Professor Jonathan Ray
When Jonathan Ray looks at history, he’s not looking for easy answers. In his efforts to piece together the daily lives and identities of medieval Jews living in Christian and Muslim territories, he’s found that “the norm is something a little bit messier, [a little bit] more complex” than many might imagine.
Ray is the Samuel Eig Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies in the Theology Department at Georgetown. His latest book, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia, recently received the prestigious John Nichols Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America, presented annually for the best first book on any topic in Medieval Studies. The prize committee applauded "Ray's exceptional book” and its interdisciplinary approach that “brings an entirely new dimension that will encourage future researchers to look beyond accepted models.” They continue, “It is a book that many medievalists, whether Iberianists or not, will want to know and share, as a model, with their students."
Ray keeps a modest perspective regarding the committee’s accolades, suggesting this interdisciplinary approach is part of the job. The Sephardic Frontier examines the role of Jewish immigrants in the Iberian Peninsula—now nations such as Spain, Portugal, and Andorra—as Christian Spain expanded its kingdom into Muslim territories in an aggressive military push known as the reconquista. Ray points out that cities needed repopulation following these violent conquests, and Jewish immigrants played a key role as civil servants in building new urban populations. Examining the extensive collections of the Archives of the Crown of Aragon as well as the National Archives of Barcelona and Madrid, Ray found that Christians and Jews interacted in these urban centers through many channels ranging from the legal to the illicit.
With this socio-economic relationship in mind, Ray’s work re-examines the nature of convivencia, the coexistence of disparate religious or cultural groups throughout history. He asks, “Is the relationship between these religious groups really the most important thing to the members of those groups?” Ray suggests that in these intercultural environments, identities were constructed along secular as well as sacred lines. “Our view of the world is that Jews are here, Muslims are here, and Christians are here—and that there’s internal solidarity within all those groups and then there’s tension among them—[which] is not really true,” he argues. “The more you look at them the more you realize there’s all sorts of dividing lines—class, gender, region, profession—and those lines move.”
Reconstructing and understanding these relationships provides challenges akin to detective work for Ray. Many of his archival sources, documents dating back hundreds of years, have been damaged over time. Likewise, many sources are written in early Latin or Catalan, and nearly all in shorthand unique to the recorder. Ray explains the painstaking process of reading those documents as a kind of code breaking: “Each scribe has their own shorthand…once you crack the code, you can read everything that scribe in particular wrote.”
Ray also recognizes how current cultural tensions over religious violence influence the way we perceive religious divisions in culturally mixed societies. Acknowledging this concern, he argues “just as things are complex and frustrating to look at today, they are just as complex, just as frustrating and surprising as they were a thousand years ago.” Examining daily interactions helps researchers better understand how Iberian Jews and Christians viewed themselves and their surroundings, without the hindsight of several hundred years.
The Sephardic Frontier was also awarded an honorable mention for the Best First Book Prize by the Society of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies. Ray’s next project will examine the movement of Jews into the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. He explains, “In those moments of flux…you really get to see what people’s priorities are and what their desires are. I like that period of flux very much, because you really get behind how things become more standard.”
To his students, Ray emphasizes that current issues are always a part of a historical arc. “There’s really no way of understanding the present day without understanding the past. And the best way to understand it is try…to look at it on its own terms rather than project our own concerns and fears and hopes back upon it.” Ray admits “to a certain extent that’s impossible. Our history is a product of the questions we ask. However, if we can try to be aware of our own cultural baggage to a certain extent, it may help us view the past as it really was rather than as we want to see it.”
-Jessica Beckman
Photos by Kuna Hamad.
