of tolerance and persecution according to which the history of Iberian Jewry is either characterized as a Golden Age marked by tolerance, as in the case of the Jews of Muslim Spain or of Christian Spain during the Reconquista, or a period of decline marked by increased persecution, as in the case of the Jews during Visigothic rule or in the century and a half between the Black Death (1348) and expulsion (1492). New emphasis on more nuanced, contextualized studies has brought many of the paradigms in the field into question and has done much to shade the lines between tolerance and persecution.
More specifically, my research focuses on the nature of Christian-Jewish relations in the decades prior to the massacres and forced conversions of 1391. In that year thousands of Jews throughout Castile and the Crown of Aragon were given the choice to die or convert to Christianity; synagogues were burned or turned into churches and only a minority of Jews escaped death or conversion. Many historians consider 1391 to be a turning point in the history of Iberia, in particular in Christian-Jewish relations. Yet, despite its importance in Iberian history, it has not yet received the concentrated attention of a major study.
I focus particularly on the Jewish communities of Aragon and Catalonia and the objective of my thesis is to analyze the nature of Christian-Jewish relations in those regions during the decades prior to 1391. I pay particular attention to the social, economic, and cultural contexts that marked cross-cultural relations. Among the questions I address include: how economically diverse were the Jews of Catalonia and Aragon in this period? How protective was the king of the religious minorities in those regions? Was there a noticeable decline in relations? If so, why? Was there a difference between Aragon and Catalonia? There seems to have been much more violence in Catalonia than in Aragon. Why? What sort of issues, both within and outside the Jewish communities, affected Christian-Jewish relations?
