New Article: Rabbi Marc Angel Denies Convivencia!
David Shasha
Rabbi Marc Angel Denies Convivencia!
If further evidence of Rabbi Marc Angel’s contempt for the classical Sephardic tradition was needed, we have his latest masterpiece attacking the idea of Convivencia in Muslim Spain:
https://www.jewishideas.org/marc-d-angel/golden-age-spain-how-golden-was-it
Here is the key passage from the article that discusses a new book on the subject by a Spanish Catholic apologist which completely gives the game away:
Professor Fernandez-Morera’s book has a clear point of view. He is especially interested in highlighting the strengths and virtues of Visigothic Spain before the arrival of the Muslims in 711. He praises the Christian re-conquest of Spain. Had it not been for the “Reconquista,” Islamic rule might not only have prevailed over all of Spain, but might have spread further into Europe. This would have led to the fostering of religious discrimination, the low status of women, the inhibiting of intellectual freedom; it would have precluded the emergence of the Renaissance, and would have left the Western world in the same general condition as the rest of the Muslim world.
While some of the arguments of Dr. Fernandez-Morera seem over-stretched and even polemical, the overall impact of his research and his book must make one stop to think more carefully about the “Andalusian Paradise” and convivencia. Are scholars and politicians perpetuating this myth because it serves a useful purpose, because they—and we—want to believe it? How nice it would be to know that there was a time and place when Muslims, Christians and Jews worked side by side in mutual respect and kindness. How nice to think that it is possible for Islamic rule to be tolerant and benevolent.
I have referred to the current trend in Sephardic Studies to undermine the idea of Convivencia and the positive cultural interaction between Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Spain that was most famously articulated by our dear friend the late Maria Rosa Menocal in her many books and articles:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/menocal/davidshasha/L1jCWtW7umY/BecIXo_fBgAJ
In my annual tribute to Maria and her important work, work that is currently under attack by the Anti-Sephardi racists, I pointed to a widely-cited article by Jonathan Ray that presents the basic anti-Convivencia thesis:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXZWhfZXhjRV82Rkk/view
I also mentioned the recent book by David Wacks which actually cites a Spanish scholar named Federico Perez Castro who supported Franco’s Fascism in a way that allows us to see the connection between Ashkenazi Anti-Sephardi sentiment and Totalitarianism.
Rabbi Angel has his own record of dubious achievement when it comes to presenting our noble heritage:
Rabbi Angel famously rejected my article “A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction” for publication in his ironically named journal “Conversations.”
We should also remember his fierce loyalty to Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy and to Yeshiva University; the same Yeshiva University that permitted a Hebrew Literature professor to call Sephardim “poor and uneducated,” as I wrote in my article “The Idiot Sephardim”:
And then there is his role in a 1976 debate with Malcolm Stern on the issue of Sephardim and Ashkenazim in New York:
Angel decided to take the pro-Ashkenazi side while Stern defended the Sephardim!
I am particularly interested in Angel’s latest assault on our tradition as he deploys the work of a despicable individual whose aim is to defend the Spanish Christian tradition of the Visigoths and the warriors of the Reconquista over the Muslims.
It would be superfluous to state here that the Spanish Jews warmly welcomed the Muslim conquest and were subject to persecutions by the Catholic authorities that eventually led to the institution of the Spanish Inquisition and the Expulsion.
We already know why Spanish Catholic apologists would want to praise their racist genocidal tradition that sought to eliminate the Jews and Judaism from Iberia.
What we don’t know is why Jews would want to support the Christian Anti-Semites.
But looking at the matter more closely, it has become clear that Zionism has taken over the contemporary Jewish mentality to the point where history is to be reframed and distorted in order to support a Christianity that decimated us, and to demonize the Arabo-Islamic tradition which in the period in question welcomed Jews to settle in the Ottoman Empire.
Rabbi Angel remains a reprehensible figure whose embarrassing identification with the Ashkenazim and their neo-Christian tendencies has become all too obvious.
David Shasha