Iberia and Southern France

Medieval Iberia and Provence, the lands of Spain, Portugal, and southern France where Christian, Muslim, and Jewish civilizations met, were for several centuries the most religiously creative ground in the Western world, because here the three faiths lived, competed, and borrowed in close proximity, a coexistence later called the convivencia.

Under Muslim rule (al-Andalus), Cordoba became one of the great cities of the medieval world, and its intellectual life produced towering figures across the traditions: the Muslim philosopher and Sufi Ibn Arabi and the jurist-philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd); the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, born in Cordoba; and a Christian scholarship that translated Arabic and Greek learning into Latin, feeding the European recovery of philosophy. The region's most distinctive religious contribution was in Jewish mysticism: it was in thirteenth-century Castile and in Provence that classical Kabbalah took form, above all in the Zohar, the central text of Jewish mysticism, which appeared in Spain in that period. Iberia was also the ground of intense conflict, the long Christian Reconquista, and its dark culmination in the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and the persecutions of the Inquisition, which scattered Sephardic Jewry and its mystical traditions across the Mediterranean. The region thus stands for both the high promise of interreligious exchange and its tragic collapse.

Iberia and the Languedoc produced an unusual amount of religious diversity and an unusual amount of documentation about it, and the documentation exists because the diversity was being prosecuted.

Inquisition registers are among the most detailed sources in this atlas for what ordinary people believed. Depositions record household practice, prayers, food rules, what a neighbour was seen doing and when, at a level of granularity no devotional text supplies. Much of what is known about Cathar belief in the Languedoc, and about the practice of Jewish and Muslim converts and their descendants in Spain and Portugal, comes from such registers.

They must be read for what they are. Testimony given to a tribunal with power to imprison, confiscate and execute is shaped by that fact; questioning followed prepared lists, so answers follow the shape of the questions; and denunciation had uses that had nothing to do with religion. A register tells you reliably what was asked and what was said, and only inferentially what was done.

The same centuries produced the region's most consequential positive contribution. The Zohar appeared in Castile in the late thirteenth century and became the central text of the kabbalistic tradition, and the expulsion of 1492 scattered that tradition across the Mediterranean, where it was reworked in Safed and elsewhere.

The archive and the exile are two halves of one history.