The cultural construction of the Jews in late medieval Portugal: contributions to a reevaluation

• Autores: Luis Alfonso
• Localización: Mitteilungen der Carl Justi-Vereinigung, ISSN 0946-2821, Nº. 13, 2001, págs. 22-46
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The cultural construction of the jews in lat medieval Portugal has been treated with a great deal of indulgence by Portuguese scholars. indeed, despite the clarity of anti-judaic medieval legislation and the documented violence against the jews, historians either dilute, or almost omit, xenophobic phenomena in late medieval Portugal. This lenience appears to be based upon two main suppositions: (i) that a permanent and absolute hostility between christians and jews did not exist; and (ii) that the siutuation of the jews in Portugal was not as perilous as it was in other european countries. Thus, an important number of historians claim that the anti-judaic culture was either an exception or a belated and sudden phenomenon in late medieval Portugal. However, we consider that most of the indulgence present in contemporary historical writing results from three factors, which we review in the first part of this paper: (i) condescending ideological approaches; (ii) mechanical materialist explanations; and (iii) conceptual misunderstandings. Proceeding from this critique, the second part explores some of the rare and few remaining sources concerning the cultural construction of the jews in portuguese-christian communities during the late middle ages. Our inquiry is directed to different visual data and to a re-evaluation of a well-known book of prayer songs (laudário) that has never been explored from this perspective.