Journal Article

Arabs, Jews, and the Enigma of Spanish Imperial Melancholy

Bartra, Roger

2000

Overview

Galeno e Hipocras Gentiles fueron por cierto Y con ellos hemos muerto Un millon de hombres y mas, Abicena moro es, Isac y Rabi Moises Judios son de natura, Mas por ende su scriptura No es quemada despues. Because Avicenna is a Moor, And Isaac and Moses Are Jewish by nature, Their writings, we can see, Were not burned up thereafter.)3 We may add that still, in as late an era as the beginning of the reign of Phillip IV (1605-1665), the authors of a petition to reform the research about \"purity of blood\" asked themselves why a sword maker was automatically considered pure, while a doctor was invariably classified as Jewish (Yerushalmi 70). [...]Golden Age Spaniards first examined the ways in which tempers and humors influenced the social and political body, as in religious spaces. Yet surgeons did not totally reject \"barbaric\" medicine, not only is the influence of the Arabic canon in the interpretation of melancholy apparent, but also Spanish doctors generally accepted the cures and treatments Arab doctors prescribed. [...]doctors both cultivated the Arabic scholarship and criticized Arab physicians, whom they thought deviated from the original Hippocratic and Galenic medical corpus. [...]I want to make reference to a problem originally proposed by Americo Castro and recently rescued-and recreated-by Eduardo Subirats when he writes about the theological-- literary bibliography of the soul of the colonizing subject (Subirats 316).

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Subject: Arab people / Catholics / Culture / Desire / Diseases / Ethnography / Humor / Illnesses / In Retrospect / Jewish people / Jewish peoples / Jewish persecution / Jews / Latin American culture / Medicine / Mystics / Mythology / Myths / Physicians / Political power / Sadness / Semitic Languages / Sentimentality / Spanish Culture / Spanish language / Writers