Jews in Spain, 1492

It's unusual for Mourning Dove Hill to give you a little history lesson, but here it is, without further apology:

The year 1492 was a momentous year, and not only because, as we are all taught in school, "Columbus discovered America" in that year (actually, in his first voyage, in that year, Columbus made land on an island in the Caribbean, and not on the mainland of North America).

Also in that year, Queen Isabella of Castile married King Ferdinand of Aragon, thus uniting the two largest Christian kingdoms of Spain.¹ That permitted the new, larger and stronger, Spanish kingdom to complete the so-called Reconquista, or reconquest of Spain by Christian kingdoms from the Muslim Moors, who had been controlling an ever-shrinking domain in Spain for centuries.

Again in that year, and not coincidentally, an edict was issued by Ferdinand and Isabella concerning the Jews who, under the Moorish rulers, had lived in peace and, in fact, more than mere toleration (in most kingdoms and at most times). The Jews were given an ultimatum: convert or get out. (Actually and practically speaking, there was a third choice: do neither and be tortured to death--possibly burned at the stake--by the Inquisition. Some Jews submitted to a conversion that was not completely sincere and thus became so-called crypto-Jews or, as the Christian Spaniards called them, "Marranos," which translates as 'pigs'. The term was also used of Muslim converts to Christianity.)

(The Muslims were also promised toleration but, some 30 years later, under King Charles II, they were similarly forced to convert or get out.)

The Jews of Spain, known as Sephardim, spread to many countries including North Africa, Turkey, and throughout the Middle East--all the lands that were then the Ottoman Empire. They brought with them a language of their own, derived from Spanish and known as Ladino or Judeo-Spanish. Ladino traditionally was written with the Hebrew alphabet, and it might be said that Ladino is to Spanish as Yiddish is to German.

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¹ As I originally wrote this, it may not be accurate. I now believe Ferdinand and Isabella were married in 1469 and united their kingdoms in 1492. The Jews were ordered to leave or convert three months later.

²One exception is that there was a massacre of Jews in 1391. 

I apologize for not being confidently in command of my facts here. I invite any reader to research these historical facts and offer a correction to anything I wrote which is not accurate.

© 2018 by Richard Stein

Christians and Muslims, Historically

At one time there were Islamic societies which led the world in their arts and sciences: notably mathematics and astronomy but also medicine, architecture, philosophy, and poetry. We owe to Muslims (and the Christian Byzantines) the preservation of much of the literature and knowledge of the ancient Greeks. By comparison, the Christian West was generally backward, and I am sure that the Muslims regarded it as even barbarian.

So how and why did the Islamic civilizations decline? I am not a historian but from what I do know, I think I can say this with hopefully only slight inaccuracy: wars with the Christians were a big factor.

In Spain, where there was quite a glorious Islamic civilization, with advanced medicine as well as philosophy and other arts and sciences--and, incidentally, generally remarkable tolerance of non-Muslims (Christians and Jews)--centuries of war (the so-called Reconquista or reconquest by Christian Spanish kingdoms) culminated in 1492 with the fall of Granada and thus the ending of the last Islamic kingdom in Spain. (In 1492, not coincidentally, Spain's Jews were expelled; the Muslims were granted tolerance but that promise lasted only some 30 years.)

In the Middle East, where notable Islamic civilizations centered on Baghdad and Persia, there similarly were several centuries of wars between Christians and Muslims, centering on the Crusades, which supposedly had the aim of recapturing Jerusalem for Christians but which caused enormous killing and destruction over a larger area. Wars between Christian states and Muslim powers lasted at least until the eighteenth century.

The last of the Muslim temporal kingdoms--and this is starting to get off the subject--was the Ottoman Empire, which had absorbed the Byzantine Empire (culminating in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople) but weakened over centuries until its final collapse with World War I.

Copyright © 2017

Crimes Against Civilization

There probably have been countless times when Humanity (or a segment of it) has wiped out a significant portion of our collective, accumulated literary and scientific record.

But here are four that might be some of the more egregious ones, at least insofar as what is known to me.

Remember Cleopatra? She was the last Queen of Egypt. I think it's historically pretty certain that she had affairs with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, but she may have had a political motive. She saw the writing on the wall and was trying to be on the winning side (when the Romans conquered Egypt) and thus save some of her own power.

Well, the reason for bringing her up is just to set the stage. While all this was going on and Roman soldiers were in Egypt, the great library at Alexandria—a depository of much of the then-world's learning—burned. It's not clear whether the Romans torched it or if there was an accident involved; but the fact that we today have only thirty-some extant ancient Greek plays (out of hundreds that were written) probably is just one small part of the immeasurable loss to civilization that was the burning of that library.

Second, Islamic civilization was not only largely heir to much of the learning of the ancient Greeks but had made brilliant progress in mathematics and astronomy. It is fortunate that at least some of that eventually was transmitted to the West (initially via Venice); but again, much has surely been lost. The glorious empire that Islamic rulers had achieved, spreading over much of the world, came under attack from several sides. When the Mongols invaded from the east, they tossed innumerable books into the river. It is said that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers ran black from the ink of the books that had been thrown in.

In Spain, Islamic caliphates were also part of the brilliant world of Islamic learning. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella II, with their united forces, completed the reconquest (so-called Reconquista) of Spain by Christians over Muslims. Among innumerable bad consequences (by today's lights)—including the end of tolerance of Jews and Muslims, all of whom had to get out or be killed, often in a painful and horrible way—the new rulers also destroyed all Islamic books except some medical texts.

Oh, and maybe I should mention the Vikings. In the era of Viking raids (starting around 800 AD or earlier, and lasting for a couple hundred years), the Vikings pretty much destroyed a civilization in the north of England and wiped out monasteries. This resulted in the destruction of manuscripts and learning in general, along with the monasteries' scriptoria and schools that taught writing, Latin, and choir. As a witness to the results of this, King Alfred the Great, writing in the 9th century and in the South of England, which had not directly suffered from the Viking raids, lamented the sad state of learning and literacy in England, stating that even many of the clergy were illiterate.

The march of civilization, if it's mostly been forward, has certainly had many, many steps backward, from the fall of civilizations, the sacking and burning of cities, the destruction of libraries, etc.

Update, November 19, 2012
Another destruction of learning, in the form of books and music manuscripts, occurred during the World War II Allied  fire bombing of Dresden, Germany--which, by the way, killed tens of thousands of civilians. According to Wikipedia, and despite efforts to move much of the library's collection to less vulnerable locations, some 200,000 manuscripts were destroyed. And then the Soviets, who occupied the eastern or Soviet zone of post-War Germany, plundered another 250,000 volumes, just as they carried off machinery from German factories and personnel such as German rocket scientists; but that's another story.

Update, July 4, 2013
Yet another tragic loss of a great library occurred in 1258 when invading Mongols destroyed the library at Baghdad. The Tigris river was stained by the ink of the books that were thrown in it.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein