Jews and Muslims in the Mediterranean Social Network: Sources and Contexts (REDMED)

The group approaches the study of Jewish and Islamic societies in their Mediterranean context, focusing on the impact of both religious cultures in their surrounding social and intellectual milieu through the study of their written and material manifestations. Both cultures have kept in distinctive varieties a complex symbiotic relationship including convergences and divergences. This has been partially determined by their physical proximity from the medieval period to this day. The artificial separation between the ensuing academic disciplines has been the result of deeply rooted static views (e.g. Orientalism) which in many cases have led to the distortion of their scope, especially as result of the appliication of reductive epistemological categories whereby these disciplines were relegated to the margins of Spanish university curricula. The group emerges with the aim to overcome restrictive identifications between sacred languages and religious cultures in their different varieties