or Christian benefactors no longer needed them as supporters in the struggle
against their Christian or Muslim adversaries.
The Jews of Christian Spain inherited both the communal organization
and much of the cultural heritage of their forebears in Muslim Spain. Typical
of Jewish communities throughout the diaspora, each Jewish community
governed by an aljama(the Arabic equivalent of kehilla), a communal board
empowered by the state to govern the entire community. The range of author-
ity enjoyed by the aljama, though, was virtually unprecedented. The Aljama
issued ordinances (takanot); established and maintained a system of courts;
assessed and collected communal taxes and fines; administered communal
charity, schools, and synagogues; managed communal property and emergen-
cies; repaired walls and gates; regulated markets and prices; and, if necessary,
excommunicated recalcitrant members. Unlike any other Jewish communal
board, however, the aljamasupervised the moral behavior of the community
through a special committee called Birurei Averot, and flogged and even
imprisoned troublesome members.
The aljama’s power was concentrated in very few hands – thirty lay leaders
in Barcelona, for example. Yet the extensive authority of these individuals
was limited by a system of checks and balances. The rabbinate at times dis-
puted the rulings of the lay aljamaboard by referring to legal precedents
within rabbinic tradition. At the same time, learned lay leaders could dis-
pute the claims of the rabbis. All ordinances proposed by the aljamahad to
be ratified by a majority of the general communal membership at a public
assembly, checking the combined influence of the lay and rabbinic elite. In
the long run, the authority of the aljamawas made possible by an underly-
ing consent of the governed, a deeply rooted loyalty to Jewish law, and a
sense of peoplehood.
The cultural world of the Jews in Christian Spain also had origins in
Muslim Spain. The Jewish courtiers in Christian Spain generally received a
dual education, as had their earlier counterparts: the Bible, the Talmud,
Hebrew, coupled with philosophy, poetry, and often medicine. Jews in
Christian Spain, moreover, maintained Arabic high culture into the thirteenth
century. At the same time, there were curricular differences. Jews in Christian
Spain increasingly gravitated toward a different philosophical tradition than
their forebears, opting for Neoplatonic rather than Aristotelian philosophy.
Hasdai ibn Crescas, one of the leading Jewish philosophers in Christian Spain,
was a sharp critic of Aristotle. Among other things, the impact of
Neoplatonism introduced an element of non-rational thinking, complemented
by the inclusion of Kabbala on the Jewish side of the curriculum.
The emergence of a systematic Jewish mystical tradition known as Kabbala
reached a high point with the appearence of the first full-length systematic
treatment of this tradition, Sefer ha-Zohar(The Book of Radiance). Compiled
and published in the thirteenth century in southern France by Moses de Leon,
96 The Jews of medieval Christendom