Iberian Jewish Literature

This stimulating and graceful book explores Iberian Jewish attitudes toward cultural transition during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when growing intolerance of Jews in Islamic al-Andalus and the southward expansion of the Christian Reconquista led to their relocation from Islamic to Christian domains. By engaging literary topics such as imagery, structure, voice, landscape, and geography, Jonathan P. Decter traces attitudes that range from tenacious longing for the Islamic past to comfort in the new Christian environment. Through comparison with Arabic and European vernacular literatures, Decter elucidates a medieval Hebrew poetics of estrangement and nostalgia, poetic responses to catastrophe, and the refraction of social issues in fictional narratives. This book brings to life the voices of Jewish writers of the period as they negotiate their identities between the Islamic and Christian worlds. Decter's clear and engaging treatment of the interplay among Islamic, Jewish, and Christian cultures in medieval al-Andalus is an important reminder of how these worlds were once intertwined. -- from dust jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.