Dante scholars led him to conclusions much like my own. In noting the impasse in the pseudodebate over Dante’s indebtedness to Arabic sources, he concludes that it “shows rather to what extent the controversy has ceased to be a problem which can be restricted only to the study of Dante’s sources. The controversy has become a problem to be solved only with a reinterpretation of our understanding of the European Middle Ages as a time in which Arabic and Jewish cultural elements as well are given the place they deserve as components of the so-called “Western” tradition. In this light the ‘influence’ of a specific work on any particular author is only an episode” (191).
15. The term “translation” is here used in quotation marks because, although it is the term normally used, it can be seriously misleading. For a fuller discussion, see Chapter 2.
16. For examples of this Europeanist absorption of Haskins’s work, see Southern 1953, Wolff 1968, and Benson, Constable, and Lanham 1982. The centrality of the Arabic tradition is apparent even in studies that do not explicitly acknowledge it and that may seem to be saying something quite different. See note 3 above for Haskins’s and Kristeller’s indirect revelations. For explicit and detailed explorations of the centrality of Averroes, his own relationship with Aristotle, and the different translations available in Europe, see both Peters 1968 and Lemay 1963a.
17. I use the term “occupation” in quotation marks partially because its accuracy is questionable when one is dealing with a seven-hundred-year period and most of all because the use of such terms is so often among the best indicators of current attitudes we have about the presence of Arabs in Europe. I can think of few other seven-hundred-year long “occupations,” and it would seem that this usage, so often reflexive, is indicative of the general image of the entire phenomenon as something quite removed from Europe, a temporary (long but still transient) interlude. The terms “Western” and “occidental,” to make another example, are often used as if they were geographical notions but at the same time in explicit juxtaposition to Islamic Spain without further explanation of how or why the Iberian peninsula comes to be relegated to the East. Clearly, geographical terminology has been reshaped by notions of cultural ideology in such cases. It is still more interesting to note that even studies specifically dedicated to exploring or demonstrating connections between the Arabic and Romance worlds often begin with the assumption of a fundamental separateness that must be “bridged.” See, for example, the titles of many works, especially Terrasse 1958, Islam d’Espagne, une rencontre de l’Orient et de l’Occident, or Menéndez Pidal 1956 (“Eslabón”), both among the best general sources of information on the admixture, rather than separation, of culture in medieval Spain. (Interestingly enough, it is the word for “bridge” in Arabic, al-Qanṭara, that was chosen as the name for the journal that has replaced Al-Andalus. See its first issue, in 1890, for a discussion.) Thus the name of a conference to explore the issue is “Islam and the Medieval West,” with an intimation of the separateness of those two entities, and the title of the 1965 Spoleto conference, “L’Occidente e l’Islam nell’alto Medioevo” conveys a similar impression. No less so Makdisi’s 1976 “Interaction between Islam and the West” or Jean Richard’s 1966 “La Vogue de l’Orient dans la littérature occidentale du moyen âge.” Even Menéndez Pidal’s 1955 Poesía árabe y poesía europea, one of the best essays on the subject of the close and vital interrelations between the two poetries, has a title that might well create a quite different impression: that the Arabic tradition (and he is, of course, speaking of the Andalusian one) is not European. The same notions impinge on concepts of nationality. As I note in several other places in this book, the very use of the title “Spaniard” is implicitly defined in racial and religious terms. The Cid is a Spaniard, but Ibn Ḥazm and Maimonides are not; they are an Arab and a Jew respectively.
18. Monroe 1970, which is both comprehensive and analytically acute, is undoubtedly the best source of the two closely related issues discussed here, covering both how the Arabs and Islam have been studied academically within the Spanish intellectual tradition and how the question of Spain’s special character as a part of the European community has been shaped by Spaniards’ views on the “Arab question.” The now-classic works on the latter issue are Castro (all entries in the bibliography) and Sánchez-Albornoz [1956] 1966. The polemic is far from dead, as Sánchez-Albornoz 1973 indicates. See also Glick 1979, the introduction of which includes a concise summary of the different views on the question. Glick begins his study by noting that “History seems scarcely distinguishable from myth” (3) and goes on to note that, in the realm of dealing with the Spanish past, the problem is more than usually acute. He notes that “long after the enemy was vanquished, the Jews expelled, and the Inquisition disbanded, the image of the ‘Moor’ remained as the quintessential stranger, an object to be feared” (3).
19. There are some views that are more explicitly negative on the Arabs than Sánchez-Albornoz’s. Bertrand’s 1952 comments verge on the unquotable and include observations that Arabs are “enemies of learning” and a “nullity as civilizing elements.” Those wishing to read as vitriolic an example as any of anti-Arab prejudice are referred to pp. 82–94 of the English translation.
20. It is important to remember here how closely related were the literary and philosophical traditions of Hebrew and Arabic in Spain. In many instances it is more accurate to recall them as a single reasonably coherent tradition with two different prestige languages than as two completely separate ones. Suffice it to recall that the kharjas that Stern deciphered were kharjas to Hebrew muwashshaḥas. For the close relationship between those poems in the two different classical languages, see especially Stern 1959 and Millás y Vallicrosa 1967. It is also helpful to recall the admixture of originally Hebrew and Arabic elements in prose narrative as well. See M. J. Lacarra 1979. The melding of those traditions is evident in the text of the converso Petrus Alfonsi; see Hermes [1970] 1977, M. J. Lacarra 1980, and Vernet 1972 and 1978. Because of the prestige of Arabic as the language of letters and philosophy, Maimonides was perhaps the most noteworthy, but far from the only, Jewish writer to have used Arabic as his medium. For admixture in the textual history of the philosophical tradition, see Lerner 1974, introduction.
21. Thus, when Curtius writes his brief observations on “Spain’s Cultural ‘Belatedness’ ” (Curtius 1953:541–43) he cites Sánchez-Albornoz in support of his views. The short piece by Curtius is worth reading in any case because it reveals much in its three pages about the sort of exclusionary and negative image some of the most important Romance medievalists have had of medieval Arabic culture in Europe.
22. “Discovery,” too, is a misleading term. Stern’s famous “discovery” of 1948 is much more accurately described as an “identification.” The kharjas were not lost or unknown—they even existed in published form. It was just that no one knew what they were. The Arabists and Hebraists who had worked on the muwashshaḥas of which they are a part had no idea of what they were, because, of course, they were studying Arabic or Hebrew literature, not Romance, and they did not imagine that the literature they were dealing with, despite its geographical provenance, had anything to do with Romance. Romance scholars, on the other hand, even those Hispanists working on medieval material, would have little if anything to do with material written in Arabic even within their own geographical and chronological sphere of interest, or even, as turned out to be the case here, with texts written in Romance but preserved in either Hebrew or Arabic transliteration and embedded in texts written in one of those two classical languages. The circumstances render Stern’s identification and decipherment of these texts far more worthy of the greatest possible respect than any mere “discovery,” any serendipitous stumbling on a lost manuscript, would have been. It was not accident or good fortune but rather his accurate understanding of the cultural situation in medieval Spain that made it possible, an understanding few scholars before him had had—or at least had applied. In addition, his success is best honored as a landmark, proof of the failure of our views of and approaches to the culture of al-Andalus, of medieval Spain, to accurately identify or deal with its literature. It is a failure that has not been overcome by Stern’s discovery and that affects the study of the kharjas and other Hispano-Arabic
