Sephardic Frontier (Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past)

Ray examines the early development of Jewish communities in the various peninsular kingdoms during the transition from Muslim to Christian rule. He contends that the social, political, and economic factors of the frontier during the second half of the thirteenth century helped to create Jewish communities characterized by a high degree of fluidity. . . . Insightful and engaging. -Booklist (15 February 2006)

Using rabbinic sources and unpublished archives, Jonathan Ray brings Jewish settlement of the southern Iberian peninsula into clearer focus. . . . This interesting and lively book challenges the image of medieval Spanish and Portuguese society as invariably corporate and religious in its organization. The high medieval Iberian frontier, at least, was a place where the quest of individuals and families for financial and social opportunity took precedence over loyalty to rigidly defined confessional groups. -Jessica A. Coope, American Historical Review (June 2007)

The Sephardic Frontier is a new and convincing account of the Sephardic Jews and the Spanish Reconquest. The Jews are here regarded not as beleaguered communities responding to a Christian onslaught, but rather as participants in the expansion: as immigrants, land-holders, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. Jonathan Ray employs many common themes of medieval Spanish history such as the frontier, cultural exchange, and the coexistence of religious communities. These are seen in a new way, however, as the Jews emerge as individuals, not as a confessional group, individuals with a range of opportunities and challenges brought about by the expansion of the Christian kingdoms. This allows historians to look beyond generalizations about a Golden Age of Spanish toleration followed by persecution and to regard the Jewish experience as more dynamic and individual. -Paul Freedman, Yale University

The Sephardic Frontier is a pioneering book on an age of pioneers, vividly explaining how the Jews of Spain and Portugal found a space for themselves on the expanding frontiers of the Christian kingdoms, under the leadership of dynamic individuals and in the face of increasing interference by the Crown. -David Abulafia, University of Cambridge

Jonathan Ray's The Sephardic Frontier is an ambitious and very important reconsideration of the establishment of Jewish settlements and the sociopolitical experience of the Jewish communities in southern Iberia during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By focusing on the critical notion of frontier in both the geographical and social sense Ray effectively bridges the historiography of the Jews with the historiography of their neighbors and offers the reader a compelling, complex picture of the richness of Sephardic history and society during a critical period in peninsular history. -Ross Brann, Cornell University