El comportament sexual en la societat hispanojueva de l'edat mitjana

Abstract

Relations between men and women quite naturally play an important part in the daily life of any society. Such relations vividly reflect on socio-economic, religious and political conditions and attitudes. Yet scarcely any sphere of life has been so subject to censorship and distortion as has sexual behaviour. Our knowledge of this subject is, not surprisingly, impaired by a lack of documentation, because such relations tended to remain, as their intimacy required, hidden from outsiders. Legal records report only a small proportion of the total number of crimes and transgressions, leaving unknown to posterity numerous instances of deviant and illicit sexual conduct. The fear and shame of the victims frequently caused this silence. Ethical works, critical of sexual laxity, sometimes present a realistic picture; others tend to idealization. On the other hand, literary sources tend to reflect the lives of the upper classes and ignore the majority of the population. Standards of sexual behaviour in mediaeval Christian and Muslim Europe were indeed shaped by their respective religions. The condemnation of physical pleasure and the insistence on the procreative function of marriage in Christianity go back to its early formative period (although this was not a natural development of any trend emanating from the Bible). Chastity and virginity were praised while sexual attraction was ignored or suppressed. One can infer from the frequent condemnations and prohibitions that the gap between theory and practice in the mediaeval Christian world was wide. As a general rule, sexual morality in mediaeval Western Europe was certainly very low, if we judge it by the standards set by canon and secular laws. Even greater laxity and permissiveness characterized Muslim society. The upper classes in Moorish Spain led an extremely permissive life, notwithstanding criticism from pietists and ascetics. Even the puritan waves of conquerors from North Africa, the Almoravids and the Almohads, we