Convivencia

[1][2] According to The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, "Critics charge that [the term 'convivencia'] too often describes an idealized view of multi-faith harmony and symbiosis, while supporters retort that such a characterization is a distortion of the complex interactions they seek to understand.

Córdoba was “one of the most important cities in the history of the world.” In it, “Christians and Jews were involved in the Royal Court and the intellectual life of the city.”[6] María Rosa Menocal, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, further describes the libraries of Córdoba as "a significant benchmark of overall social (not just scholarly) well being, since they represented a near-perfect crossroads of the material and the intellectual.

"[7] James L. Heft, the Alton Brooks Professor of Religion at USC, describes Convivencia as one of the “rare periods in history” when the three religions did not either keep “their distance from one another, or were in conflict.” During most of their co-existing history, they have been “ignorant about each other” or “attacked each other.”[8] The period of Islamic rule in the Iberian Peninsula began in the early eighth century when Arab invaders took political control over the Iberian Peninsula, calling it al-Andalus.

The Christian kingdoms progressively expanded south taking over Muslim territory in what is historiographically known as the Reconquista, effectively confining al-Andalus to the southern Emirate of Granada, ruled by the Nasrid dynasty from 1231 to 1492.

[citation needed] As Anna Akasoy has summarized in a review article, Menocal "argues that the narrow-minded forces that brought about its end were external", both from the North African Muslim Almoravids and Almohads, and Christian northerners.

Mark Cohen, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, in his Under Crescent and Cross, calls the idealized interfaith utopia a myth that was first promulgated by Jewish historians such as Heinrich Graetz in the 19th century as a rebuke to Christian countries for their treatment of Jews.

[18] This myth was met with what Cohen calls the "counter-myth" of the "neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history" by Bat Yeor and others,[18] which also "cannot be maintained in the light of historical reality".

He further states that there is scarcely any information available on the Jewish and Christian communities during the Caliphate of Cordoba, and that this may come as a shock in view of the huge clout of the convivencia meme [“... quizá pueda resultar chocante teniendo en cuenta el enorme peso del tópico convivencial.”] According to Manzano, Castro's conception "was never converted into a specific and well-documented treatment of al-Andalus, perhaps because Castro never succeeded in finding in the Arabist bibliography materials suitable for incorporation into his interpretation.”[2] Aaron Hughes adds that "contemporary ecumenicists appeal to the 'Golden Age' of tolerance" in the 10th and 11th centuries in Córdoba under Muslim rule, but, for the most part, they are not interested in what actually happened among the Jews, Christians, and Muslims.