Nirenberg, David. "Was There Race Before Modernity? The Example of 'Jewish' Blood in Late Medieval Spain." In The Origins of Racism in the West, edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, 232–264. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Explores Christian attitudes towards Jews in medieval Castile and Aragon, with specific reference to the stakes of contemporary discourse about premodern race. The essay provides a historiographical argument about how contemporary knowledges about the Spanish context were produced through both deployments of and aversions to race as a heuristic, while also examining the emplotment of biological thinking about race in the 15th century with respect to Spanish Christian concerns about Jewish lineage. The essay regards conversations in the study of historiography, genealogy, anti-Semitism, and the history of race.
