And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the LMU in Munich, online at

www. History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode. W. As every American school child knows, in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

He was dispatched on his voyage of discovery by Ferdinand and Isabella, famous as heroes of the Christian re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.

But heroic isn't really the right word for them if you ask me.

In the same year of 1492, they offered the Jews and Muslims remaining in Spain a stark choice, convert to Christianity, leave our realms, or die.

Many Jews converted and many left, sometimes choosing the Islamic world as the safest haven.

This was a departure from the policy of earlier Christian monarchs.

A century earlier, the rulers of the Christian principalities in Spain had tried, albeit unsuccessfully,

to stop a spasm of violence targeting Jews in the year 1391.

The view from the top typically saw Jews as valuable members of the community serving an especially useful role in economic terms.

On the other hand, throughout the medieval period, Jews were often seen as being akin to Muslims.

Often they were respected as Abrahamic peoples, much as Muslims,

designated the Christians and Jews as fellow peoples of the book.

But for the same reason chasing the last Muslims out of Spain

seemed to the rulers to go hand in hand with the removal of the Jews. Before this final act

of religious cleansing there had of course been centuries of tension,

cooperation, and competition between the three faiths that flourished in Andalusia,

frequently spilling across the border into southern France.

We have already seen several examples.

There was the Kuzari of Judah Halevi, with its favorable comparison of Judaism

to Christianity and Islam. There was the shocking event in which Christian authorities

were enlisted by Jews to repress rationalist currents among their co-religionists in the so-called

...