jews and christians in fifteenth-century spain

38 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 174
writing of history, a genre until then largely neglected in the
Diaspora. It is certainly true that history streamed from the pens
of first-generation Sephardic exiles like Shelomo ibn Verga,
Abraham Zacuto, Elijah Capsali, Abraham ben Salomon de
Torrutiel Ardutiel, Yosef ben Tzadiq of Arévalo, and others.93
But the historical sensibilities of these Sephardic writers owed as
much to their genealogical mentalities as to their exilic experience,
and in this sense the creation of a ‘Sephardic historiographic
mentality’ predated the expulsion by several generations.
The importance of genealogy as a template for post-exilic
Jewish historical narrative is evident, for example, in Abraham
Zacuto’s adaptation for historiographic purposes of pre-existing
genealogical genres such as shalshalaot ha-qabbalah, ‘chains of
tradition’, a genre whose task it was to assign a lineage to ideas.
Hence the title of his most innovative work, the Sefer Yuh1asin
ha-Shalem, the ‘sound book of genealogies’ (1504).94 But it is
equally evident in a good deal of writing from throughout the
fifteenth century, for writers such as Zacuto and Ibn Verga were
inheritors of a genealogical approach to culture developed in
Jewish apologetics (and we must remember that history and
apologetics were inseparable in this period) a century before the
expulsion, in response to heightened Christian (and Muslim)
polemical insistence on Jewish cultural hybridity and corruption.
Fifteenth-century Sephardic apologists sought to turn the tables
upon their attackers by adopting modes of historical argument
that stressed the purity of Jewish belief and practice in contrast
to the corruption of originally Jewish concepts in their rivals’
culture. To do so, they drew on traditional genres (like the ‘chains
of tradition’ mentioned above) that Jews had long ago developed
to ‘guarantee’ the authoritative origins and stable transmission of
their traditions. But they also drew on the most up-to-date
methods of their opponents.
In his Kelimat ha-Goyim (Reproach of the Gentiles, c.1397),
for example, Profet Duran borrowed extensively from Christian
humanist strategies for establishing pure archetypes of texts and
concepts through critical study of manuscript transmission and
93 Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle,
1982), 58–9: ‘In effect, the primary stimulus to the rise of Jewish historiography in
the sixteenth century was the great catastrophe that had put an abrupt end to open
Jewish life in the Iberian peninsula at the end of the fifteenth’.
94 Abraham Zacuto, Sefer Yuh1asin ha-Shalem, ed. Herschell Filipowski and
Abraham Hayyim Freimann (Frankfurt, 1924).