In Neighboring Faiths, a recently published collection of essays, the historian David Nirenberg explores the relationship among the three religions during the Middle Ages. Alex Novikoff writes in his review:
Medieval Iberia has often been held up as a mirror to our own society, and for quite understandable reasons. For some, this bygone era represents a beacon of interfaith tolerance and cultural exchange of the sort we might learn from today. Convivencia (“living together”) has long been the descriptive term of choice, a word that over the years has achieved a sort of sublime meaninglessness. . . .
For others, medieval Iberia is best seen as a harsh and unrelenting mill that, through the grating and grinding of competing cultures and hostile takeovers, churned out some of the worst templates of religious intolerance: jihad and crusade, forced conversions, torture and inquisition, racial exclusion, wholesale expulsions, and more. . . . Yet other scholars . . . favor a more nuanced middle ground of [simultaneous] conflict and coexistence. . . . In this stimulating and deeply learned collection of essays . . . David Nirenberg reaffirms his mastery as an original and challenging expositor in this third category of historical interpreters.
Many who pick up this book will want to know whether Nirenberg has a special message to a modern audience bathed both in the gruesome stories of religiously inspired violence that flood our daily news feeds and in the seemingly endless discussions of the allegedly “medieval” behavior of modern fundamentalist groups. . . . By the close of the book I could not quite tell whether Nirenberg is pessimistic or optimistic about the future of our neighborly relations. . . . . He gently entreats his readers to draw their own conclusions from the terrain that has been mapped and the issues that have been raised. My own conclusion is one that [the poet] Robert Frost, I suspect, must have known all along: good fences don’t make good neighbors; good neighbors make good neighbors. The fences we build play a more ambiguous role.
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