ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Hebrew liturgical verse, social poetry, rhymed prose narratives, and rhetorical anecdotes and the ways that they provide insights into the Jews' historical experiences and the historical consciousness in modern research on the Jews of al-Andalus and the medieval Iberian Christian kingdoms. The disciplinary connection between Jewish literature and history was established in the nineteenth century through the historically minded practices, objectives, and achievements of scholars such as Leopold Zunz and Moritz Steinschneider, who identified with the project known as Wissenschaft des Judentums. Reinforcing methodological developments and practices in critically and historically minded cultural studies requires that we never consider the literary isolated from the social and historical and never place undue emphasis on particular memories, records, events, textual genres, or ways of reading them. Today scholars of Jewish literature are inclined to historicize the texts they study, that is, to insist texts always be placed, examined, and interpreted in their own respective historical contexts.
