Jonathan Ray

Georgetown University, Theology and Religious Studies, Faculty Member

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I am a professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University, specializing in medieval and early modern history of the Sephardic world. My research explores the connections between Christian, Muslim and Jewish societies in Iberia and throughout the broader Mediterranean region.

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Dartmouth College

McGill University

Wellesley College

Università di Bologna

J. H. Chajes

University of Haifa

Florin Curta

University of Florida

Andreas Rhoby

Austrian Academy of Sciences

Daniel Hershenzon

University of Connecticut

Ardian Muhaj

Universidade de Lisboa

Fabien Montcher

Saint Louis University

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Papers by Jonathan Ray

Antisemitism in Spain - A Historical Survey

The Routledge History of Antisemitism, 2023

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Jewish Life in Medieval Spain

University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks, Oct 21, 2022

Hispano-Jewish Society: An Introduction

The Jew in Medieval Iberia, 1100-1500

The rich history of Iberian Jewry has been a powerful muse for scholars of Jewish and medieval st... more The rich history of Iberian Jewry has been a powerful muse for scholars of Jewish and medieval studies for over a century. For many, the subject conjures up images of a Golden Age of Jewish civilization characterized by great material success and an outpouring of religious and intellectual works. For others, this alluring image of Jewish achievement is juxtaposed with, and often overshadowed by, a much darker legacy of marginalization and persecution that culminated in the eventual expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492. The Jew in Medieval Iberia attempts to embrace this complexity and present a portrait of Jewish life in Christian Iberia that emphasizes both the internal diversity of this community and the variety of ways it interacted with its host society. During the high and late Middle Ages, Iberian Jews fulfilled a number of distinct roles, acting as economic catalysts, diplomats, physicians and transmitters of culture. At the same time, the propagation of Jewish intellectual culture advanced along a variety of different pathways. In the hands of rabbis and Jewish courtiers, this intellectual culture also became linked to the general identity and the social and political fortunes of the average Jew. The essays collected in this volume introduce readers to some of the leading figures and social groups of Hispano-Jewish society, and explore the way in which they responded to the opportunities and challenges of their times.

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“Although He Sinned”: Spanish Conversos Between Law, Theology, and Jewish Popular Perception

Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019

Much of the prevailing research on medieval Conversos has focused on Christian attitudes regardin... more Much of the prevailing research on medieval Conversos has focused on Christian attitudes regarding their religious status. To the extent that Jewish responses to the Conversos phenomenon have often been studied, the tendency has been to affirm the influence of the longstanding rabbinic position that the Conversos were forced converts, or ‘anusim, and thus still Jewish. Yet a closer analysis of late medieval sources reveals a great deal of popular Jewish suspicion with regard to Converso religious identity and resistance to the integration of former Conversos into the daily life of professing Jewish communities. Attitudes of average Jews on this issue offer insight into the ways in which theological and legal concepts of sin played out in the social spaces of Mediterranean Jewish communities.

Diaspora as Nation

The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora

This chapter traces the evolution of the so-called “Eastern” Sephardic diaspora in its Mediterran... more This chapter traces the evolution of the so-called “Eastern” Sephardic diaspora in its Mediterranean context from 1492 to the late twentieth century. It looks at the way in which these exiles and their descendants forged a new diasporic identity characterized by sprawling mercantile networks that linked Jews and Conversos, new forms of Judeo-Spanish, and a nostalgia for medieval Spain. At first, the mutual sense of estrangement between the refugees and the native Jews among whom they came to settle reinforced communal solidarity among the Sephardim. From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Mediterranean Sephardim adopted aspects of Ottoman, North African, and Italian culture, but succeeded in maintaining a distinct communal character amid a shifting set of political contexts and associations. During the twentieth century, the mass migration of Mediterranean Sephardim to the State of Israel helped recast them as “Eastern” Jews, or Mizrahim.

2 Ashkenazim and Sephardim before (and after) the Modern Age

After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry, written by Jonathan Ray

Journal of Early Modern History, 2015

Iberian Jewry between West and East: Jewish Settlement in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean

Mediterranean Studies

If ever there was a group that fit the latter-day Sephardic poet's description as "tempest-tossed... more If ever there was a group that fit the latter-day Sephardic poet's description as "tempest-tossed," it was the Spanish Jews of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1 492 stands as one of the most tragic and decisive turning points in Jewish history, and is commonly recognized as the effective terminus of Jewish life in medieval Europe. The mass migration it produced also represents something of a return of this community, whose cultural identity was forged in Muslim al-Andalus, to the Islamic world. Accordingly, the expulsion of 1492 and the subsequent settlement of so many of the exiles in the Muslim lands of the Ottoman Empire present themselves as hallmarks of the transition from the medieval to the early modern world that highlight the differences of West to East, Christendom and Islam. The foundation of the Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire is a cherished tale for many who champion its legacy of interfaith symbiosis, the basic outline of which is as follows. The Jewish presence in most of medieval Europe ended with a long period of decline crowned by mass forced conversions, and eventually expulsion of the region's last great Jewish community in 1492. But just as the long history of Jewish life in the medieval West was coming to a close, a new empire and a new era were rising in the East. The rapid expansion of the Ottoman Empire over the course of the fifteenth century provided a ready-made haven for the Jewish refugees of Europe, especially those summarily exiled from Spain in 1492. Thus, as the medieval period gave way to the early modern period, the balance of world Jewry shifted from West to East, and Ottoman tolerance became juxtaposed with Christian persecution. These Jews helped to enrich their new host society as merchants, civil servants and artisans. This portrait of Sephardic settlement in the Ottoman Empire has been closely bound up with the collective memory of Middle Eastern Jews, and continues to function as a reference point for a variety of groups seeking evidence of inter-religious coexistence. However, the broad lines of this narrative remain misleading. Hispano-Jewish migration during this period does 44

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The Jews of Medieval Spain: Community, Marginality and the Notion of a Mediterranean Society

From Catalonia to the Caribbean: The Sephardic Orbit from Medieval to Modern Times

Christian (Re)Encounters with Jews in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean

Jewish History, 2017

This essay considers how the reencounter between Christians and Jews over the course of the sixte... more This essay considers how the reencounter between Christians and Jews over the course of the sixteenth century shaped the evolution of European attitudes toward Jews. It notes that, while 1492 marked an end to a long-standing era of Christian-Jewish relations in Europe, it also signaled an important shift toward new thinking about the once-familiar Jews. The combined effects of the absence of Jewish communities from most of Western Europe, the failure of Christian society effectively to integrate the Conversos of Spain and Portugal, and the expanded cultural horizons engendered by the Age of Discovery helped challenge and alter popular images of the Jews that had been inherited from the Middle Ages. The lands of the Muslim Mediterranean operated as an important stage on which the Christian reencounter with Jews played out, and travelers' accounts of the Jews in these lands came to exert a powerful influence on the way in which the image of the Jew was recast in the European imagination. The discussion here seeks to expand on recent work on sixteenthcentury Christian ethnographies of the Jews and to complicate some of our notions of the nature and development of Christian attitudes toward the Jews during the transition from the medieval period to the early modern.

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Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur

Safed 16th-19th Centuries, in German.

The Jews between Church and State in Reconquest Iberia: The Evidence of the Ecclesiastical Tithe

Viator, 2007

... Milton, Christian and Jewish Lenders: Religious Identity and the Extension of Credit, Viato... more

Images of the Jewish community in medieval Iberia

Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 2009

... Ben Shalom, Myths of Troy. 10Lawee, Reception of Rashi&amp;amp;#x27;s Commentary. 11O... more

Whose Golden Age? Some Thoughts on Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval Iberia

Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, 2011

The medieval period in Spanish history has alternately been cast as a Golden Age of interfaith ha... more The medieval period in Spanish history has alternately been cast as a Golden Age of interfaith harmony and an example of the ultimate incompatibility of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities. In this essay, I suggest that a better way to understand interfaith relations in medieval Iberia is to think about these religious communities in less monolithic terms. With regard to Jewish-Christian relations in particular, factors such as wealth, social standing, and intellectual interests were as important as religious identity in shaping the complex bonds between Christians and Jews.

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What if King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had not expelled the Jews of Spain in 1492?

What Ifs of Jewish History

David A. Wacks: Double diaspora in Sephardic literature

Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies

The Sephardic Frontier

No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconqui... more No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond. The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high degree of openness, mobility, and interaction with both Christians and Muslims. Ray's view challenges the traditional historiography, which holds that Sephardic communities, already fully developed, were simply reestablished on the frontier. In the early years of settlement, Iberia's crusader kings actively supported Jewi...

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Encara una "societat mediterrània"?: els jueus dels regnes ibèrics cristians a la Mediterrània baixmedieval

Contested community: the problem of political organization in the Early Sephardic Diaspora

Hispania judaica bulletin, 2015

Community and Control in the Sephardic Diaspora

Antisemitism in Spain - A Historical Survey

The Routledge History of Antisemitism, 2023

Download

Jewish Life in Medieval Spain

University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks, Oct 21, 2022

Hispano-Jewish Society: An Introduction

The Jew in Medieval Iberia, 1100-1500