Robyn Creswell’s NYRB review (February 22, 2024; archived) of On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus by Eric Calderwood should be worth reading for anyone interested in the period of Islamic rule over the Iberian Peninsula, but what drives me to post is this (bold added):
The most popular tool in this interpretive kit, which a host of thinkers have used to understand al-Andalus, is the concept of convivencia, or coexistence. Many English-language readers encountered this idea in the scholar María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World (2002), a lyrical portrait of what she calls medieval Spain’s “culture of tolerance.” […]
The idea of convivencia, though often associated with Andalusia, is not Andalusian: its roots lie in the much more recent past. The word was first used in the peculiar—and conveniently vague—sense of religious and ethnic coexistence by the Spanish historian and literary critic Américo Castro in his book España en su historia (1948). Borrowing the term from philology, where it denoted the struggle for supremacy among vernacular variants of a word, Castro gave it an existentialist turn, using it to characterize the daily interaction between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish “castes,” which he took to be the basis of Spanish identity.
I find it hard to believe that a word which appears to mean simply ‘living together’ (and is so defined in the RAE’s Diccionario de la lengua española) originally had the specialized sense of ‘the struggle for supremacy among vernacular variants of a word’ and that this had to be borrowed and repurposed by Castro, but since there is no OED for Spanish, I have no way of finding out. Anybody know the history of this word?
Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing Our Approach to Medieval “Convivencia”, fn 3:
and, perhaps, The Contribution of Menéndez Pidal to Linguistic Theory.
The semantic connection between “living together” and “the struggle for supremacy among vernacular variants of a word” is perhaps stronger for an “old school” Spanish philologist than for participants + readers of this thread. After all, diachronically the different variants of a word do not coexist forever: eventually one variant emerges as the dominant one and drives the others to extinction (or at least to marginalization). In like fashion the coexistence of Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities on the Iberian peninsula ultimately ended with the elimination of the latter two religious communities.
Thus, for an “old school” Spanish philologist an established term describing this coexistence of vernacular variants, with the tacit understanding that one such variant drove (or, in the case of modern vernaculars, will drive) the others to extinction, would have seemed appropriate as a term describing a situation of different religious communities coexisting. Appropriate, because our “old school” Spanish philologist knew (approvingly or not, that does not really matter) that this coexistence was not to stretch into the present.
… since there is no OED for Spanish, …. Well, 1726-1739 the Diccionario de Autoridades did a fair approximation of the later OED. And convivencia didn’t make it into those three tomes.
https://webfrl.rae.es/DA.html.
There is also the Diccionario histórico de la lengua española. I believe it has the letter A done so far. Here is an example entry.
https://webfrl.rae.es/DH.html
“ El Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (DHLE) es un diccionario nativo digital que persigue describir en su integridad (en el eje diatópico, diastrático y cronológico) la historia del léxico de la lengua española. Una característica definitoria de este repertorio radica en su voluntad de analizar la historia del léxico en una perspectiva relacional, atendiendo a los vínculos etimológicos, morfológicos y semánticos que se establecen entre las palabras. El DHLE ha sido concebido desde sus orígenes como una base de datos léxica electrónica (y diacrónica), lo que permite elaborar sus artículos de acuerdo con un criterio de organización del trabajo por campos semánticos (o voces relacionadas por su significado) y familias léxicas.”
For other RAE dictionaries go here: https://www.rae.es/recursos
Google lists a few links to sites that supposedly offer etymologies for convivencia, but those I’ve read so far give only the most superficial history, followed by lots of philosophical opinions.
Here is one. https://elalmanaque.com/lexico/convivencia.htm
Thanks, everyone! I guess I can see how that transition makes sense, but I’m still unclear about whether the term was actually originally specialized to such a restricted philological meaning.
The word was first used in the peculiar—and conveniently vague—sense of religious and ethnic coexistence by the Spanish historian and literary critic Américo Castro…
I guess what it means is that the word convivencia was first used as a term of art by that particular historian in that particular work.
Is that a ‘struggle’? Does there have to be a ‘winner’? Can’t/don’t historically variants persist in parallel? There’s plenty of words in dictionaries with multiple meanings and/or spellings that show no signs of coalescing. Or is it that the printing press and durned lexicographers/bean-counters want to arrange words into neat boxes?
We had in another place the occasion to mention the persistence of variants of Eyot/Ait.
It’s hard to believe in these end times that Muslims and Jews could coexist, but that was evident in touring the Alhambra … until the Christians got uppity and smashed a Renaissance church all un-geometrically into those Moorish courtyards.
El Cid, the prototypical Spanish hero, was absolutely fine with offering his services to Muslim princes or Christian. (Clue’s in the name …)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Cid
Said princes, Christian and Muslim, had no great hangups about attacking coreligionists in alliance with the other team, either.
The army under Judar Pasha (aka Diego de Guevara) that delivered the deathblow for the invading Moroccans against the Songhay empire at Tondibi contained a significant Christian contingent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tondibi
You can find a few uses of “convivience” in English in recent decades for the non-philological “conviviencia” concept, presumably because the perfectly good old English word “conviviality” is thought to have the wrong semantic overtones.* Indeed, the ngram viewer tells us that “conviviality” (as a word if not a practice …) peaked in Anglophone society about 200 years ago. Those were the days when publishers offered titles like _The Humourous and Sentimental Songster; or, Convivialist’s Pocket Companion, containing a Selection of Admired Songs, Anecdotes, &c._ A tremendous value at only one shilling the copy, considering the same publisher wanted 2/6 for _The Accomplished Youth; or the true Principles of Morality and Politeness_.
*To be fair, conviviality did not descend straight from the Latin verb that is the etymon of conviviencia but sideways via the derived noun convivium, which does not mean just any instance of together-living but more specifically a banquet.
echoing Etienne and AntC: the contentious part seems to me to be the slide from “ongoing coexistence” to a social-darwinist fantasy of a “struggle for supremacy”. that certainly had no place in menocal’s use of the word (as i can attest as an advisee of hers), and i very much doubt that it was any part of américo castro’s. i could see that, perhaps, as part of earlier philological uses – though i wonder how much is simply creswell (or calderwood, or another recent source) projecting baseline contemporary u.s. social darwinism into the situation. but if that was at all widespread, then castro and menocal’s use was very pointedly ironic*.
a very significant part of their work was specifically about naming the ongoing presence of andalus (and its muslim and jewish strands in particular) in modern and contemporary spanish (and through it, western european) culture, despite the vocal insistance since the renaissance on “the european tradition” as an exclusively christian/roman monoculture. just off the top of my head, menocal’s writings on that theme point to everything from lexicon (lute; troubador; etc) to central literary forms (the frame-story-based collection; the love lyric; etc**) to pervasive social/cultural structures (‘udhrī/courtly/romantic love; the renunciatory-poet trope; etc).
which is to say, they used “convivencia” to put forward a vision of coexistence that directly rejects the (christian, roman) teleology that creswell is claiming as central to the term. their intervention in cultural history was/is very much analogous to kropotkin’s in evolutionary biology, disproving the idea that multiplicity means a “struggle for supremacy” and eventually conquest*** by showing concretely how mutualism operates in practice (which doesn’t exclude conflict, but develops ways for conflict to not end in “supremacy” on one side and extermination on the other).
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* the juxtaposition of names has its own irony, too, which i never pointed out in menocal’s presence, because a silent agreement to avoid drectly airing our political differences was part of what made my working with her possible.
** i think there’s a case to be made that their work has implications for science fiction/fantasy too, or at least the “journey into mystery” side of the genre/s. i can’t remember whether it was menocal herself or castro or someone else she liked to cite who traced the connection, but she described a set of ways that dante’s Divine Comedy was rooted in the mi’raj literature, which i think places the roots of a central part of sff squarely in the muslim mediterranean cultural world.
*** which is almost never actually argued for or defended, just presented as an axiomatic abstraction.
While it not logically impossible that a philologist (of all people) might use a word which transparently has the etymology “living together” to mean pretty much its exact opposite, “struggle for supremacy”, it seems a bit unlikely on first principles. Citation needed, as the wikipeople say.
The second of MMcM’s links suggests that Pidal held that an important part of diachronic language change is the reduction in number of what were once numerous coexisting variants (the article says that he concluded that the many variants found in later Latin manuscripts in Spain often reflected genuine spoken variation rather than merely varying degrees of interference from the scribes’ actual speech in their attempts to write Latin.)
That seems reasonable, but I’d be surprised if Pidal himself used convivencia to mean, specifically, “loss of variation over time” (by whatever mechanism.) Perhaps he used convivencia as a technical term for the whole diachronic scenario he describes, and others subsequently applied it to mean just the variant-pruning processes. It wouldn’t be the first time linguists had come up with seriously misleading terminology …
Whatever changes, if any, may have occurred in the commonly accepted use of convivencia over the centuries—I see only steadfast consistency in the RAE publications—there was a radical shift in El Andalus. Under Muslim Berber domination, the Christians and Jews were accepted as “people of The Book” and were allowed to practice their religions.
When Don Pelayo emerged from Covadonga and began the reconquista, the new group at the top of the pile declared that only their own beliefs were acceptable. Goodbye, convivencia.
After the reconquistas in Iberia were completed, many of the Iberian Jews who were driven out relocated to the Ottoman-ruled Balkans, where they formed one element in a multireligious, multicultural, multilingual polity that lasted for many centuries until it didn’t. Now I am curious as to whether popularizing historians of that era of Balkan history have appropriated “convivencia” to their own use or whether the rhetorical parallel has not been drawn — perhaps because a gauzy romanticizing of al-Andalus suits certain modern agendas while the agendas that would be served by ditto of the Ottoman era have for good or ill found little market share in the current Balkans.
A google search tentatively suggests that the word “convivencia” may not appear in Mark Mazower’s fine book _Salonica, City of Ghosts_ about one urban microcosm of that lost Ottoman milieu, although it does appear in a 2021 review of book by David Leupold titled _Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory_. Which is not really the Balkans, but close I suppose …
Separately, of course, the promoters of modern discourse about the supposed tolerance of al-Andalus may overlook or understate the considerable variability in practice, with certain rulers unsurprisingly being more tolerant and others less, leading to incidents like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Andalusi_Christians_in_1126 which tend to undermine the more simplistic versions of the Lost Golden Age narrative.
Christians and Jews could be executed for blasphemy, which could be construed as making any statement in opposition to Islam beyond that required by someone’s own religion. Apostasy was also a capital crime, and anyone whose father was a Muslim was considered a Muslim, meaning they were forbidden from ever professing a different religion. How rigorously these laws were enforced varied a great deal over the history of the Islamic caliphates; there were a number of crackdowns during the history of Al-Andalus, although the number of people executed was never particularly large.
i don’t recall him using the word “convivencia”, but ammiel alcalay’s books After Jews and Arabs and Memories of the Future are landmarks in talking about the ottoman (and pre/post-ottoman) levant as this kind of shared (multi)cultural space. and other sefardi cultural workers (i’m thinking of writers like devin naar and tom haviv, and musicians like laura elkeslassy) certainly work in that intellectual tradition, though i don’t know that any of them make direct reference to the castro/menocal/etc school of thought in their work on the eastern and southern mediterranean.
i don’t think any of the writers in that tradition, however, offer a flat romanticized vision of either the andalusi convivencia or the ottoman ekumene. things worked rather differently in the various umayyad polities centered on córdoba than in the taifas or the more theocratic almoravid and almohad cross-strait empires, partly for internal reasons, and partly in relation to what happened in the christian-ruled taifas and then kingdoms. i suspect that menocal’s focus on the cultural sphere may have been precisely to move the terrain of debate away from the messiness of shifting and varied state policies (and practices, which may or may not have matched them) and into a space where the overall processes and shape of things were more consistent over the long durée.
“The Convivence” will be the interstellar pan-Galactic more-or-less-statelike thing in my forthcoming space opera trilogy.
(My plucky-yet-vulnerable beautiful-but-badass heroine will be an operative of its clandestine spy network, the Connivance.)
I see that Ammiel Alcalay (mentioned by rozele) is himself a Balkan-American, descended from the Sephardim of Belgrade, yet he chose to write (at least in the work mentioned) about Levantine matters rather than similar Balkan matters. This may be understandable, but I am so eccentric as to find the Balkans perhaps more interesting. The Balkans need better PR people!
@JWB: alcalay very much looks at the balkans as part of a levantine cultural sphere that roughly corresponds to the ottoman ekumene*. sarajevo, beirut, and morocco’s Kénitra prison (longtime home of abraham serfaty) are among the key points in the geography he discusses.
(aside from his own poetry, he’s also written, about visiting his family friend charles olson in gloucester as a kid in the early 1960s, and is the moving force behind CUNY’s amazing Lost & Found archival publication series)
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* or the original zone talked about as “the near east” (either way, as opposed to the more limited meaning that basically corresponds to bilad ash-shams, or the post-WWI “direct-rule” Class A Mandate territories). and if memory serves, he talks about it as less defined by geography than by the multilingual paths of intellectual and artistic circulation that tightly knit together a world spanning alexandria, salonika, aleppo, smyrna, algiers, sofia, al-quds…
@rozele: Oh, that’s interesting. It’s an eccentrically broad sense of “Levantine,” but who am I to object to the eccentrically broad?
I’m delighted to see Ammiel Alcalay come up; he’s an old favorite — see this 2005 post in which I link to several earlier ones (on the first of which, from 2003, Alcalay himself commented).
That 2005 post has some vintage Tatyana ranting comments that might be a treat for real connoisseurs of the early indie-label days of the Hattery. (She expresses skepticism about Andalus-romanticizers in perhaps less cautious language than I have employed in this thread.)
Huh! That’s my third cousin once removed! (Alcalay, not Tatyana.)