The Politics of Persecution in Fourteenth-Century Seville

A MEDIEVAL WEEK 2022 EVENT

You can register for this talk on our Eventbrite site: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/287977266757.

Speaker: Dr. Maya Soifer Irish (Rice University)

Over thirty years ago, R.I. Moore argued that in the twelfth century, Latin Europe saw the emergence of a “persecuting society” when ecclesiastical and secular authorities seeking to consolidate their power and influence began to build an apparatus for persecuting Jews and other marginal groups. Christian Iberia, however, seemingly remained free of such state- and church-sponsored persecutory measures. Focusing on the treatment of the Jewish community in Seville in the decades preceding the 1391 massacre, I will show that the persecution of Jews in medieval Castile is easy for historians to miss because it was normalized, mundane, and integrated into the kingdom’s political discourse. I argue that the politics of persecution in Castile evolved not at the state level, but in local contexts: in towns and villages where local authorities manipulated and fueled anti-Jewish grievances to pursue their short-term political goals.

Bio:

Dr. Maya Soifer Irish an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program at Rice University. Her research focuses on religious violence and toleration, and explores the legal, social, and economic situation of religious minorities in Iberian Christian societies. She is the author of many articles, including “Beyond convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain.” Her first book, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change,explores the changes in Jewish-Christian relations in the kingdom of Castile between the 11th and 14th centuries. She is currently working on a new book, The Politics of Persecution in Medieval Spain: Toward the Anti-Jewish Riots of 1391. Between 2018 and 2021 she served as President of the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain (AARHMS).

Story submitted by Renee Ward
rward@lincoln.ac.uk