Convivencia

La Convivencia ("The Coexistence") is an academic hypothesis regarding the period of Spanish history from the Muslim Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the early eighth century until the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. It claims that in the different Moorish Iberian kingdoms, the Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in relative peace. According to this interpretation of history, this period of religious diversity differs from later Spanish and Portuguese history when Catholicism became the sole religion in the Iberian Peninsula, as a result of expulsions and forced conversions.

However, the historicity of the above view of the supposed intercultural harmony has also been challenged as a "myth" and that it is too strongly dependent on unreliable documentation. “Contemporary ecumenist appeal to the ‘Golden Age’ of tolerance” in the 10th and 11th centuries in Córdoba, Andalusia, Spain under Muslim rule, but, for the most part, they are not interested in what actually happened among the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Rather, they describe it as ‘tolerance,’ a word “that would have had little or no meaning at that time.”

La Convivencia often refers to the interplay of cultural ideas between the three religious groups and ideas of religious tolerance. James Carroll invokes this concept and indicates that it played an important role in bringing the classics of Greek philosophy to Europe, with translations from Greek to Arabic to Hebrew and Latin.

An example of La Convivencia was Córdoba, Andalusia in Muslim Spain, in the ninth and tenth centuries. Córdoba was “one of the most important cities in the history of the world.” In it, “Christians and Jews were involved in the Royal Court and the intellectual life of the city.”María Rosa Menocal, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, further describes the libraries of Córdoba as "a significant benchmark of overall social (not just scholarly) well being, since they represented a near-perfect crossroads of the material and the intellectual."

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