Les Rois et la Royauté dans la biblia de AlbA

Among the 324 miniatures that illustrate the Biblia de Alba (Castille, 1422–1430), more than one hundred feature the king, the court, and battles, in which the leader is, once more, the king. This work on this Bible was carried out by one of the great scholars of his day, Rabbi Moses Arragel of Guadalajara, honored translator, and renowned exegete, who also saw to the illuminations in the manuscript in collaboration with a Franciscan and a Dominican friar. Through knowledge of his Jewish heritage, Arragel sought “to promote the glory of Castile.” At the same time, he had a clear ideological program, making the history of the Jews appear in the form of res gestae, important deeds. The Jews are conquerors, kings and warriors, champions of the Mosaic faith, which, in his commentary on Isaiah 2:5, he calls “the holy catholic faith,” in the sense of universal (fol. 267r). Arragel thus transmits a highly glorified imagine of the Jews in Spanish society, rejecting that of the scapegoat, the “degraded people”, which the Church and others had sought to impose upon the Jews for refusing to recognize the true faith. This joint work, the combined effort of Jewish scribes and Christian artists under the direction of Arragel himself, following the orders of a Church prelate, yielded a unique result, one that is truly remarkable, a Bible that is at once Christian in appearance, yet remains profoundly Jewish. This Bible may fairly be called the most important document to have reached our hands from the reign of John II. It witnesses what may have been the last attempt at real communication between Jews and Christians before the 1492 expulsion.