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Anti-Semitism in the Cantigas de Santa Maria

1983; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382832000360189

1469-3550

Vikki Hatton, Angus Mackay,

Archaeological and Historical Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: ALFONSO X, KING OF CASTILE & LEÓN [ALFONSO EL SABIO] (1221–1284)CANTIGAS DE SANTA MARIA [ALFONSO X EL SABIO]JEWS — LANGUAGE, HISTORY, LITERATURE, CULTURE & INFLUENCE Notes 1. J. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews (New Haven: Yale U.P., 1945), 216. 2. Quotations from the texts of the poems are from Alfonso X, O Sabio, Cantigas de Santa María, ed. Walter Mettmann (Coimbra: University of Coimbra, 1959–72), 4 vols. The miniatures are reproduced in J. Guerrero Lovillo, Las Cántigas. Estudio arqueológico de sus miniaturas (Madrid: C.S.I.C., 1949). 3. Y. Baer, The Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961), I,128. 4. A. Bagby, ‘The Jew in the Cántigas of Alfonso X el Sabio’, Speculum, XLVI (1971), 670–88, and ‘Alfonso X, el Sabio, compara moros y judíos’, RF, LXXXII (1970), 578–83. For criticism of Bagby's approach see J. T. Snow, The Poetry of Alfonso X, el Sabio: A Critical Bibliography (London: Grant & Cutler, 1977), 100, 102–03. 5. The problem of the authorship of the CSM is discussed in J. T. Snow, ‘The Central Rôle of the Troubadour Persona of Alfonso X in the Cantigas de Santa Maria’, BHS, LVI (1979), 305–16. This article will follow Snow's view that, while Alfonso was not the author of all the cantigas, he did exercise editorial control over the whole. 6. S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd edn. X (New York: Columbia U.P., 1965), 357. 7. Trachtenberg, 156. 8. That even so apparently tolerant a theme as this could be given an anti-semitic tone by another author is shown in Berceo's version of this story, in which the Jew's contempt for Christianity and the Christian merchant's virtue are stressed: (Los Milagros de Nuestra Señora, ed. B. Dutton [London: Tamesis, 1971], Milagro 23). For a more detailed treatment of the comparison between the Jews of the CSM and those of the Milagros, see below. 9. Bagby, ‘The Jew in the Cantigas’, 679 and 80. 10. Quoted by Baron, XI, 153. 11. For tables linking the CSM with other versions of the same stories, see A. Rey, ‘Correspondence of the Spanish Miracles of the Virgin’, RR, XIX (1978), 151–53, and Liber de Miraculis Sanctae Mariae, ed. T. E. Crane (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1925); none of the four conversion tales discussed below appears in either of these tables which together compare the CSM with eleven other Spanish and European collections. 12. All quotations from Berceo are taken from Dutton's edition, already cited. Dutton also includes versions of each story taken from a manuscript known as Thott 128, which he argues is very close to the source of the tales and which therefore illustrates the ways in which Berceo, unlike Alfonso X, altered the stories to give them a more markedly anti-semitic tone. 13. There are many examples of such formulaic insults in cantigas which otherwise do not refer to Jews—for example, Cantigas 22, 71, 91, 149. 14. Cantiga 85 is described as taking place in England, Cantiga 108 in Scotland, while the location of Cantiga 89 is not given. 15. See F. Fita, ‘La Judería de Segovia. Documentos inéditos’, BRAH, IX (1886), 372–89. 16. See K. R. Scholberg, Sátira e invectiva en la España medieval (Madrid: Gredos, 1971), 99, who comments: ‘es notable la falta casi absoluta de referencias a personas de estirpe judaica, entre los poetas gallego-portugueses, situación muy distinta de la que se dará después entre los poetas de la corte de Juan II de Castilla.’ 17. For example, M. Metzger, La Haggada Enluminée (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973), figs. 4,11,31; B. Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts (Jerusalem: Encyclopaedia Judaica and New York: Macmillan, 1979), plates 29, 38. 18. See Trachtenberg, 35. 19. See B. Blumenkranz, Le Juif médiéval au miroir de l’art chrétien (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1966). 20. Trachtenberg, 208. 21. A. MacKay and G. McKendrick, ‘Confession in the Cántigas de Santa Maria’, Reading Medieval Studies, V (1979), 71–88. 22. Siete Partidas, Part. VII, Tit. XXIV, Leyes VI and II. 23. Concilium Lateranense IV, Constitutiones 70 and 68, and Siete Partidas, Part. VII, Tit. XXIV, Ley XI. 24. Siete Partidas, Part. VII, Tit. XXIV, Ley IX; see Fita, 374: ‘quedam hebrea diffamata est quod peccabat cum quodam milite coniugato’. 25. Trachtenberg, 134. 26. Blumenkranz, 24. 27. See R. Emery, The Jews of Perpignan in the Thirteenth Century (New York: Columbia U.P., 1959); Baron, X, chs XLIV and XLV. 28. On the general significance of the 1263 dispute of Barcelona, see L. Suárez Fernández, Judíos españoles en la edad media (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma, 1980), 120–28. 29. Baer, I, 182.