A Vigilant Society: Jewish Thought and the State in Medieval Spain

Uncovers a fundamental change that took place in Western thinking, especially its departure from the Sephardic philosophy found in the Iberian Peninsula during the 13th century.

A Vigilant Society presents a provocative hypothesis that argues that Western society as we know it emerged from the soil of Jewish intellectual advances in the thirteenth century, especially those formulated on the Iberian Peninsula. A paradigmatic shift began to occur, one that abandoned the pre–Gothic Sephardic wi...