The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Religion, better known as The Kuzari, is one of the last and most popular works of medieval Judaism's premier poet, Judah Halevi (c. 1075-1141). While originally undertaken to respond to the queries of a Karaite scholar, it was reworked and expanded over nearly two decades into the artful and multifaceted dialogue we now possess. Halevi crafted it to address a broad array of religious, philosophical, and cultural issues that concerned him and his contemporaries in the wake of bloody conflicts generated by the Reconquista and the First Crusade. These reflected ongoing quarrels between belief and unbelief and between belief and belief, both within and among the cultures and communities of Andalusia, which continue in important ways to this day. While the work is generally regarded as apologetic in character, it is no mere polemic. Rather, its theological defense of Judaism is deeply informed by philosophy and respectful of both its integrity and methods. In what follows, my goal is to analyze and explain a number of Halevi’s key ideas and arguments, to show how he uses them and also revises them, to raise a number of salient questions about them, and to identify the trajectory of their reappearance later in the dialogue.

Consumption is a heading so all-embracing as to be potentially infinite in its scope. We have chosen to concentrate on the fields of cuisine and fashion for a number of reasons. They are, as this chapter will show, to a large extent related ('show what me what you eat and drink and I will tell you what you wear' is perhaps an exaggeration, but not much of one); they have perhaps unsuspected political and ideological resonances; they are probably the two areas of French popular culture most significantly ignored by Anglophone academics, as the dearth of articles on them in major journals suggests; and yet their presence not only 'on the ground' in mainland France but in French literary and cinematic texts is an often vitally important one. Much more important work remains to be done in exploring the resonance and significance of these two most inescapable of areas. The French all eat, drink and dress themselves, but until now little has been done, in English at any rate, to investigate how and why.

Food and drink France's cuisine is among her major cultural and economic assets. Indeed, it could be argued that it is the area more than any other in which she clearly leads the world. German philosophy, Italian art and architecture, the American cinema, the British theatre are worthy rivals and sometimes more to their French counterparts, but nobody would question France's position as the cradle of gastronomy and the world's leading producer of top-quality wine.

In the summer of 1305, Rabbi Solomon ibn Adret and his court in Barcelona prohibited the study of Greco-Arabic philosophy and science to Catalonian Jews below the age of twenty-five. In order to protect their community from any potential effects of this decree, a group of prominent Jewish scholars in the city of Montpellier prohibited the placement of any obstacle in the way of southern French Jews, of any age, wishing to pursue Greco-Arabic learning. The transgression of either injunction by Jews within its jurisdiction carried the severe penalty of excommunication or communal banishment. The leader of a more conservative philosophic group in Montpellier, frustrated by the brazen action of his southern French adversaries, declared their proclamation on behalf of Greco-Arabic learning “illegitimate ” and excommunicated its promulgators. At the time of this flurry of conflicting excommunications, philosophic perspectives were well incorporated into southern French Jewish culture; yet some more conservative Jewish thinkers felt that the character of philosophic interpretation in the South of France had become so extreme that it endangered the historical and normative fabric of Judaism. Abba Mari of Montpellier, the philosophically oriented thinker who sounded the alarm, cited the influence of the Muslim philosopher Averroes as critical to this treacherous exegetical turn that he hoped to reverse by encouraging the scholars of neighboring Catalonia to prohibit access to Greco-Arabic learning until an age at which aspiring philosophers generally would have achieved a traditional religious commitment. Abba Mari ultimately failed to achieve his goal of steering Jewish culture in the South of France along safer paths, but his efforts opened the window wide upon a whole world of Jewish intellectual and spiritual ferment.

Accounts of the evolution of narrative forms in Spanish literature often hinge on an unacknowledged notion of progress in which expressions of pride accompany resentment at the world's failure to recognize national achievements. A glorious start (Cervantes, the picaresque novel) was followed by a period of decline (the unpatriotic eighteenth century, the underdeveloped local-color piece, the contemptible serialized novel), then a reawakening (to use Menéndez Pelayo's term) during the nineteenth century with the emergence of the great masters of realism, notably Pérez Galdós. As Alda Blanco has argued, this trajectory is often narrated as a sexualized competition, in which “feminine” forms, linked with mass culture, are despised or ignored, while more “virile” forms are held up to compete with the work of celebrities such as Balzac or Zola. In describing this narrative trajectory as a response to anxiety over legitimacy, both sexual and national, feminists today are engaged in a healthy critique of literary standards and the evaluative rhetoric of evolution that implies literary perfectibility.

The process of reassessing a feminine tradition begins with a search, discovery,reediting and reevaluation of what has been excluded from the predominantlymale canon. In the case of Spain this process is still in its initialphase, although considerable impetus has come recently from the collectionof women writers edited by Castalia in conjunction with the Instituto de laMujer (‘Institute for Women’s Affairs’).

In a classic article, Shlomo Pines argued that post-Thomistic Scholasticism, most notably Duns Scotus and the school of Parisian physics (e.g., Jean Buridan, Nicole Oresme), had a strong impact upon fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Jewish philosophy. Pines pointed in this article to the “interest displayed by contemporary Jewish thinkers in the new problems under discussion, or in the old problems in a new formulation unfamiliar to the Arabic-Jewish tradition.”In what follows I shall explore Pines' thesis against the backdrop of specific issues in Jewish philosophy. More specifically, I shall claim that Scholastic influences upon fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Jewish philosophy can be seen in the increased attention paid to Scholastic logic, in increased analysis of the logical and theological status of future contingents, in metaphysical concerns having to do with identity and individuation, and in the development of non-Aristotelian physics. Before turning to the issues themselves, however, I would like to situate this study by briefly examining important developments within the world of Christian Scholasticism.

INTRODUCTION: FAITH, BELIEF, AND HERESY IN SCHOLASTIC AND JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

In order to appreciate the content of Scholastic discussions during this period, we must say more about the importance of the condemnation of philosophy of 1277. The condemnation of 1277 represents the culmination of a series of earlier condemnations in the Christian universities, and raised the thorny issue of heresy.

Are great works of imaginative literature, such as Gulliver's Travels, made out of life, or are they made out of other books? In 1919, T. S. Eliot published a landmark essay entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”arguing that the true worth of a writer was not to be found in “those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else,”but rather that “the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Eliot's anti-romantic account minimizes originality and foregrounds hard work. Artistic achievement results from consciousness of the past, of cultural history. Literature is made of other literature, Eliot contends, more surely than it is made out of life experience. Readers of Swift might feel, perhaps should feel, that the antithesis is a false one. Nevertheless, Eliot's argument is persuasive enough to suggest that investigating the way in which a major writer modifies, and is modified by, pre-existing literary traditions, can be a valuable approach to the creative work. Our most direct source of knowledge here must derive from what Swift himself read. Accordingly, the first section of this chapter will be concerned with the books that Swift read, and with his way of reading them. The second section will focus more generally on what he made of what he read.

Critical tradition holds that in Spain, the eighteenth century is one “without novels”in the sense of those produced by realist and naturalist authors; eighteenth-century novels have been characterized as didactic works lacking the stylistic interest and psychological depth of later narrative achievements, or as simply scarce presences in a century which in Europe saw the flourishing of the form. Yet recent scholarship has developed a more nuanced picture of the novel during the eighteenth century in Spain, a century that may no longer be accused of dearth in terms of either production or quality. In scores of original and translated or adapted works, eighteenth-century novelists gave readers access to “what was 'asked' of literature: observation of people, a realistic description of their lives, and a knowledge of their souls based on experience and their relation to society.”

Enlightenment fiction was the vehicle not only for moral instruction andlessons concerning virtue, but also for the observation of life and reality.Readers wanted fiction to represent experience as though it were happeningbefore their eyes, and turned to novels for realist elements such as theportrayal of consciousness and the depiction of intense emotions, a key componentof the most characteristic of Enlightenment fictional genres: the narrativeof sensibility. Authors of fiction experimented with the possibilities ofthe form in many aspects, such as dialogical modalities and the narration ofhuman experience in time.

When placing works of prose fiction within the framework of modernity, critics find that diverse styles and trends tend to conform to a basic structure, which Nil Santiáñez-Tió has termed a “spectrum of possibilities”:

In 1983 I proposed that a similar polarity existed between the testimonialnovel, on the one hand, and the poetic novel, on the other. But whether onespeaks of “realist” as opposed to “modernist” prose or of the testimonial asopposed to the poetic novel, it is certainly the case that the idea of literarypolarity derives from what we consider “modern” literature. Both poles maybe present at the same time, in the same writer, and even in the same work.These poles may exist in a relatively pure state or as subtle variations thatcombine the magnetic attraction of one to the other.

Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides, 1288-1344), philosopher, scientist, and rabbinical authority,1 has often been portrayed in the scholarly literature as a faithful follower of Aristotle and an unorthodox, even radical, theologian: “The boldest of all Jewish philosophers”Gersonides “may be the truest disciple of Aristotle whom medieval Jewish philosophy produced” and hence is “essentially alien to those biblical doctrines which in his formulation he seemed to approach.” In Gersonides' system “mosaic dogma [gives] way to the requirements of Aristotelianism” since his intellectual worldview is “Islamic peripateticism in all its purety.” One scholar considers his theory of the world's creation to be “almost in the spirit of modern deism” because it “[limits] the direct activity of God to the act of the creation of the world.” Another deems his theory of divine knowledge “a theological monstrosity”; still another claims that it “radically destroys the whole of history as told in the Bible.”

When the Franco dictatorship ended in 1975, the time was ripe for the revitalization of women's literature in Spain. Spain's transition to democracy led to a so-called boom in women's narrative, with the emergence of a new group of women writers who began to publish at that time: among them are Rosa Montero, Lourdes Ortiz, Soledad Púertolas, Marina Mayoral, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Carme Riera, and Esther Tusquets. Still others such as Carmen Martín Gaite, Ana María Moix, and Montserrat Roig, who had already published during Francoism, started to write more self-consciously experimental works in the late 1970s, thus departing from the predominantly neorealist aesthetic of their own and other women's works in the earlier decades of the post-war period. Without attributing homogeneous characteristics to this group of women based on strictly chronological or historical criteria, it would not be inaccurate to claim that the literary techniques and preoccupations of post-Franco women writers generally constitute a break from the previous generation of writers.

A brief overview of women’s social, political, and cultural history shouldserve to contextualize twentieth-century Spanish women’s literature and literaryhistory. In Spain, the women’s movement not only arrived late, incomparison to other Western societies, but was also slow to develop withinstrictly women-centered, feminist organizations.

Medieval Jewish philosophy is in large measure an interpretation in philosophical terms of beliefs, concepts, and texts bequeathed to medieval Jews by the Bible and by rabbinic literature. Thus, much of the agenda of medieval Jewish philosophy is set by ideas featured in the Bible, Talmud, and midrash: God, creation, prophecy, providence, miracles, commandments, and more. For this reason, although there is a need here to present the biblical and rabbinic background to medieval Jewish philosophy, the discussion will largely be an exposition of one aspect of medieval Jewish philosophy itself: namely, its ambition to provide an exegesis of biblical and rabbinic texts, along with explications of their concepts, that would demonstrate the value of philosophy in earlier Judaism and would unearth rigorous philosophical propositions contained in the ancient works.

Examples abound. Saadya Gaon (882–942), head of the academy in Babylonia and the father of medieval Jewish philosophy, and Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides) (1288–1344), an eminent philosopher, logician, and scientist, authored biblical commentaries – Gersonides’ cover a very substantial part of the Bible – that are controlled by a view of the book as shot through with philosophical truth and as standing in agreement with the conclusions of human reason. While the less illustrious rationalist Joseph ibn Kaspi (1279–1340) authored a commentary on the Bible that is controlled not by the assumption of an underlying philosophical truth, but instead by a historicist view, he is an exception among medieval rationalists.

Readers gain a rare and privileged glimpse into the extended, yet implicit, dialogue that all texts possess when writing becomes the object of description, commentary, or meditation in a novel or essay. While commentary by critics and self-reflexive allusions to writing, embedded in the fiction itself, often aspire to the authority of scientific assertions, such reflections form part of complex cultural debates in which good taste, common sense, truth, verisimilitude, and originality are affirmed rather than questioned. As literature evolves, we can easily recognize that the periods of Romanticism and Realism are different; criticism also evolves, reflecting changing cultural perspectives and styles. When Juan Goytisolo writes in Reivindicación del Conde don Julián (Count Julian, 1970) that “erudition deceives,” he alludes to scientific imperturbability and detachment, a view held by certain critics. Criticism’s desire for Olympian stability, demonstrated by Menéndez y Pelayo in the nineteenth century and José Montesinos in the twentieth – each convinced of the propriety of his own values – was seen as opposed to the flux of the novel. In recent decades, concepts steeped in relativity recognize that the vantage point from which we are observing is also in motion and fully engaged with its own time. A close look at how books are represented within novels as well as at the opinions expressed about writing in novels and essays during the modern period will explore this deep commonality between creation and criticism.

The historical foundations of French design

France entered the twentieth century with one of its greatest assets, a rich national culture, in full vigour. More than any other European country, French society set cultural standards which most creative people observed and the population respected. Since its origins under Henri IV (1589-1610) and Louis XIV (1643-1715), this comprehensive culture had been associated with national unity and power, formal training, and the dominance of Paris within French society.

Most French design was inspired from the late sixteenth century by an aesthetic derived from the Italian Renaissance, and given a clear national form from the seventeenth century by architects such as Mansart, Lemercier and Blondel. In this chapter the term 'classical' will be used to describe this aesthetic. It was a system of harmonious proportions, enhanced by details associated with the ancient world. It often made use of the classical orders but many features, such as turrets and steep roofs covered in slate, finials, filigree work, and massive fire surrounds, were medieval French. These traditional features had faded, however, by the late seventeenth century except in small towns and the countryside where tradition still dictated design. In the eighteenth century, symmetry, repetition, archaeological study of ancient remains, the classical orders, and precisely shaped masonry blocks, marked most new public buildings and the homes of the royalty and aristocracy.

The first half of the twentieth century was crucial in creating the identity of modern France, yet that process appears on the surface to be highly paradoxical. On the one hand, it was one of the most dramatic periods in modern French history, encompassing the four years of blood-letting of the First World War, political and economic volatility in the interwar years, culminating in the Depression of the mid-1930s, the catastrophic defeat in June 1940, followed by four years of German Occupation, and, finally, the Liberation of France, which also took the form of a near-civil war and vicious purges.

These dramatic events were accompanied by, and in some cases the product of, deep divisions in French society inherited from the nineteenth century: the fierce antagonism between republicans and anti-republicans, although mitigated after 1900, which would lie dormant for years, only to reappear at moments of crisis, like the Depression or the defeat of 1940; the battle of the Republic against the Catholic Church in the early years of the century which rumbled on right into the period of the Occupation; important social divisions between the urban working class, the peasantry and the bourgeoisie; inequalities between men and women, not least in the areas of electoral suffrage and legal status; and, finally, conflicts real or potential which were the product of ethnic divisions. Throughout the first half of the century, France was amajor colonial power, second only to the United Kingdom, and its relationship to its colonised peoples, in North and West Africa, in South-East Asia and in the Pacific, was crucial in the forging of a national identity based upon a stereotype of the white Frenchman.