The Golden Age of Sefarad

1. Sefarad and the Idea of a Golden Age

For roughly five centuries, from the court of the Umayyad caliphs at Córdoba in the tenth century to the expulsion from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1492, the Jews of the Iberian peninsula produced a body of poetry, scholarship, philosophy, medicine and science that later generations came to regard as a high point of Jewish civilisation. They wrote in Hebrew and in Arabic, and later in Latin and the Romance vernaculars; they served Muslim emirs and Christian kings as physicians, financiers, translators and diplomats; and they built communities whose descendants carried the name of the peninsula with them across the Mediterranean and beyond. This book tells that story, from its Roman and Visigothic prelude to its catastrophic end.

The phrase “golden age” is itself part of the story. It was coined by modern historians who looked back on medieval Iberia with particular hopes and anxieties of their own, and it has been challenged, refined and defended ever since. This opening chapter therefore does three things before the narrative begins. It explains the name Sefarad and how it came to stand for the whole peninsula; it traces the modern idea of a golden age and the debate over “convivencia” that grew out of it; and it describes the kinds of evidence on which any history of these communities must rest. It closes with an outline of the chapters that follow.

The name Sefarad

The Hebrew word Sefarad appears only once in the Hebrew Bible. In the closing verses of the short prophetic book of Obadiah, the second half of verse 20 reads, in the Jewish Publication Society’s translation of 1917, “And the captivity of Jerusalem, that is in Sepharad, Shall possess the cities of the South”^[1]. Where the prophet located Sepharad is uncertain, and the verse itself gives no geography beyond the contrast with Jerusalem. What matters for this history is the use that medieval Jews made of it. By the Middle Ages, Jewish writers had attached the biblical name to the far western land in which many of them lived, and Sefarad came to mean the Iberian peninsula as a whole, together with the Jews who lived there^[2]. From the same root came the adjective Sefardi, the self-designation of Iberian Jews and, after 1492, of their descendants in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Italy and the Netherlands; the Jewish Encyclopedia notes that the plural, Sefardim, became the common name for Jews of Spanish origin^[3].

The modern word “Spain” is not an exact equivalent, and the difference is more than pedantic. As the Encyclopaedia Judaica points out, the Spanish state as later understood came into being only after the Jews had been expelled from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1492; by the time Navarre had been incorporated and a single Spain could be spoken of, there were officially no Jews left in the peninsula^[2]. Medieval Sefarad, by contrast, comprised al-Andalus under its successive Muslim rulers, the Christian kingdoms of León and Castile, Navarre, Aragon and Catalonia, and Portugal. Its Jewish culture was shaped above all by the encounter between Judaism and the Greek and Arabic learning that flourished in al-Andalus^[2]. This book follows the medieval usage. When it speaks of Spain it means the peninsula and its several kingdoms, not the later nation-state, and it notes where Portugal’s experience diverged.

The medieval communities also told stories about how they had arrived. Several leading families of Lucena traced their settlement there to the time of Nebuchadnezzar, and the historian Abraham ibn Daud preserved a tradition that the Jews of Mérida descended from captives brought west by Titus after the destruction of the Second Temple^[4][5]. Similar legends attached biblical figures to Spanish towns, and the Jewish Encyclopedia, writing in the first years of the twentieth century, already dismissed them as incredible^[3]. Such genealogies tell us less about antiquity than about the medieval communities that cherished them. They expressed a claim to ancient and noble descent, to a presence in the land older than that of either Christians or Muslims, and to a share in the history of Jerusalem itself. The real beginnings, which are those of Roman Hispania, are the subject of the next chapter.

What “golden age” meant to nineteenth-century historians

The idea that Iberian Jewry enjoyed a golden age took shape in the nineteenth century, among the founders of the modern critical study of Jewish history in Germany. Mark R. Cohen has described the consensus that then prevailed: Jews of the Islamic Middle Ages, with al-Andalus as the model, were believed to have lived in a “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim harmony, “an interfaith utopia of tolerance and convivencia”, mingling freely with Muslims, immersed in Arabic culture and admitted to high office^[6]. In Cohen’s account the idea arose “in the first instance from disappointment felt by central European Jewish historians as Emancipation-era promises of political and cultural equality remained unfulfilled”^[6]. Medieval Spain under Islam offered a mirror in which German Jews could see what they hoped for, namely a minority fully at home in the high culture of the majority without abandoning its own faith.

Ismar Schorsch, in a study whose title speaks of “the myth of Sephardic supremacy”, examined how this admiration shaped German Jewish life and scholarship in the same period^[7]. Sephardi poets were edited, translated and held up as models of literary refinement; Sephardi philosophers were presented as proof that Judaism and reason could coexist; and the Sephardi aesthetic found its way into the design of the great nineteenth-century synagogues of Central Europe. The image of Spain was thus as much a programme for the present as a description of the past. It contrasted a cultivated, rational and outward-looking Sefarad with what reformers regarded as the narrower world of the Ashkenazi yeshiva and ghetto.

Cohen is careful to add that the idea contained “a very large kernel of truth”. Compared with the gloomier history of the Jews of medieval northern Europe and of late medieval Spain itself, where persecution was more frequent and more severe, the Jews of the Islamic world did fare better, and the image of the golden age remained dominant among scholars and the wider public through the nineteenth century as a new political antisemitism took hold in Europe^[6]. The term therefore needs to be handled with care rather than discarded. It names something real, a period of extraordinary creativity, but it was framed by people with their own reasons for idealising it, and it tends to compress very different centuries and regimes into a single bright image.

That compression is one of the problems this book has to manage. The Jewish culture of al-Andalus in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Jewish courtiers and translators of Christian Toledo in the twelfth and thirteenth, and the hard-pressed communities of Castile and Aragon after 1391 belong to the same history but not to the same world. The title of this book uses the familiar phrase deliberately, because it is the name by which the period is known; the chapters that follow try to show what it did and did not mean at each stage.

Convivencia and its critics

The Spanish word convivencia, which means living together, entered the discussion in the twentieth century and has since become a byword for the coexistence of Muslims, Christians and Jews in medieval Iberia. In its strongest form, popularised for a wide readership by María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World, the idea presents al-Andalus as a culture of tolerance in which the three faiths shared poetry, philosophy and science^[8]. In its weaker forms it simply recognises that people of different religions lived side by side, traded, quarrelled, borrowed from one another and sometimes cooperated, without implying that they regarded one another as equals.

The idealised version has provoked a reaction. Cohen describes a “counter-myth of Islamic persecution”, which he calls, adapting Salo W. Baron’s famous criticism of a “lachrymose conception of Jewish history”, a “neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history”; in this view Islam persecuted Jews as relentlessly as medieval Christendom did, and the golden age is a fiction^[6]. Cohen notes that this counter-myth flourished in the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and after the attacks of 11 September 2001, which made dispassionate inquiry both more difficult and more necessary^[6].

Cohen’s own approach is comparative. He sets the Islamic world beside the Christian world of northern Europe, where relations between Jews and Christians, tolerable in the early Middle Ages, deteriorated into persecution and expulsion^[6]. His conclusion is qualified. Islam was more tolerant than Christendom only in a limited sense, because in the Middle Ages tolerance in the modern sense of full equality was not considered a virtue. Each monotheistic religion regarded the others as inferior, and the minorities accepted their subordinate status as long as they were allowed to live in security and practise their religion without interference. That, Cohen writes, was “toleration” in the medieval sense of the word^[6].

The legal framework under Islam was the status of the dhimmi, the “protected people”. Jews and Christians received security, freedom of worship and communal autonomy in return for an annual poll tax, and they were subject in theory to the restrictions of the so-called Pact of ʿUmar, which forbade new houses of worship, required humility towards Muslims, demanded distinctive dress and excluded non-Muslims from authority over Muslims^[6]. In practice, Cohen observes, many of these rules “were largely honored in the breach, often with the tacit approval of Muslim rulers”, and Jews occupied a low but secure place in a hierarchical society that was already religiously plural^[6]. The careers of Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut and Samuel ha-Nagid, who held power that the Pact of ʿUmar formally denied to any non-Muslim, show how far practice could depart from theory. The massacre at Granada in 1066 and the forced conversions under the Almohads in the twelfth century show the limits of that latitude^[6].

Recent scholarship has moved beyond the simple choice between utopia and persecution. Sarah Stroumsa’s study of philosophy in al-Andalus treats Muslim and Jewish thinkers together, arguing that the shared culture of the Islamicate world allowed scholars of different religions to engage in the same philosophical pursuits, while acknowledging that Muslims and members of the religious minorities did not enjoy the same social standing^[9]. For Christian Iberia, Jonathan Ray’s work on the frontier of the reconquest has shown a fluid and often volatile society, in which Jewish settlers moved between kingdoms and dealt extensively with Christians and Muslims before more rigid communal structures took shape^[10]. This book follows the same course. It assumes neither harmony nor persecution as the norm, and it asks of each period what the sources show about the conditions under which Jews lived and worked.

The sources

Any history of Sefarad rests on several distinct bodies of evidence, each with its own languages, survival patterns and biases. The first and richest is the literature written by the Jews themselves. Hebrew poetry, sacred and secular, is the most celebrated part of it. Its distinctive forms took shape in tenth-century Córdoba when Dunash ben Labrat applied the genres and metres of Arabic poetry to biblical Hebrew, an innovation that was resisted at first and then adopted by generations of poets^[11]. Alongside the poetry stand grammars and dictionaries, biblical commentaries, legal responsa, philosophical treatises, many of them written in Judaeo-Arabic, which is Arabic in Hebrew characters, and scientific and medical works.

Among these writings, a small number of historical works shaped how later generations understood the whole period. The most influential is the Sefer ha-Qabbalah (Book of Tradition) of Abraham ibn Daud of Toledo, written in 1160–1161. It is a history of the chain of rabbinic tradition, composed above all to defend rabbinic Judaism against the Karaites, and it contains the narrative on which much of the conventional account of tenth-century Córdoba depends^[12][13]. Ibn Daud wrote two centuries after the events he described and with a clear argument to make, so his stories, including the celebrated tale of the four captives that explains how a Babylonian-trained rabbi came to Córdoba, must be weighed against other evidence. Later chapters return to him often.

The tale of the four captives shows why this caution matters. Ibn Daud tells how four scholars travelling by sea were seized by a raider, how the wife of one of them, Moses ben Ḥanokh, threw herself into the sea rather than submit to her captor, how Moses was sold as a slave at Córdoba and redeemed by the community, and how his learning was then recognised so that he became its rabbi. The story explained, in a single dramatic episode, how the centre of Jewish learning passed from Babylonia to Spain. Sources discovered since the nineteenth century have made the story difficult to accept as it stands. They suggest that Moses probably came from southern Italy, perhaps after capture at sea during the naval war between the Umayyads of Córdoba and the Fatimids of North Africa, and that he reached Spain in the 950s^[14]. The outline of Ibn Daud’s narrative survives, but its meaning changes. What he presented as providence becomes a question of patronage and politics, and the Genizah and the Arabic sources help to answer it.

The second body of evidence is the Cairo Genizah. In the storeroom of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, medieval Jews deposited worn-out writings in Hebrew script rather than destroy them. The collection now held at Cambridge University Library alone comprises some 193,000 manuscript fragments, mainly in Hebrew, Judaeo-Arabic, Aramaic and Arabic, and it is an unparalleled source for the social and economic history of the medieval Mediterranean^[15]. Fragments relating to Spain include letters, contracts, poems and drafts, and some of them bear directly on figures in this book. A letter addressed to Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut describing the sufferings of the Jews of Palermo during a war in Sicily, for example, survived only in the Genizah^[16].

The third body consists of Arabic writings by Muslim authors: chronicles, biographical dictionaries of scholars and physicians, geographical works, legal opinions and literary anthologies. They record Jewish courtiers and physicians, describe Jewish quarters and cities, and preserve the hostile verse and polemic that accompanied moments of crisis. Some Muslim scholars took a more inquiring interest. The Toledan judge Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī, writing in 1068, included the Jews among the nations that had cultivated learning, alongside the Indians, Persians, Greeks and Arabs^[17].

The fourth body of evidence comes from Christian Iberia, in Latin and later in Castilian, Catalan and Portuguese. It includes the legislation of the Visigothic kings and church councils, chronicles and lives of saints, and above all the archives of the Christian kingdoms. Royal chanceries, cathedral chapters and municipal councils kept charters, tax rolls, privileges, court records and correspondence, and from the twelfth century onward these documents allow the historian to follow individual Jewish families and communities in a detail impossible for al-Andalus. Yitzhak Baer’s history of the Jews of Christian Spain, which traces the communities from the eleventh century to 1492, was built largely on such archives, and Ray’s study of the frontier draws on royal, ecclesiastical and municipal archives together with rabbinic literature^[18][10].

Finally there is the material evidence of buildings, inscriptions, coins, manuscripts and archaeological sites, from Roman tombstones to the synagogues of Toledo and Córdoba. Much has been lost, and much of what remains was transformed after 1492, when synagogues became churches and Jewish quarters were renamed. The surviving remains, however, help to locate communities, to date them and to show how they presented themselves in stone and script.

The shape of this book

The chapters that follow are arranged chronologically, with chapters devoted to particular figures where their lives and works call for it. Chapter 2 surveys the Jews of Roman Hispania and the anti-Jewish legislation of the Visigothic kingdom, and asks what changed with the Muslim conquest of 711. Chapter 3 describes Córdoba under the Umayyad caliphs of the tenth century, the setting of the first Jewish flowering. Chapter 4 is devoted to Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut, the physician and diplomat whom later tradition remembered as the patron of that flowering.

Chapters 5 to 13 follow the great age of Andalusi Jewish culture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They cover the Hebrew grammarians and the new poetry; Samuel ha-Nagid of Granada; the taifa kingdoms and the catastrophe of 1066; Solomon ibn Gabirol, Baḥya ibn Paquda, Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Ezra; and Abraham bar Ḥiyya and the beginnings of Hebrew mathematics and astronomy. Chapter 14 considers the physicians of Sefarad. Chapter 15 turns to the Almohad invasions and the world of Abraham ibn Daud, Maimonides and Averroes.

Chapters 16 to 18 move to the Christian kingdoms. They describe Toledo and its translators, Alfonso X of Castile and his Jewish collaborators, and the organisation of the Jewish communities, the aljamas, of Castile, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal. Chapters 19 to 21 trace the decline: the riots of 1391, the Disputation of Tortosa and the age of the conversos, and the expulsion of 1492. Chapter 22 considers what Sefarad left behind, in the diaspora that carried its name and in the books, buildings and ideas that outlived it.

Throughout, the book treats poetry, philosophy, medicine and the exact sciences as achievements to be understood on their own terms and in their historical setting. Poetry is quoted in short extracts from published translations, and every factual statement is tied to a numbered source that the reader can consult.

A word on conventions. Personal names are given in the forms most common in English-language scholarship, with a simplified transliteration of Hebrew and Arabic; the same person may therefore appear as Ḥasdai in one source and Ḥisdai or Hasday in another. Dates are given according to the Common Era, with the Hijri or Jewish year added where a source states it and the conversion matters. Where the sources disagree about a date, a birthplace or the course of an event, the disagreement is reported rather than silently resolved. The medieval evidence is uneven, and a clear statement of uncertainty is more useful to the reader than a precise date that cannot be supported.

2. Hispania, the Visigoths and the Conquest of 711

The golden age of Sefarad did not begin from nothing. By the time the Umayyad caliphs ruled at Córdoba, Jews had lived in the Iberian peninsula for at least seven centuries, under pagan Roman emperors, Arian and then Catholic Visigothic kings, and finally Muslim governors and emirs. The first of these periods left only scattered traces. The second produced one of the harshest bodies of anti-Jewish law in early medieval Europe. The third created the conditions in which the culture described in the rest of this book could develop.

This chapter follows the Jews of the peninsula from their first secure attestation in Roman Hispania to the consolidation of the Umayyad emirate in the ninth century. It considers the canons of the Council of Elvira, the legislation of the Visigothic kings and the councils of Toledo, the Muslim conquest of 711 and the place of Jews in the new order. The evidence for most of this period is thin and comes almost entirely from outsiders, from church councils, royal law codes and later Arabic chronicles, and it has to be read with that limitation in mind.

Jews in Roman Hispania

Medieval Jews liked to believe that their ancestors had reached Spain in biblical times, but there is no evidence for such a settlement, and most historians date the first Jewish communities to the Roman Empire^[2]. The earliest secure witness is a tombstone from Adra, the ancient Abdera on the coast of Andalusia, which records a Jewish girl and dates from the third century of the Common Era^[2][3]. It is written in Latin, as were most Jewish inscriptions of the western Roman provinces. The Jews of Hispania, like those of Italy and Gaul, spoke and wrote the language of the empire and used Hebrew chiefly for formulas and liturgy.

Other finds point in the same direction. At Mérida, the capital of the province of Lusitania and a junction of Roman roads, a Latin tombstone probably dating from no later than the fourth century renders in Latin the Hebrew formulas usual on Jewish graves of the period^[5]. At Tarragona, the capital of Hispania Tarraconensis, a laver was found bearing the inscription “Peace over Israel, over ourselves, and our children”, which probably belongs to the Roman period, and coins with Hebrew inscriptions have been taken as evidence of a Jewish settlement there under the Visigoths^[22]. The Jewish Encyclopedia, summarising older scholarship, also noted traditions that Vespasian and Hadrian transported Jewish prisoners to Spain after the Jewish revolts^[3].

There is also a literary hint. In his letter to the Romans, written in the 50s of the first century, the apostle Paul says that he intends to travel to Spain. The Jewish Encyclopedia took this as evidence that there were Jews there to whom he meant to preach^[3]. The inference is plausible, given Paul’s usual practice of beginning in the synagogues, but the letter does not say so. For the first three centuries of the Common Era, the Jewish presence in Hispania must therefore be reconstructed from a handful of inscriptions and objects, set against what is known of Jewish life in the western Mediterranean more generally.

What these traces suggest is a population of modest communities in the coastal and provincial towns, integrated into the economic life of the province. Several of the places that were to matter most in the Middle Ages, among them Mérida, Tarragona, Córdoba and Toledo, were already Roman cities, and continuity of settlement in some of them is likely even where it cannot be proved.

The Council of Elvira

The first document that speaks directly about relations between Jews and their neighbours in Hispania is ecclesiastical. In the early fourth century, bishops and presbyters from across the peninsula met at Elvira, near the later city of Granada, and issued a set of canons on Christian discipline. The date is uncertain. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 305, while the Jewish Encyclopedia places the council in 303–304, and other dates have been proposed^[2][3]. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, nineteen bishops and twenty-four presbyters took part, the bishops coming from Córdoba, Seville, Toledo, Saragossa and other cities with Jewish inhabitants^[3].

Several canons concern Jews. Under pain of excommunication, Christians were forbidden to live in the houses of Jews or to eat in their company, and they were forbidden to have the produce of their fields blessed by Jews, “in order that the ecclesiastical benediction might not appear fruitless and vain”^[3]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica reads these rules as an attempt to create or maintain a separation between the two faiths at a time when the inhabitants of the peninsula were turning to Christianity^[2].

The canons are evidence of contact rather than of hostility in the population at large. Bishops do not forbid what nobody does. That Christians lived in Jewish households, shared meals with Jews and invited Jews to bless their crops implies that the boundaries between the communities were porous, and that Jews enjoyed some religious prestige among their neighbours. The council sought to close those boundaries from the Christian side. Its rules bound only Christians, and the Roman state, which was still pagan and which in the same years was persecuting Christians, had no part in them. Elvira nonetheless announced the theme that would dominate the next four centuries, the attempt by the church to define Christian identity by separating Christians from Jews.

Visigothic Toledo and the anti-Jewish canons

The Visigoths, a Germanic people who had served and fought the Roman Empire, established their rule in Hispania during the fifth and sixth centuries and made Toledo their capital. For most of the sixth century they were Arian Christians, divided in religion from the Catholic Hispano-Roman majority, and the Jewish Encyclopedia describes a period in which Jews were well treated, trading, farming and even holding judicial offices^[3]. The decisive change came when King Reccared abandoned Arianism for Catholicism in 587, a conversion ratified at the third Council of Toledo in 589^[2]. From then on the Visigothic kings pursued religious unity as an instrument of political unity, and the councils of Toledo, which were political as well as religious assemblies, became the chief instrument of their policy towards the Jews^[2].

Reccared’s council laid down that children of mixed Jewish and Christian marriages were to be baptised. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, it also forbade Jews to own Christian slaves, to hold public office or to have relations with Christian women^[2][3]. His successors went further. King Sisebut, who reigned from 612 to 621, ordered the Jews of his kingdom to accept baptism or leave it^[2]. The date of the decree is variously given. The Encyclopaedia Judaica places it in 613, while recent studies by Capucine Nemo-Pekelman and by Rodrigo Laham Cohen and Carolina Pecznik place it around 615 or 616^[2][23][24]. Thousands left; others accepted baptism and many of them returned to Judaism under Sisebut’s more tolerant successor Swintila, when a number of exiles also came back^[2]. Laham Cohen and Pecznik describe the forced conversion as the moment that created a new and intricate map of identities in Visigothic society, in which religious belonging had to be defined again and again by law^[24].

The church’s response to forced conversion was ambivalent. The fourth Council of Toledo in 633, presided over by Isidore of Seville, declared in its fifty-seventh canon that no one was henceforth to be compelled to believe^[2]. King Sisenand, who reigned from 631 to 636, supported this position, but he and the council insisted that the converts of Sisebut’s reign who had returned to Judaism under Swintila must return to Christianity^[2]. Nemo-Pekelman has shown that the canon, which she attributes to Isidore himself, was a criticism of Sisebut’s policy grounded in an Augustinian theology of free will and grace^[23]. The same canon, however, insisted that those who had already been baptised by Sisebut’s order and had received the sacraments must be compelled to keep the faith^[23]. The prohibition of forced baptism thus coexisted with the forced retention of the forcibly baptised, and a new legal and social category came into being, the baptised Jew. Laham Cohen and Pecznik have traced how the distinction between Iudaei and Iudaei baptizati became a recurring problem of seventh-century legislation^[24].

The middle decades of the century brought alternating severity and neglect. King Chintila compelled the sixth Council of Toledo in 638 to declare that only Catholics might live in the kingdom^[2]. Under Chindaswinth the laws were so loosely applied that his son Recceswinth complained to the eighth Council of Toledo in 653 about the continued presence of Jews^[2]. Recceswinth ordered those who had lapsed to be brought back to Christianity. Those who had relapsed were made to sign a declaration rejecting all Jewish rites, although they were allowed to abstain from pork. Jews who had never been baptised were forbidden to practise circumcision or to keep the Sabbath and festivals^[2]. A declaration of this kind, presented by the baptised Jews of Toledo to Recceswinth, is preserved in the Visigothic law code and is available in translation in the Fordham Jewish History Sourcebook^[25].

The Toledo memorial of 654 deserves closer reading, because it is one of the very few texts of the period in which Jews, or at least people who had been Jews, speak in the first person, even if the Fordham editors suspect that a priest dictated its wording^[25]. The signatories recall that they had already been compelled to make a similar promise to Chintila, and admit that they had not then truly believed. They now undertake, for themselves, their wives and their children, to observe no Jewish rites, to have no dealings with unbaptised Jews, to marry only according to Christian rites, and to abandon circumcision, the Passover, the Sabbath and the dietary laws^[25]. Only on one point do they ask for indulgence. They cannot bring themselves to eat pork, but they promise to eat food cooked with it without showing disgust^[25]. The document ends with an oath that any transgressor among them would be burned or stoned by the signatories themselves. Behind its formulas can be glimpsed a community trying to survive by promising whatever the king demanded, while holding on, in the matter of food, to a last visible mark of its identity.

The final decades were the harshest. Wamba expelled the Jews from Narbonne. Erwig, who reigned from 680 to 687, obtained from the twelfth Council of Toledo a law requiring every Jew to accept baptism within a year on pain of confiscation, corporal punishment and exile. Priests were to read the law aloud to the Jews in church so that none could plead ignorance, and nobles who sheltered Jews were to be fined^[2]. The Fordham sourcebook reproduces Erwig’s law offering Jews who had not yet become Catholics the alternatives of baptism or expulsion^[25]. Egica, who reigned from 687 to 702, combined incentives to conversion with measures designed to impoverish those who refused. Jews were made to sell to the king, at a price he fixed, the slaves, buildings, lands and vineyards they had acquired from Christians; they were forbidden, on pain of servitude, to trade with Christians or overseas; and their taxes were sharply increased^[2]. These measures were ratified by the sixteenth Council of Toledo in 693. Then, amid rumours that the persecuted Jews were looking to the Muslim powers across the strait for help, Egica accused them at the seventeenth Council of Toledo in 694 of conspiring with their coreligionists abroad. The council declared all the Jews of the kingdom slaves, confiscated their property and ordered that their children be taken from them at the age of seven to be raised by Christians^[2].

Whether any such conspiracy existed cannot now be known. The accusation was made by a king who had every reason to justify the confiscation of Jewish property, and no independent account of the alleged plot survives. What can be said is that the Visigothic kings had given the Jews of the peninsula every reason to hope for a change of rulers, and that within seventeen years of the council the change came.

It is easy to read this sequence as a steady escalation, and in a sense it was. Yet the repetition of the laws is itself evidence that they were not enforced. The Fordham editors observe that the legislation “was not always carried into effect, for the royal authority met with opposition in many parts of Spain”, and they identify among its motives religious zeal, the desire for a uniformly Catholic population and the prospect of gain from confiscated property^[25]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that Jews survived thanks to allies even among the clergy, and that the kings could not count on their subjects to carry out their anti-Jewish policy^[2]. Visigothic Spain at the end of the seventh century nonetheless had no openly practising Jewish community that the law recognised, and many of its Jews were formally Christians who practised Judaism in secret.

The Visigothic legislation outlived the kingdom that made it. The Fordham editors note that the Visigothic Code continued to influence Catholic Spain throughout the Middle Ages, and that its traces can be seen in the procedures of the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century^[25]. The categories it created, the Jew, the baptised Jew and the baptised Jew suspected of practising Judaism in secret, would reappear with terrible force after 1391, when mass conversions once again produced a large population of converts whose sincerity was doubted. The seventh century is thus the prelude to the end of this history as well as to its beginning.

711 and the new order

In 711 an army of Berbers and Arabs under Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād crossed the strait from North Africa, and within a few years overran the Visigothic kingdom and most of the peninsula. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, there were then no communities of openly professing Jews in Spain, but many secret Jews remained, and they welcomed the conquerors as deliverers from long oppression^[2].

Later Arabic accounts report that the conquerors called together the Jews of each captured town and entrusted the town to them as a garrison. The reports name Córdoba, Granada, Toledo and Seville^[2]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s entry on Córdoba presents the same tradition more cautiously, as the testimony of “some sources”^[29]. The tradition fits the military situation, since a small invading army needed local allies if it was to continue its campaign without leaving large garrisons behind. It also fits the experience of Jews who had lived for decades under laws that declared them slaves. But the reports were written down long after the event, and they cannot be taken as an exact record. They show at least that later Muslim and Jewish writers alike remembered the Jews as allies of the conquest.

The conquest changed the legal position of the Jews at a stroke. Under the new rulers Judaism was no longer a crime but a tolerated religion. Jews who had fled to North Africa during the Visigothic persecutions appear to have returned, and some may have taken over estates abandoned by fleeing Visigothic nobles^[2]. The new order was not free of burdens. Jews, like Christians, paid heavy taxes to their new masters, and they suffered with everyone else in the factional strife and civil wars that divided the Arab and Berber conquerors in the first decades of Muslim rule^[2].

Political stability came with the arrival of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I, a survivor of the Umayyad dynasty that had been overthrown in the East by the Abbasids. In 755 he reached al-Andalus, and he made Córdoba the capital of an independent Umayyad emirate^[2]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes relative economic prosperity throughout Umayyad rule, with Jews represented in medicine, agriculture, commerce and crafts. It also describes how the regime’s tolerance made Muslim Spain a refuge, so that the Jewish population grew^[2].

The dhimma in al-Andalus

Under the emirate the Jews of al-Andalus became dhimmis, members of a protected community subject to the poll tax and to the discriminatory regulations described in the previous chapter^[6]. For the ninth century there is almost no direct evidence of how these rules were applied in Spain, but the few sources that survive point to communities that were growing in size and confidence.

One sign is the existence of places that Muslims and Jews alike regarded as Jewish towns. In 853 the Babylonian gaon Natronai wrote that Lucena, south of Córdoba, was “a Jewish place with no gentiles at all”. In the twelfth century the geographer al-Idrīsī reported that Jews lived within the fortified town while Muslims lived outside the walls^[4]. The Jews of Lucena worked in olive groves, vineyards, agriculture, commerce and crafts. The town had scholars of standing, among them Eleazar ben Samuel Ḥurga, who received honorary titles from the Babylonian academies^[4]. Arab geographers also called Granada and Tarragona “Jewish cities”^[2][22].

Tarragona illustrates how exposed such communities could be on the frontier with the Christian north. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that the Jews there engaged in commerce and agriculture under Arab rule, and that some owned land and property, which may explain why al-Idrīsī described it as a Jewish city^[22]. It also records the report that in 850 the Jews of Tarragona helped the Arabs to capture Barcelona, which the Christians later retook^[22]. Accusations of this kind, that Jews had opened the gates of a city to its enemies, recur in the chronicles of every side in the wars of the peninsula, and they are rarely verifiable. They show how readily a minority on a frontier could be suspected of loyalty to the other side.

The same frontier helps to explain the value of the dhimma to both parties. For the rulers of Córdoba, a protected Jewish population was a source of revenue through the poll tax, of skills in trade, crafts and medicine, and, in frontier towns, of residents whose fortunes were tied to the government that protected them. For the Jews, the arrangement offered what Cohen calls toleration in the medieval sense: security, the free practice of their religion and the right to manage their own communal affairs under their own leaders and courts, in return for an inferior status that most of them accepted as part of the natural order^[6]. The contrast with the last century of Visigothic rule, when Jewish practice itself had been outlawed, could hardly have been sharper.

A second sign is the correspondence between Spain and the academies of Babylonia. The geonim, the heads of the great academies of Sura and Pumbedita, answered legal questions from Lucena and Barcelona. In the mid-ninth century Amram Gaon sent his order of prayers in reply to a scholar in Spain^[2][4]. For the Jews of al-Andalus in this period, Babylonia remained the source of legal authority and liturgical practice, and Spain was a distant province of a religious world centred on Iraq. That dependence is the background to the changes that Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut would bring about a century later.

A third sign is the episode of Bodo, a deacon at the court of the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious. In 838 Bodo set out with a retinue, ostensibly on pilgrimage to Rome, but travelled instead to Spain, adopted Judaism under the name Eleazar and settled first at Saragossa and then at Córdoba^[30]. There, it was said, he urged the Muslim ruler to compel his Christian subjects to adopt Judaism or Islam, and he engaged in a polemical correspondence with the Christian scholar Paul Alvarus of Córdoba. Alvarus’s letters survive, but Bodo-Eleazar’s replies were deliberately cut out of the codex in which they had been copied, and they are known only from quotations^[30]. The exchange, which the Encyclopaedia Judaica dates to about 840, is the first explicit reference to Jewish settlement in Córdoba^[29].

The Bodo affair shows a Jewish community in Córdoba that was confident enough to receive a convert from Christianity, a convert who expected the Muslim authorities to hear his arguments, and a Christian minority anxious about its position between two other faiths. It also reminds us that al-Andalus was not a two-sided society. Its Muslim rulers governed a Christian population that for a long time remained large, and the Jews were one minority among others. The three-sided relationship would shape the following centuries.

By the early tenth century, then, the Jews of al-Andalus had recovered from the Visigothic catastrophe. They were numerous, prosperous in some towns, linked to the academies of the East and, in places like Lucena, concentrated enough to give a town its character. They spoke Arabic, which had replaced Latin and Romance as the language of daily life and of learning. Mark Cohen observes that by the tenth century Jews across the Islamic world had made a nearly complete transition from Aramaic to Arabic, and that this prepared them to share fully in the high culture of Islamic society^[6]. In Spain the same transition left them ready to take part in the cultural life of the capital when ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III proclaimed himself caliph in 929.

3. Córdoba of the Caliphs

In 929 the Umayyad ruler of al-Andalus, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, took the title of caliph, claiming for himself the supreme leadership of the Muslim community that his dynasty had lost in the East nearly two centuries earlier. Córdoba, his capital, became for the next two generations the seat of the most powerful state in western Europe and one of the great cities of the Mediterranean world. Its palaces, mosques and libraries attracted scholars from across the Islamic world, and its court provided the setting in which a Jewish physician could rise to direct the caliph’s customs and diplomacy.

This chapter describes the Córdoba of the caliphs as the setting for the first flowering of Jewish culture in al-Andalus. It considers the political meaning of the caliphate, the palace-city of Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ, the library and patronage of al-Ḥakam II, the astronomy and mathematics associated with Maslama al-Majrīṭī, and finally the Jewish community of the capital, its quarters, its scholars and its links with the wider world. The chapter that follows is devoted to Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut himself, so here he appears only as part of the larger picture.

The caliphate of 929

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III came to power in 912 as emir of a state in disarray. Maribel Fierro describes a ruler born in 890 who reigned for some fifty years, first as emir and then as the first caliph of Córdoba, putting an end to internal rebellions and pursuing an expansionist policy in North Africa to check the threat of a rival caliphate^[31]. That rival was the Fatimid dynasty, which had established itself in North Africa and claimed the caliphate for itself. For a ruler in Córdoba, an Umayyad descended from the caliphs of Damascus, it was intolerable to remain a mere emir while a rival dynasty across the strait claimed the leadership of all Muslims. The proclamation of 929 was thus both a statement of legitimacy and an act of war by other means.

UNESCO’s description of the historic centre of Córdoba summarises the city’s course: founded by the Romans in the second century before the Common Era near an older native settlement and made the capital of the province of Baetica, it became the capital of an emirate dependent on Damascus in the eighth century, and in 929 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III made it the seat of the independent caliphate^[26]. The same text speaks of Córdoba’s greatest glory in the period after the Muslim conquest, when, it says, some 300 mosques and innumerable palaces and public buildings were built to rival Constantinople, Damascus and Baghdad^[26]. Medieval figures of this kind should be treated as expressions of the city’s reputation rather than as counts. The broader judgement, that between the eighth and tenth centuries Córdoba was the main urban and cultural focus of the western world, is widely shared^[26].

At the centre of the city stood the Great Mosque, begun in the eighth century and enlarged by successive rulers. UNESCO calls it an irreplaceable testimony of the caliphate of Córdoba, notes that it was for centuries second in surface area only to the Holy Mosque at Mecca, and describes it as a testing ground for building techniques that influenced both Arabic and Christian architecture^[26]. After the Christian conquest of the city in the thirteenth century it was turned into a cathedral under Ferdinand III of Castile^[26]. Its architecture belongs to the history of Andalusi art rather than to this book, and is treated more fully elsewhere on this site. Here it is enough to note that the Jewish quarter of the caliphal city lay a short walk from the mosque and the palace. The Jews of tenth-century Córdoba lived beside the political and religious centre of the caliphate, not on its margins.

The Jewish history of these years is closely bound up with the politics of the caliphate. The rivalry with the Fatimids was fought partly at sea, and the naval war between the two powers may explain how the scholar Moses ben Ḥanokh came to Córdoba as a captive in the 950s^[14]. The rivalry with the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad, whom the Umayyads had never acknowledged, gave the rulers of Córdoba a reason to welcome any development that loosened the ties between their Jewish subjects and the Jewish academies of Iraq. The Encyclopaedia Judaica observes that ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III was “obviously interested in putting an end to the Babylonian tutelage over Spanish Jews”^[16]. The diplomacy of the caliphate with Byzantium, the German emperor and the Christian kingdoms of the north created the opportunities in which a Jewish courtier could make himself indispensable.

Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ

The most ambitious monument of the new caliphate was a city. In the middle of the tenth century the Umayyads built, a short distance west of Córdoba, a palace-city that served as the seat of the caliphate, known in Arabic as Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ and in Spanish as Medina Azahara^[32]. UNESCO, which inscribed the site on its World Heritage List in 2018, describes it as a complete urban complex, “a new city planned and built as a state initiative”, combining architecture, landscape, decoration and an infrastructure of roads and canals^[32].

The city had a short life. It was destroyed in the early eleventh century, during the civil wars that brought the caliphate to an end, and it then remained hidden until its rediscovery in the early twentieth century^[32]. Because the site was never rebuilt and was used for grazing, its remains are unusually well preserved. Only about a tenth of it has been excavated, and the buffer zone around it preserves the quarries from which its stone was taken and several of the great country estates, the munyas, that surrounded it^[32]. The excavated parts of the fortified palace include buildings whose original walls still stand several metres high^[32].

Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ was where the caliph received ambassadors, and its halls were designed to impress them. The embassies described in the next chapter, from Byzantium, from the German emperor Otto I and from the Christian rulers of the north, were received in this setting, and the Jewish courtier who managed several of them moved between the palace-city and the old capital. The decoration of its reception halls, with their carved stone panels and geometric and vegetal ornament, belongs to the history of Andalusi art and is treated elsewhere on this site. For the present purpose the important point is political. The palace-city was a statement that Córdoba was now the capital of a caliphate equal in splendour to Baghdad and Constantinople, and the court that inhabited it needed physicians, secretaries, translators, astronomers and financiers. Some of them were Jews.

Libraries and the sciences under al-Ḥakam II

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III died in 961 and was succeeded by his son al-Ḥakam II, who reigned until 976. Al-Ḥakam is remembered above all as a collector of books. María Jesús Viguera Molíns, in her survey of Arabic libraries and manuscripts in Córdoba, notes the caliph’s “passion” for books and reports that, according to Ibn Ḥazm and Ibn Khaldūn, he assembled 400,000 volumes^[33]. The same authors, together with al-Maqqarī and others, report that the royal library of Córdoba was recorded in a catalogue of forty-four quires of fifty folios each, and the thirteenth-century writer Ibn al-Abbār names its librarian, who bore the title of keeper of the caliph’s scientific treasures^[33].

Such numbers have been discussed at length by modern historians, among them David Wasserstein, who devoted a study to the library of al-Ḥakam II and its place in the culture of Islamic Spain^[34]. Whatever the true size of the collection, there is no doubt that it was exceptional and that its formation reflected a deliberate policy. Viguera also notes that the Umayyads of Córdoba treasured among their books a copy of the Qurʾān believed to have belonged to the caliph ʿUthmān, which remained in Córdoba until the Almoravids carried it off to North Africa^[33]. Al-Ḥakam’s bibliophilia was remembered in the eleventh century by the Toledan judge Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī in his history of the nations that cultivated learning^[33][17].

The caliph’s library was the summit of a much wider book culture. Viguera cites the Córdoban chronicler Ibn al-Fayyāḍ, who reported that in a single suburb of the capital some 170 women were employed in copying the Qurʾān^[33]. At the end of the nineteenth century the Arabist Julián Ribera, after surveying the biographical dictionaries of Andalusi scholars, ventured the estimate that between sixty and eighty thousand books might have been copied in Córdoba each year at the height of its culture. Viguera reproduces the estimate as an indication of how the sources present the city, as a great storehouse of books and a lively market for them^[33]. She also reproduces a story, told by a visitor from outside the city, of a book auction in Córdoba. The visitor was repeatedly outbid for a volume he wanted for his studies, and he discovered that his rival had no idea what the book contained. The rival wanted it because a gap on his shelves exactly fitted its size, and because good society in Córdoba required a man of standing to keep a library^[33]. The anecdote is told with the visitor’s surprise, and modern historians have quoted it often as evidence both of serious learning and of collecting as fashion.

For the Jews of Córdoba this culture of the book mattered in practical ways. Hebrew manuscripts, like Arabic ones, had to be copied by hand, and a patron who wished to build up a centre of Jewish learning had to acquire books from the East and pay scribes to copy them. The Jewish Encyclopedia reports that Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut imported Hebrew books from the East for the scholars he supported, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica that he acquired the best manuscripts available^[35][16]. Jewish patronage in Córdoba thus followed the model set by the caliph and his courtiers, on a smaller scale and for a different literature.

Patronage of this kind depended on the ruler, and it could be withdrawn. Viguera recounts how al-Manṣūr, who took power after al-Ḥakam’s death, had the caliph’s libraries examined in the presence of his chief religious advisers and ordered that the books on the ancient sciences regarded as suspect be separated from the rest and burned. Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī reported the episode in the eleventh century^[33]. The purge did not destroy the collection, and Viguera quotes modern historians who argue that al-Ḥakam’s accumulation of books helps to explain why Andalusi science survived the blow practically unharmed^[33]. When the caliphate collapsed in the civil wars of the early eleventh century, the remaining books of the Umayyads were sold and dispersed across al-Andalus, carrying their learning to the courts of the new kingdoms^[33]. The fate of the library anticipated that of the Jewish scholars of Córdoba, who were scattered in the same years.

The importance of the library for the sciences lay in what it brought to al-Andalus from the East. Arabic science had developed first in Baghdad, where, as the MacTutor history of Arabic mathematics explains, the translation of Greek scientific texts and the research of mathematicians such as al-Khwārizmī began around 800 under the Abbasid caliphs^[36]. That tradition spread westward with the expansion of Arabic learning to North Africa and Spain, and the MacTutor authors stress that the scholars who carried it were not all Muslims or Arabs, “some were Jews, some Christians, some of other faiths”^[36]. In tenth-century Córdoba, books on astronomy, mathematics, medicine and philosophy acquired from the East made it possible for local scholars to take up that tradition and, within two generations, to develop it in original ways.

Philosophy followed the same path. Mark Cohen describes how the Jews of the eastern Islamic lands, who had access to the Arabic translations of Greek science, medicine and philosophy and an interest in them, created a Judaeo-Arabic culture in which philosophy served religious truth, as it did for Muslim philosophers, and how that culture spread from the East to the Muslim West^[6]. Sarah Stroumsa’s history of philosophy in al-Andalus traces its development from its introduction into the peninsula through its later Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, theological and mystical forms. She argues that the politics of the day, including the conflicts with the Christian north and with the Fatimids of North Africa, shaped philosophical activity in al-Andalus and affected Muslims and Jews in different ways^[9]. In the tenth century the philosophical sciences were still new in al-Andalus, and the caliph’s patronage of books and scholars gave them a place at court. Solomon ibn Gabirol, Baḥya ibn Paquda and Judah Halevi, in the next century, could take that place for granted.

Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī, writing in Toledo in 1068, is one of the main sources for this development. His Ṭabaqāt al-umam, a survey of the nations that had cultivated learning, treated the Indians, Persians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks, Byzantines, Arabs and Jews in turn^[17]. Born in Almería in 1029 and appointed chief judge of Toledo in 1068, Ṣāʿid was a legal official by career, but his historical interest in the sciences, and his encouragement of a group of young instrument makers and astronomers that included al-Zarqālī, made him an important link between the Córdoba of the caliphs and the Toledo of the eleventh century^[17]. His decision to include the Jews among the learned nations reflects the reputation that Jewish scholars had acquired in al-Andalus by his time.

Maslama al-Majrīṭī and Andalusi astronomy

The leading figure of Córdoban science in the later tenth century was Maslama al-Majrīṭī, whose name records his origin in Madrid. Josep Casulleras, in the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, describes him as the man his Andalusi contemporaries regarded as the foremost astronomer of his time. He was born in the first half of the tenth century, came as a young man to Córdoba, studied and worked there, and died there in 1007^[37]. His work lay mainly in mathematical astronomy, though he also wrote on commercial arithmetic^[37].

Maslama’s significance, Casulleras argues, lies as much in his teaching as in his writings. He founded an original school of Andalusi astronomers in which arithmetic and geometry were also cultivated, and his disciples, among them Ibn al-Samḥ, Ibn al-Ṣaffār and Ibn Barghūth, who died in 1052, spanned three generations and spread the exact sciences throughout al-Andalus^[37]. He brought together for the first time in al-Andalus two mathematical traditions, the arithmetic of inheritance shares required by Islamic law and the mathematical sciences of the philosophical tradition, which included astronomy. His two known teachers, one a specialist in inheritance law and the other reputed to know astronomy, represented these two strands^[37].

He was also, according to Casulleras, the first Andalusi astronomer known to have made his own observations. The later astronomer al-Zarqālī reports that Maslama observed the star Regulus in 979 and found its ecliptical longitude to be 135° 40′. From this he determined the longitudes of all the fixed stars, implying a precession of the equinoxes of 13° 10′ since the epoch of the star catalogue in Ptolemy’s Almagest^[37]. The value appears in the star table attached to his commentary on Ptolemy’s Planisphaerium, a treatise on the stereographic projection of the sphere, which is the geometrical basis of the astrolabe. Casulleras notes that Maslama most likely revised an existing eastern Arabic translation of the work rather than translating it from Greek himself, and that his additions improved the procedures for drawing the lines of the astrolabe and locating the stars on its rete^[37].

His most influential work was a revision, made with his disciple Ibn al-Ṣaffār, of the astronomical tables of al-Khwārizmī, the Sindhind zīj. This ninth-century handbook was based mainly on Indian methods. Al-Khwārizmī’s original is apparently lost, but a Latin translation of Maslama’s revision by Adelard of Bath, made in the twelfth century, survives^[37]. The revision was more than a copy. Casulleras explains that the aim of the Andalusi astronomers was to adapt al-Khwārizmī’s tables to their own time and place^[37]. They replaced the Persian solar calendar of the original with the Muslim lunar calendar, recalculated observer-specific tables for the coordinates of Córdoba, added tables of sines and of shadow lengths, which are equivalent to the cotangent, and included a reference to the Hispanic era, the dating system of the Christian peninsula, which counted from 38 BCE^[37]. One consequence of using the longitude of Córdoba is particularly striking. Maslama provides the earliest evidence of a correction that reduced the length of the Mediterranean Sea, much exaggerated in Ptolemy’s geography, to something close to its real size, a correction preserved in most later Andalusi geographical tables^[37].

The Córdoban revision of a Baghdad handbook thus reached the Latin West, a pattern of transmission from East to West through al-Andalus that later chapters on Toledo and its translators will follow in more detail.

Maslama and his school matter for the history of Sefarad in two ways. The first is direct. The Jewish astronomers and mathematicians of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, among them Abraham bar Ḥiyya and Abraham ibn Ezra, worked within the scientific tradition that Maslama and his pupils established in al-Andalus, and some of their works carried that tradition into Hebrew. The second is indirect but no less important. The prestige of the mathematical sciences at the court of Córdoba set a standard that educated Jews sought to meet. The ideal of the cultivated Jewish courtier, versed in medicine, mathematics and astronomy as well as in Hebrew and the Talmud, took shape in this environment.

The Jews of Córdoba

The Jewish community of Córdoba in the tenth century is known chiefly through the careers of its leading men and the disputes among its scholars, but some features of its physical setting can be recovered. The Encyclopaedia Judaica places the Jewish quarter of the Muslim period near the alcázar, the fortified palace, in the south-west of the city, where it continued after the Christian conquest and where parts of it can still be seen. A second quarter appears to have existed in the north of the city near a gate known as the Bāb al-Yahūd, the Jews’ Gate, later called the Talavera or León gate, which stood until 1903^[29]. The small synagogue that visitors see in Córdoba today dates from 1315 and belongs to the Christian period^[29].

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When Córdoba became the capital of the caliphate, the Encyclopaedia Judaica writes, it also became the centre of “a diversified and brilliant Jewish culture”, largely through the patronage of Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut, who gathered philosophers, poets and scholars around him^[29]. The intellectual life of the community in the third quarter of the tenth century can be followed through three groups of people: the grammarians and poets, the rabbinic scholars, and the travellers and courtiers who connected Córdoba with the wider world.

The grammarians and poets were led by Menahem ben Saruq, Ḥasdai’s secretary, and Dunash ben Labrat, who came to Córdoba from Fez after studying in Baghdad with Saadia Gaon^[39][11]. Their quarrel over Menahem’s Hebrew dictionary, the Maḥberet, and Dunash’s introduction of Arabic metres into Hebrew poetry are among the founding events of the Hebrew culture of al-Andalus and are treated in Chapter 5. A third figure, Judah ben David Ḥayyuj, born in Fez, arrived in Córdoba about 960, when the dispute between Menahem and Dunash was at its height. In works written in Arabic he set out the principle that Hebrew roots consist of three consonants, the foundation of all later Hebrew grammar^[40][2].

Córdoba was not the only centre of rabbinic learning in al-Andalus. The academy of Lucena, mentioned in responsa as early as the ninth century, continued to flourish into the twelfth, and its later heads included some of the greatest legal scholars of Sefarad^[2][4]. But in the tenth century the capital took the lead. The rabbinic scholars of Córdoba were led by Moses ben Ḥanokh and then by his son Ḥanokh. Under their leadership, as the next chapter explains, the academy of Córdoba became a centre of talmudic learning independent of Babylonia^[14][41]. The succession to Moses ben Ḥanokh divided the community. His pupil Joseph ibn Abitur, a native of Mérida who excelled in secular learning, contested Ḥanokh’s appointment. After Ḥasdai’s death the dispute was renewed, and al-Ḥakam II confirmed Ḥanokh, so that Ibn Abitur was placed under a ban and left Spain for the East^[41][42]. When the vizier al-Manṣūr took power after al-Ḥakam’s death, the Jewish silk merchant Jacob ibn Jau rose to influence and had Ḥanokh dismissed in favour of Ibn Abitur. Ibn Abitur declined to return, saying, in the words reported by Ibn Daud, that “from Spain to Babylonia there was no scholar so worthy of the office as R. Ḥanokh”^[42]. Ibn Jau later fell from favour and was imprisoned, and Ḥanokh was restored, serving until his death in 1014^[41]. That the caliph and his vizier were drawn into the appointment of a rabbi shows how closely the leadership of the Jewish community was bound to the politics of the court.

The travellers connected Córdoba with lands far beyond al-Andalus. The most remarkable is Ibrāhīm ibn Yaʿqūb, a Jew of Tortosa who travelled through central Europe in the 960s. He visited what is now France as far as the neighbourhood of the English Channel, went on to Mainz and Fulda, reached the court of Otto I in 966 and probably travelled to Prague. He was the first writer to speak of the kingdom of Poland^[43]. His purpose is disputed. Some scholars have seen him as a merchant, others as a physician or translator attached to a diplomatic mission. The Encyclopaedia Judaica raises the possibility that he was sent on an exploratory journey by al-Ḥakam II, whom it describes as a known supporter of research^[43][2]. His account survives only in fragments quoted by the eleventh-century Arab geographer al-Bakrī. Its interest in distances, plants, diet, medicine and religious customs, including a salt mine near Magdeburg that he says was worked by Jews, made it an important source for Arabic knowledge of Europe north of the Pyrenees^[43].

The relationship between the Jewish community and the Christian population of Córdoba is harder to trace in this period. The Christians of al-Andalus, many of them Arabic in speech and culture, formed a larger minority than the Jews, with their own bishops, churches and scholars. The exchange between Bodo-Eleazar and Paul Alvarus in the 840s shows that learned Jews and Christians in Córdoba could argue with each other directly, and with some bitterness, about the meaning of the Scriptures they shared^[30]. A century later, when Christian ambassadors from the north and from Germany came to Córdoba, it was a Jewish courtier who conducted much of the negotiation with them^[16]. The Jews of the capital stood between the ruling Muslims and the Christian minority, and some of them learned to make use of that position.

The Jewish community of the caliphal capital thus combined deep roots in local life with an unusual range of connections. Its scholars corresponded with Babylonia and with Italy, its merchants and travellers reached the Rhineland and Bohemia, and its leading courtier, as the next chapter shows, wrote letters to Constantinople and to the distant kingdom of the Khazars. The dhimmi status of the Jews limited what they could become in Muslim society, but in Córdoba under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III and al-Ḥakam II the limits were wide. Within them, a generation of Jewish scholars began to build a culture that combined the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud with the poetry, grammar, medicine and science of the Arabic-speaking world.

The prosperity of this world was not to last. After al-Ḥakam’s death in 976 power passed to al-Manṣūr, who ruled in the name of the young caliph Hishām II. After al-Manṣūr’s death in 1002 the caliphate dissolved into civil war. The Berber conquest of Córdoba in 1013 and the end of the dynasty in the 1030s scattered the city’s elites, Jewish as well as Muslim, to the capitals of the new taifa kingdoms^[2]. Among the refugees was a young pupil of Ḥanokh ben Moses who would become vizier of Granada, Samuel ha-Nagid^[2][41]. The culture that took root in tenth-century Córdoba flowered in the eleventh century in Granada, Saragossa, Seville and elsewhere, and the following chapters follow it there.

4. Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut, Physician and Diplomat

Of all the Jews of tenth-century Córdoba, one stands out in both Jewish and non-Jewish sources. Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut was a physician who served the caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III and his son al-Ḥakam II, took part in the revision of the most important pharmacological text of antiquity, directed the customs of the caliphate, negotiated with ambassadors from Byzantium, Germany and the Christian kingdoms of the north, and wrote, or caused to be written, a letter to the king of the Khazars on the Volga. He was also the leader of the Jews of al-Andalus and the patron of its first generation of Hebrew poets and grammarians. The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls him “the first of the Jewish dignitaries in the service of Spanish rulers on whom information is extant”, and regards him as the founder of Sephardi Jewry, in the sense that he laid the foundations of the cultural and religious flowering that came to be called the golden age^[16].

That reputation rests partly on later tradition, which had every reason to magnify him, and partly on contemporary evidence in Arabic, Latin and Hebrew. This chapter tries to separate the two. It follows Ḥasdai’s career from his family’s origins to the court; examines his part in the Arabic revision of Dioscorides; describes his diplomatic work; considers the Khazar correspondence and the debate over its authenticity; and assesses his patronage of Jewish learning and his role in making Córdoba independent of the academies of Babylonia.

From Jaén to the caliph’s court

Ḥasdai’s full name, as given by the Jewish Encyclopedia, was Abū Yūsuf Ḥasdai ben Isaac ben Ezra ibn Shaprut^[35]. The Arabic kunya Abū Yūsuf and the Hebrew patronymic illustrate the double identity of a Jewish courtier in al-Andalus, known by one name at court and by another in the synagogue. He was born about 915, or on some modern reckonings a few years earlier, as discussed below. Both the Encyclopaedia Judaica and the Jewish Encyclopedia trace his family to Jaén in eastern Andalusia, and the Byzantine prosopography compiled by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy states that he was born in Jaén in 915^[16][35][44]. The biography by Alejandro García Sanjuán in the Real Academia de la Historia’s Diccionario Biográfico gives Córdoba instead^[45]. The difference may reflect the family’s move. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that his father, a wealthy man, came from Jaén to Córdoba, so a child of the family could have been born in either city^[16].

The father, Isaac, was himself a patron of learning. The lexicographer Menahem ben Saruq, who later served as Ḥasdai’s secretary, came to Córdoba as a young man under Isaac’s protection, and he wrote eulogies on Ḥasdai’s parents^[39]. Ḥasdai thus grew up in a household that already supported Hebrew scholarship, and his later patronage continued a family practice.

His education combined Jewish learning with the languages and sciences of the court. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that he acquired a thorough knowledge of Hebrew, Arabic and Latin, the last of which was then known in Spain chiefly to the higher clergy^[35]. He studied medicine above all. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica he was a practising physician who also engaged in medical research^[16]. Later tradition credited him with the discovery of a universal remedy, a theriac called al-fārūq. The Jewish Encyclopedia reports this with the cautious phrase “is said to have discovered”^[35], and Ibn Juljul’s account of the Córdoban revision of Dioscorides, discussed below, names him among the physicians working to identify the drugs of the ancient text^[46]. The theriacs of the period were complex compound remedies made from many ingredients, and the claim that Ḥasdai devised a new one should be taken as evidence of his standing as a pharmacologist rather than as the record of a discovery.

Medicine was his route to power. In tenth-century Córdoba it was a prestigious profession. Cabo González describes how the medical knowledge inherited from Roman and Visigothic Spain was transformed under the caliphate into an organised structure centred on the court physician, who enjoyed great prestige, and how the most important medical and pharmacological works of al-Andalus were written in this period^[46]. A Jewish physician who served the caliph thus belonged to an elite of learned men who had the ruler’s ear. Ḥasdai entered the service of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III as a physician^[16]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that Muslim rulers of the period often entrusted their physicians with administrative and political responsibilities, and that the caliph accordingly appointed Ḥasdai director of the customs department, one of the most important positions in the administration of the state^[16]. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes him as controlling the customs and ship dues of the port of Córdoba, and adds that “without bearing the title of vizier he was in reality minister of foreign affairs”, arranging the caliph’s alliances and receiving the envoys of foreign powers^[35]. The absence of the title matters. A Jew could not formally hold authority over Muslims under the rules of the dhimma, but a trusted physician could be given responsibilities that in practice amounted to high office^[6].

Ḥasdai’s career continued after ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III died in 961. He retained his position under al-Ḥakam II, whom the Jewish Encyclopedia describes as surpassing his father in his love of learning^[35]. The Berlin prosopography describes him as a physician and scholar at Córdoba under both caliphs^[44]. The date of his death is uncertain. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives about 970, the Berlin prosopography gives 970, the Diccionario Biográfico allows 970 or 975, and the Jewish Encyclopedia, following older scholarship, gives 970 or 990^{[16][44][45][35]}. Peter Cole, in the introduction to his anthology of Hebrew poetry from Spain, gives Ḥasdai’s dates as “c. 910–75”, placing both his birth and his death a few years from the encyclopaedias’ figures^[47]. Sarah Stroumsa, in her study of Ḥasdai’s descendants, gives “ca. 910–ca. 970”^[48]. Modern scholarship therefore places his birth between about 910 and 915 and his death about 970, or at the latest in the mid-970s, in either case during the reign of al-Ḥakam II.

The Dioscorides codex and Arabic pharmacology

The most famous episode of Ḥasdai’s scientific career concerns a book. Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician of the first century of the Common Era from Anazarbus in Cilicia, served with the Roman legions under Claudius and Nero. His travels allowed him to study local remedies, and he wrote a treatise known by its Latin title De Materia Medica, which became the standard work on the medicinal properties of plants, minerals and animal substances^[46]. Ana María Cabo González, in a study of the Córdoban revision of the work, counts some 600 plants, 90 minerals and 35 products of animal origin among the substances it describes, with directions for identification, collection and dosage^[46].

The work reached the Arabic-speaking world early. In Baghdad, in the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil in the mid-ninth century, it was translated from Greek into Arabic by Iṣṭafan ibn Bāsīl and corrected by the great translator Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq^[46]. Iṣṭafan rendered into Arabic the names he knew, but left many others in transliterated Greek, hoping that later scholars who knew the drugs themselves would supply the Arabic equivalents^[46]. This Baghdad version reached al-Andalus and was used there for a century^[46]. Its gaps were a practical problem. A physician or apothecary who could not identify a plant from its Greek name could not use the remedy.

The opportunity to fill those gaps came through diplomacy. The fullest account is that of the Córdoban physician Ibn Juljul, born in Córdoba in 944, who took part in the work and described it in his book on the names of the simple drugs of Dioscorides. Cabo González quotes the account at length^[46]. According to Ibn Juljul, about 337 of the Hijra, which corresponds to 948–949, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān received from the emperor of Constantinople a letter with costly gifts. Among them were the treatise of Dioscorides, written in Greek and illustrated with superb miniatures, and the history of Orosius^[46]. The emperor’s letter, as Cabo González reports it, warned that Dioscorides could be of use only through a translator who knew Greek and understood the properties of drugs^[46]. No one among the Christians of Córdoba could read Greek, and the codex therefore remained untranslated in the caliph’s library while physicians continued to use the Baghdad version^[46].

When the caliph replied to the emperor, he asked for someone who knew Greek and Latin to teach those languages to his servants. In reply the emperor sent a monk, Nicholas, who arrived in Córdoba in 340 of the Hijra, or 951^[46]. At that time, Ibn Juljul continues, there were in Córdoba several physicians devoted to establishing the Arabic names of the simple drugs in Dioscorides. Foremost among them in interest and diligence, as Cabo González renders the passage, was the Jewish physician Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut, who sought to please ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, and the monk Nicholas became his close friend^[46]. Ibn Juljul names other members of the group, including a physician from Sicily who knew Greek and the properties of drugs. He says that Nicholas died at the beginning of the reign of al-Ḥakam II, and that thanks to the group’s research the true properties and correct names of all but about ten of the simple drugs became known in Córdoba and throughout al-Andalus^[46].

The Berlin prosopography summarises the same evidence. Ḥasdai belonged to a group of scholars in Córdoba, led by the Byzantine monk Nicholas, which from 340 of the Hijra, that is between June 951 and May 952, translated the Greek Dioscorides that Constantine VII had given to ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III^[44]. The older encyclopedias simplify the story. The Jewish Encyclopedia dates the embassy to 949 and credits Ḥasdai, “with the aid of a learned Greek monk named Nicholas”, with translating the codex into Arabic^[35]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica places the embassy in the late 940s and makes Ḥasdai a member of the group that translated the book from Greek into Arabic^[16]. The differences are of emphasis and date rather than substance, but they matter. The work was a collective revision, not a single man’s translation. It began only with the monk’s arrival in 951 or 952, two or three years after the codex itself, and its purpose was to correct and complete an existing Arabic version.

Cabo González’s study shows what the revision achieved. The Córdoban team did not simply translate the Greek again. They identified and correctly named, in the Arabic of al-Andalus and in its Romance variants, the substances that had remained unknown, confused or wrongly rendered in the Baghdad version, so that the Córdoban text became a work adapted to the plants, geography and medicine of al-Andalus^[46]. Ibn Juljul himself added many Hispano-Arabic identifications to the text of Dioscorides, and later served as personal physician to the caliphs^[46]. Cabo González quotes his own account of his motives, preserved by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa: a deep desire to know the true nature of medicine, which is the basis of compound remedies, and to revive knowledge that was in danger of being forgotten^[46].

The codex that started the project has not survived. Cabo González reports the opinion of the Spanish scholar R. Matesanz that it closely resembled an illustrated Greek manuscript of Dioscorides now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, M652^[46]. If so, the book that reached ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III was a luxury object as well as a scientific text, with painted images of the plants beside their descriptions. Such images were themselves an aid to identification. A physician who could not match a Greek plant name to an Arabic or Romance one might still recognise the plant from its picture, and the collaboration of Nicholas, Ḥasdai and the Córdoban physicians may well have depended on them. The gift from Constantine VII, in Cabo González’s phrase, set off a thorough revision and updating of one of the most important medical and pharmacological works in the history of science^[46].

The episode shows several features of Ḥasdai’s world at once. A gift between rulers set a scientific project in motion. The Muslim court could not proceed until a Christian monk arrived from Constantinople, and the work then brought together Muslim physicians, a Byzantine monk, a Sicilian who knew Greek and a Jewish courtier. Its results passed into the Arabic pharmacology of the West, which later reached Latin Europe. Ḥasdai’s Latin, Arabic and Hebrew, together with his medical training, made him well suited to work with a Greek monk on a text whose plant names had to be matched with the vocabulary of Spain. His eagerness to please the caliph, which Ibn Juljul noted without malice, was the eagerness of a courtier whose position depended on being useful.

Embassies from Byzantium and Otto I

Byzantium was the most distant of Córdoba’s diplomatic partners and in some ways the most important. Cabo González lists, on the basis of the Arabic sources, a series of Byzantine embassies to ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, though their dates are much disputed. The first came in 947 or 948. A second, in 949 or 950, was distinguished by an exchange of letters and gifts, including the copy of Dioscorides. A third, in 951–952, brought the monk sent to help with the work. A fourth probably came in the first part of 956. Between 956 and 959, apparently, a fifth was followed by the dispatch of 140 columns from Constantinople for the adornment of Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ^[46]. The Berlin prosopography, following the Spanish Byzantinist Juan Signes Codoñer, distinguishes an earlier embassy that delivered the codex, accompanied by the bishop Hishām ibn Hudhayl, from the embassy of 340 of the Hijra that brought the monk Nicholas^[44]. Byzantine interest in Córdoba was long-standing. Cabo González notes that the first Byzantine embassy known to have reached al-Andalus was sent by the emperor Theophilus in 839–840, seeking an alliance against the caliphs of the East and the rising powers of North Africa, an invitation the emir courteously declined^[46]. In the tenth century the two courts again had common enemies, the Fatimids above all, and the exchange of embassies continued under al-Ḥakam II. Byzantium sent an embassy to honour the new caliph on his accession in 961, and another is reported in 972^[46]. Gifts such as manuscripts and marble columns were the visible currency of this relationship. The Córdoba of Ḥasdai’s day was a court to which emperors sent their treasures.

The precise sequence is uncertain. What is clear is that Ḥasdai was involved in Córdoba’s relations with Constantinople at more than one level, as a scholar working with the monk and, as the Khazar correspondence shows, as a correspondent of the Byzantine court in his own right.

The best-documented of Ḥasdai’s diplomatic missions concerns the German king and emperor Otto I. Otto sent an embassy to Córdoba headed by John, a monk of the abbey of Gorze in Lorraine, which is known from the Latin life of John. The date of its arrival is variously given. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 953, the Jewish Encyclopedia 956, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on the Khazars speaks of the years 953–955^[16][35][49]. The discrepancy probably reflects the length of the embassy’s stay, which, as the dispute over its letter suggests, was not brief.

The difficulty was a letter. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the caliph feared that Otto’s letter contained matter offensive to Islam and entrusted the negotiations to Ḥasdai, who saw that the letter could not be presented in its existing form and persuaded the envoys to send for another without the objectionable passages^[35]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica confirms that the negotiations with John of Gorze were conducted through Ḥasdai^[16]. The life of John contains a famous judgement on the Jewish negotiator. As quoted in the Jewish Encyclopedia, John said that he had “never seen a man of such subtle intellect as the Jew Ḥasdeu”^[35]. The praise is the more striking for coming from a Christian monk with no reason to flatter a Jew.

Ḥasdai’s diplomacy extended to the Christian kingdoms of the peninsula. In 956, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, he was sent with a Muslim envoy to the court of the king of León to negotiate a peace treaty^[16]. His most celebrated success came two years later. Sancho, a prince of the royal house of Navarre who had been crowned king of León, had been driven from his throne. His grandmother Toda, the queen of Navarre, sought the caliph’s help in restoring him^[16][35]. In 958 Ḥasdai was sent to the court of Navarre, at first in order to treat Sancho as a physician. He succeeded in persuading the queen, her son and her grandson to travel to Córdoba to conclude a treaty with the caliph^[16][35].

The arrival of the Christian rulers in Córdoba, as supplicants to a monarch who had long been their enemy, was hailed as a diplomatic triumph^[16]. A Hebrew poem of the time praised Ḥasdai in terms that the Jewish Encyclopedia quotes: the proud queen had been vanquished “by the charm of his words, the strength of his wisdom, the force of his cunning, and his thousand tricks”^[35]. The episode combined medicine and diplomacy in a way that sums up Ḥasdai’s career. He reached the Christian court as a physician, won the confidence of its rulers and brought them to the caliph as clients.

These successes made Ḥasdai valuable to ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III and gave him standing among the Jews of al-Andalus. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that after he had become an important dignitary at court, he was also appointed leader of the Jewish population of Muslim Spain^[16]. In later Hebrew sources he is called nasi, prince. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s entry on Ibn Abitur uses that title of him, though whether it was a formal office or an honorific is unclear^[42].

The letter to the Khazar king

The document for which Ḥasdai is best known outside Spain is a letter in Hebrew addressed to Joseph, king of the Khazars. The Khazars were a Turkic people whose rulers governed a powerful state between the Caspian and Black Seas, and whose state religion, as the Berlin prosopography puts it, was Judaism^[44]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on the Khazars gives the name Khazar Correspondence to the exchange of letters between Ḥasdai and Joseph, which survives as Ḥasdai’s Letter and a Reply of Joseph in two versions, a long one and a short one^[49]. It warns at once that “the Correspondence involves serious critical difficulties, and its authenticity has been much debated”^[49]. The entry on Ḥasdai himself speaks of his “alleged” letter and the “alleged” reply, and records a divergence of scholarly opinion on their authenticity^[16].

The letter as preserved has a clear structure. It opens with a Hebrew poem whose acrostic gives the names of Ḥasdai and of Menahem ben Saruq, who presumably composed it as Ḥasdai’s secretary^[49][39]. The prose that follows describes the geographical position of al-Andalus in relation to Khazaria, the natural wealth of al-Andalus and Ḥasdai’s own position there^[49]. Ḥasdai explains that his interest had been aroused by repeated reports that the Khazars were Jews. He then describes his attempts to reach the Khazar king, which finally succeeded through two Jews, Mar Saul and Mar Joseph, who came to Córdoba with an embassy from the king of a people the letter calls the G-b-lim, identified in the letter with the Ṣaqlab, or Slavs,^[49][35]. By their means the letter travelled overland to the East. According to the Reply, it was finally placed in the king’s hands by a Jew from Central Europe, named Jacob or, in the long version, Isaac ben Eliezer^[49].

The letter’s questions show what a Jewish courtier in Córdoba wanted to know about a Jewish kingdom. Was there a Jewish kingdom anywhere on earth? How had Jews come to Khazaria? How had the Khazars converted? Where did the king live, and from which tribe did he come? How did he go in procession to his place of worship? Did war override the Sabbath? And did the king have any knowledge of the end of days^[49]? The letter names ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III as the reigning king of al-Andalus, which places it before 961. If the people of the embassy that brought Mar Saul and Mar Joseph were Otto I’s subjects, as has been suggested, it cannot be earlier than 953–955, when John of Gorze was in Córdoba^[49].

The Berlin prosopography adds a further dimension, drawn from fragments of Ḥasdai’s correspondence edited by Jacob Mann and by Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak. Having learned from a Byzantine embassy of the difficult situation of the Jews in Byzantium, Ḥasdai initiated an embassy of his own, led by one Isaac ben Nathan, with the aim of making contact with the Khazar ruler. Isaac travelled to Constantinople with a letter from Ḥasdai to the empress Helena and the emperor Constantine VII, and fragments of that letter survive^[44]. Ḥasdai apparently hoped to reach Khazaria by sea with Byzantine support. The attempt failed. After six months in Constantinople Isaac returned to Córdoba with a letter from Constantine VII explaining that the Khazar land could not then be reached from Byzantium either by land or by sea^[44]. Signes Codoñer, as summarised in the prosopography, dates this embassy after 951–952, possibly to 953^[44]. Whether any envoy of Ḥasdai ever reached the Khazar king cannot be determined from the sources, but the prosopography concludes that the Reply attributed to Joseph shows that some contact took place^[44].

The Reply attributed to Joseph answers in kind. It recapitulates Ḥasdai’s questions, relates the early history of the Khazars and tells at length how their king Bulan and the leading Khazars accepted Judaism after a debate between representatives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It then describes a later reform under a king named Obadiah, when synagogues and schools were built and rabbinic Judaism was introduced^[49]. Joseph traces his own descent from Obadiah, describes his country and capital, answers the question about the end of days noncommittally, and invites Ḥasdai to visit Khazaria^[49].

The textual history of the correspondence explains much of the debate. The letters became widely known only in print, first in a Hebrew pamphlet published by Isaac Akrish in or after 1577, and then in the edition of Judah Halevi’s Kuzari published by the younger Buxtorf in 1660^[49]. The only known manuscript of Ḥasdai’s Letter together with the short version of the Reply is in the library of Christ Church, Oxford, and is undated; the long version of the Reply was published in 1874 from a manuscript in the Firkovich collection, now in St Petersburg, and is thought to date from the thirteenth century^[49]. These late witnesses invited suspicion. Against the view that the whole correspondence is a sixteenth-century fabrication, however, the Encyclopaedia Judaica points to the Sefer ha-ʿIttim of Judah ben Barzillai of Barcelona, written between 1090 and 1105, which refers to the correspondence and cites part of the Reply, and to a similar reference in Ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition in the twelfth century^[49]. Whatever the history of the text, the correspondence was known in Spain within a century and a half of Ḥasdai’s death. Judah Halevi’s Kuzari, which frames a defence of Judaism as a dialogue between a Khazar king and a rabbi, belongs to the same tradition and is discussed in Chapter 11.

The debate over authenticity cannot be settled here, and it is not necessary to settle it in order to see what the correspondence meant to its readers. The letter’s question whether a Jewish kingdom existed anywhere on earth, and its interest in the end of days, show that for its writer the matter was more than curiosity^[49]. News of a Jewish king ruling his own land bore directly on the condition of a people that had lived without sovereignty since antiquity, and on its hopes of redemption. Whether or not every word of the surviving text is his, it records the hopes and curiosity of an educated Jew who had access to the diplomatic networks of the caliphate and used them to learn about Jewish communities across the known world. The correspondence was copied, printed and read long afterwards, and it shaped how later generations imagined both the Khazars and the Jewish courtier of Córdoba.

Patron of a Western centre of learning

Ḥasdai’s patronage of Jewish learning is the part of his career that later tradition praised most. The Jewish Encyclopedia quotes the thirteenth-century Arabic biographer of physicians Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, who wrote that Ḥasdai “was among the foremost Jewish scholars versed in their law. He opened to his coreligionists in Andalusia the gates of knowledge of the religious law, of chronology, etc. Before his time they had to apply to the Jews of Bagdad on legal questions, and on matters referring to the calendar and the dates of the festivals”^[35]. The judgement of a Muslim writer two centuries later shows how Ḥasdai’s reputation had spread beyond the Jewish community.

His methods were those of any great patron of the period. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica he acquired the best manuscripts, offered opportunities to scholars from Spain and elsewhere, and supported them^[16]. The Jewish Encyclopedia adds that he imported Hebrew books from the East, sent rich gifts to the academies of Sura and Pumbedita in Babylonia, and corresponded with Dosa, the son of Saadia Gaon^[35]. In return, as was customary among the magnates of al-Andalus, he received poems of praise from the poets he supported^[16].

The two most important of his protégés were Menahem ben Saruq and Dunash ben Labrat. Menahem, born in Tortosa, served Ḥasdai as secretary, composed the Khazar letter and, with Ḥasdai’s encouragement, compiled the Maḥberet, a dictionary of biblical Hebrew written in Hebrew^[39]. Dunash, a pupil of Saadia in Baghdad, came to Córdoba from Fez, introduced the metres and genres of Arabic poetry into Hebrew, and wrote poems in Ḥasdai’s honour^[11]. The two men quarrelled bitterly. Shortly after 958 Dunash presented to Ḥasdai, with praise and thanks, a set of criticisms of Menahem’s dictionary, some 180 of which survive^[11]. Dunash charged that some of Menahem’s definitions might lead readers into error in matters of law and belief, which explains the severity of the attack^[39][11]. Menahem did not reply himself, but three of his pupils defended him, and the controversy continued for generations^[39]. The substance of the debate, which concerned the nature of the Hebrew root and the right method of biblical interpretation, is treated in Chapter 5.

The quarrel also had a darker side. Menahem fell from favour, and Ḥasdai, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, persecuted his former protégé and forced him to return to Tortosa^[39]. The Jewish Encyclopedia says that Dunash prejudiced Ḥasdai against Menahem and that Ḥasdai had him maltreated^[35]. From Tortosa Menahem wrote a letter of complaint to Ḥasdai, which the Encyclopaedia Judaica calls “a gem of epistolary style and an important historical document”^[39]. The same article notes that Menahem lived in poverty because Ḥasdai was not a very generous patron^[39]. Dunash, too, eventually left al-Andalus after difficulties with Ḥasdai^[11]. Patronage in Córdoba, Jewish as well as Muslim, was a relationship of dependence, and the poets and scholars who enjoyed it could also lose it.

The quarrel nonetheless produced lasting results. Menahem’s dictionary, written in Hebrew rather than Arabic, could be read by Jews in Christian lands who knew no Arabic, and it was used extensively in northern France by Rashi^[39]. Dunash’s criticisms, which the twentieth-century scholar David Yellin judged to be generally well founded, began a debate over Hebrew grammar that drew in Menahem’s pupils, Dunash’s defenders and, two centuries later, the tosafist Jacob Tam and the grammarian Joseph Kimḥi^[39]. One of Menahem’s pupils may have been Judah ben David Ḥayyuj, whose theory of the three-letter root transformed the study of Hebrew, though the identification is doubtful^[39][40]. Ḥasdai’s household was thus the setting in which Hebrew grammar became a science, and in which Hebrew poetry acquired the Arabic metres that would define it for five centuries. A wealthy patron could not have planned such results, but he created the conditions in which they could happen.

The Cairo Genizah has preserved a reminder of how far Ḥasdai’s reputation reached. A letter addressed to him, published by Alexander Scheiber and Zvi Malachi in the 1970s, describes a war waged by a Christian army in Sicily and the great suffering of the Jewish community of Palermo^[16]. Its writer evidently believed that Ḥasdai could help. The letter suggests that Jews across the Mediterranean regarded the Jewish courtier of Córdoba as a protector and intercessor, as the letter to the Khazar king suggests he regarded himself.

Moses ben Ḥanokh and independence from Babylonia

The most lasting consequence of Ḥasdai’s leadership was religious. Until the middle of the tenth century, as Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa observed, the Jews of al-Andalus depended on the geonim of Babylonia for legal rulings and the calendar^[35]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica argues that Ḥasdai made use of the antagonism between the Umayyad caliphate of Córdoba and the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad to create the conditions for the religious independence of Spanish Jewry, and that ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III had his own reasons for wishing to end the Babylonian tutelage over his Jewish subjects^[16]. A Jewish community whose religious authorities lived in the capital of a hostile caliphate, and to whom it sent money and questions, was a political anomaly that both the caliph and his Jewish courtier had reason to correct.

The instrument of change was a scholar. Moses ben Ḥanokh, who died about 965, arrived in Spain in the 950s and became rabbi of Córdoba^[14]. Abraham ibn Daud’s story of the four captives presents his arrival as an accident of piracy, but, as Chapter 1 explained, later evidence suggests that he came from southern Italy, perhaps as a captive taken during the naval war between the Umayyads and the Fatimids^[14]. Whatever the circumstances, Ḥasdai gave him his protection and appointed him to the rabbinical seat of Córdoba. Moses headed a yeshiva with many pupils and answered legal questions sent to him from other towns^[14][16]. The Jewish Encyclopedia, following Ibn Daud, says that the appointment was made “to the great joy of the calif”^[35].

Moses’ responsa were regarded by his contemporaries as no less authoritative than those of the Babylonian geonim, and some were later included in collections of geonic responsa. One responsum long attributed to a gaon of Sura is in fact his, and later authorities, among them Isaac ben Abba Mari of Marseilles in his legal code Ha-ʿIttur, quoted his rulings^[14]. His contemporaries remembered him for his humility and modesty as well as his learning, qualities that may have eased the acceptance of a newcomer from Italy as the supreme legal authority of a proud community^[14]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica concludes that from the time of Moses ben Ḥanokh the practical dependence of Spanish scholars on Babylonia “ceased in everything connected with halakhah and custom”^[14]. Its entry on Ḥasdai describes the appointment as “of great historical importance for the development of the Jewish community of Spain”, because it loosened the ties between the Jews of Spain and Babylonia^[16].

Ḥasdai also secured the succession. After Moses’ death he supported the candidacy of his son Ḥanokh against the rival claim of Joseph ibn Abitur, and Ḥanokh was elected^[16][41]. The dispute revived after Ḥasdai’s death and was settled, as the previous chapter described, by the intervention of al-Ḥakam II and later of al-Manṣūr^[41][42]. Under Ḥanokh, who served until his death in 1014, the academy of Córdoba remained an independent centre of learning. Hai Gaon of Pumbedita complained bitterly that Ḥanokh did not answer his letters, and Ḥanokh’s greatest pupil was Samuel ha-Nagid^[41].

It would be easy to overstate the break. The Babylonian academies remained centres of authority for much of the Jewish world for decades to come, and the Jews of al-Andalus continued to read and cite the geonim. Ḥasdai himself, as noted above, sent gifts to Sura and Pumbedita^[35]. What changed was the balance. For the first time al-Andalus had its own recognised rabbinic authority, its own academy and the means to train its own scholars. It also had a patron at court able to protect them. Ibn Daud, writing two centuries later in Toledo, composed his Book of Tradition to demonstrate the unbroken continuity of rabbinic tradition, and in his narrative these events become the moment at which that tradition took root in Spain^[13][12]. It is largely through his account that later generations came to think of Ḥasdai as the founder of Sephardi learning.

The modern historian can accept much of that verdict without its providential framework. Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut was not the only cause of the flowering that followed. The prosperity of Córdoba, the culture of the Arabic book, the patronage of the caliphs and the arrival of scholars from Fez, Baghdad and Italy all played their part. But he brought these elements together at a decisive moment. As a physician, he took part in the most important scientific project of the caliphal court. As a diplomat, he made himself indispensable to a powerful ruler. As leader and patron of the Jewish community, he used his position to support poets, grammarians and rabbis, and to make Córdoba a centre of Jewish learning in its own right. The model of the Jewish courtier who combined service to a Muslim ruler with leadership of his own people and patronage of Hebrew culture would be followed, in the next century, by Samuel ha-Nagid of Granada, and it would remain an ideal of Sephardi Jewry until 1492.

5. The New Hebrew, Grammarians, Metre and Forms

The literary achievement for which Sefarad is best remembered is a body of Hebrew poetry. Between the middle of the tenth century and the middle of the twelfth, Jews in al-Andalus wrote verse on wine and gardens, love and war, friendship and grief, alongside a liturgical poetry that is still sung in synagogues today. The Encyclopaedia Judaica places the secular phase of this poetry in Muslim Spain between about 950 and 1150 and names its principal exponents as Samuel ha-Nagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Moses ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi^[50]. Peter Cole, whose translations have introduced the poetry to a wide English readership, describes the same four as the giants of Hebrew verse in Spain, with Abraham ibn Ezra as a fifth who straddles two periods^[47].

That poetry did not appear from nowhere. It depended on three developments of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, which are the subject of this chapter. The first was a new attitude to the Hebrew language itself, which Andalusian Jews came to treat, as Arabic speakers treated Arabic, as a classical tongue with rules that could be studied and a beauty that could be displayed. The second was the work of grammarians and lexicographers who, between Menahem ben Saruq in the 950s and Jonah ibn Janāḥ in the 1040s, produced the first systematic account of biblical Hebrew. The third was the adoption of Arabic prosody, the quantitative metres and the poetic forms of Arabic verse, which gave Hebrew poets a technical framework entirely new to their tradition.

The three developments were connected. The new metres depended on a precise knowledge of vowel quantities, which only grammatical study could supply. The new diction depended on a mastery of the biblical lexicon, which was what the dictionaries recorded. The Encyclopaedia Judaica observes that the earliest poets, Menahem, Dunash and Samuel ha-Nagid, were also philologists, and that all the poets of the period had a distinct inclination for philology^[50]. This chapter follows the grammarians and the prosodists together, and ends with the forms in which the new poetry was written.

From Baghdad to Córdoba

The impulse came from the East. Hebrew literature in the early centuries of Islamic rule, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, flourished in the heart of Islamic culture and was strongly influenced by Arabic science and literature, yet shows no trace of having adopted the forms of Arabic poetry^[51]. Saadia Gaon, the head of the academy of Sura in Babylonia in the first half of the tenth century, was a philosopher and linguist who wrote extensively in Arabic, but in his Hebrew poetry he followed the norms of the older liturgical verse, the piyyut, with its strophic structure and changing rhymes, and with no syllable-counting metre^[51].

Saadia nonetheless set the agenda for what followed. Cole describes him as a scholar who looked outward to Arab culture and learning, saw what the Judaism of his day was lacking, and set about filling the gaps with a dictionary for liturgical poets, biblical commentary, linguistic treatises, a prayer book and a systematic work of theology^[47]. In the introduction to his poets’ dictionary, the Agron, Saadia lamented that the Jews had neglected their sacred language. Cole’s translation of the passage includes the complaint that “the sacred speech which is our redoubt has been removed from our mouths”, and the hope that the people “will use it to fashion literary works of various sorts, and to prepare every manner of poetry and prose”^[47].

The programme in that passage, a Hebrew cultivated as a literary language for every purpose, was carried west by one of Saadia’s pupils. Dunash ben Labrat, described by Moses ibn Ezra as a Baghdadi by origin and a man of Fez by education, was one of the last students of Saadia in Baghdad^[11]. After his teacher’s death in 942 he settled in Fez and then in Córdoba, where he was teaching around 960^[11]. Cole sums up the result in a phrase that captures the paradox of the movement, that the first poet in Iberia to compose in what is now called the Spanish Hebrew style smuggled his innovations in from abroad, and was not Spanish at all^[47].

The setting he found in Córdoba was the court of Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut, described in the previous chapter. Cole points out that Ḥasdai, like the Arab Andalusian courts of the time, had his poet, and that the Jewish intellectuals of Córdoba were beginning to take an interest in the study of Hebrew, influenced by the Arab scholars around them, who placed supreme value on a detailed knowledge of language and its workings^[47]. Grammar in the Arabic world was not a dry auxiliary discipline. It was bound up with the interpretation of the Qur’an, with the definition of eloquence and with the self-image of an educated class. Jewish scholars who learned in Arabic absorbed those assumptions and applied them to their own scripture.

The Arabic mirror

The Hebrew revival took place alongside a flowering of Arabic poetry in al-Andalus itself. Cole notes that Andalusian Arabic poetry experienced its golden age from the late tenth through the eleventh century, and he names among its major poets Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi, Ibn Darrāj al-Qasṭallī, Ibn Shuhayd, Ibn Ḥazm and Ibn Zaydūn^[52]. The same period saw new forms based on the spoken language, especially the strophic zajal^[52]. Jewish poets who lived among this activity heard it at the courts they served, and many of them read Arabic verse as easily as Hebrew.

Their response was a mixture of admiration and rivalry. Cole describes the Hebrew poets as spurred on by a pride that drove them to show that Hebrew could do what Arabic could, and sometimes do it better, even while they acknowledged the superiority of the Arabic tradition^[47]. In his view the complexity of that response gives the Hebrew verse much of its depth^[47]. Cole also reports the suggestion of the historian David Wasserstein that the Jewish cultural renaissance can be seen as part of a wider movement of cultural self-assertion by non-Arabs against claims of Arab superiority, known as the shuʿūbiyya, and that the decentralised taifa states which followed the caliphate brought Jews increased opportunity but also increased exposure and risk^[52].

The rivalry was conducted within shared assumptions. Both Arabic and Hebrew poets regarded their scripture as the summit of eloquence, both treated grammar as the foundation of literary skill, and both judged poems by the same standards of diction, metre and ornament. A Hebrew poet who wished to prove the worth of his language had to meet those standards, and in meeting them he adopted the aesthetic of the culture he was competing with.

Menahem and the first dictionary

The first major product of this interest was Menahem ben Saruq’s Maḥberet, a dictionary of biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. Its original name, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, was probably The Book of Solutions^[39]. The work was written in Hebrew, and that choice had consequences. Its style, the same article observes, surpasses that of better dictionaries translated into Hebrew from Arabic, and because it was in Hebrew it could be read by Jews in Christian countries, where it exerted great influence^[39].

Menahem’s method was organised around roots. He investigated them systematically and built the dictionary accordingly, and the work shows an awareness of ellipsis, pleonasm and poetic parallelism, constructions in which, in his own words as quoted by the encyclopaedia, “one half instructs us in the meaning of the other”^[39]. It attempted, without reference to its predecessors, a systematic summation of the lexical and grammatical knowledge of its day.

Its weakness lay in its theory of the root. Menahem thought that letters which disappear in conjugation are not radical, and he therefore established, at the level of description, roots of two letters and even of one^[39]. The encyclopaedia concludes that the Maḥberet can be regarded as a summary of past achievements, and that it was left to Menahem’s pupils to begin the new period of linguistic research^[39].

Menahem also refused to compare Hebrew with Arabic. The encyclopaedia attributes this to the view that Hebrew was a holy language^[39], and Cole describes the refusal as ideological, noting that Menahem spoke Arabic but would not make what he considered degrading comparisons with the cognate language^[47]. The decision cut him off from the most powerful tool available to a Semitic philologist in tenth-century Córdoba, since Arabic, with its richer surviving vocabulary and its fully described grammar, could explain many rare biblical words.

Dunash and the critique of the Maḥberet

Dunash arrived in Córdoba while Menahem was at work on the dictionary. Shortly after 958 he wrote a set of replies against it and presented them, with praise, to Ḥasdai^[11]. He claimed to have disputed two hundred items, and the surviving text contains one hundred and eighty entries. Sixty-eight of them are included in a poem, explained by prose paragraphs in a form borrowed from technical Arabic literature^[11].

The tone was severe, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica explains why. Many of Dunash’s comments concern explanations which, in his view, were likely to lead to error in matters of law and belief; the meaning of a word or its classification could bear on the Jewish conception of God, the moral obligations of humankind and the authority of rabbinic tradition against sectarian views^[11]. In some cases he criticised interpretations that seemed close to Karaism, the movement that rejected rabbinic tradition^[11]. Cole adds that Dunash wrote a detailed and condescending corrective to the lexicon, based among other things on his knowledge of Arabic and Aramaic philology, which he had absorbed from Saadia in Baghdad^[47].

Menahem did not reply himself. Three of his pupils, Ibn Kapron, Isaac ibn Gikatilla and Judah Ḥayyuj, answered on his behalf, in responsa dealing with fifty items that imitated the form of Dunash’s poem; a pupil of Dunash, Yehudi ben Sheshet, replied to them in the same manner^[11]. The quarrel outlived its protagonists. Rashi in northern France quoted Dunash about twenty times and Menahem many more; Jacob Tam wrote decisions on the disputed points, and Joseph Kimḥi answered him in favour of Dunash^[11]. The modern verdict, recorded in the encyclopaedia, is that of David Yellin, who demonstrated that Dunash’s criticisms were generally well founded^[39].

Menahem’s own writing shows what the older style could achieve. After his disgrace he addressed a long complaint to Ḥasdai, which chapter four described as a historical document. Cole translates part of it, noting that Menahem prefaced the letter with a poem of praise and then composed his protest in a cadenced and semi-rhymed biblical style^[47]. It begins, in Cole’s version, “Is it you for whom I long? You for whom I shed my tears?”^[47]. The passage has the parallelism and the rhythmic intensity of biblical poetry, but no metre in the Arabic sense. It is the voice of the tradition that Dunash set out to replace, and its power is a reminder that the replacement was a choice of fashion as much as of quality.

The borrowed measures

The grammatical quarrel was bound up with a literary one. Dunash, the Encyclopaedia Judaica states, introduced the Arabic quantitative metrical system into Hebrew poetry in Córdoba in the middle of the tenth century, and the innovation, which became the subject of a fierce polemic, was seen as violating the nature and grammar of the Hebrew language^[51]. He applied to Hebrew not only Arabic metres but also Arabic poetic forms and genres, and in doing so laid the foundation of medieval Andalusian Hebrew poetry^[11].

Cole cites a line from one of Dunash’s poems that states the programme in a single couplet: “Let Scripture be your Eden,” he wrote, “and the Arabs’ books your paradise grove”^[47]. The two halves of the line describe the two halves of the new poetry, biblical in its language and Arabic in its forms.

Cole’s assessment of the change is that the adaptation of Arabic quantitative metres, based on distinctions between the length of vowels, gave Hebrew for the first time precise criteria for measuring the pace of the line, and that this in turn intensified the poets’ attention to the language itself and its lyric properties^[47]. He compares Dunash’s achievement to what other writers who borrowed from Arabic did for Persian and Turkish, and to what the Roman poets who borrowed from Greek did for Latin^[47]. The comparison makes clear the scale of the change, which brought into Hebrew not only a set of metres but, as Cole puts it, the entire history of the verse that the metres had served^[47].

The opponents were articulate. The pupils of Menahem accused Dunash of desecrating the holy tongue. Cole’s notes translate lines from the reply written by Isaac ibn Kapron, which says that Dunash “destroyed the holy tongue, / which is our remnant, / by casting Hebrew / in foreign meters”^[52]. Cole points out that Ibn Kapron composed his attack in one of the quantitative metres, imitating a poem by Dunash, to show that his objection did not arise from any difficulty in writing in them^[52]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica makes the same point more generally, that even Dunash’s opponents used quantitative metres in their polemical poems against the system^[51].

The objection never entirely disappeared. Arguments against quantitative metre, the encyclopaedia notes, were raised time and again, appealing to biblical tradition and to the accentual nature of Hebrew; yet the opponents, notably Judah Halevi, seldom departed from the system in their own secular poetry^[51]. Halevi’s reservations, set out in the Kuzari, belong to a later chapter. For the present it is enough that within a generation of Dunash the new metres had become the standard form of Hebrew verse in Spain.

Dunash’s own poetic output survives only in part. The Encyclopaedia Judaica lists panegyrics for Ḥasdai and other notables, poems of friendship, love and wine, and didactic verse, as well as poems lamenting the condition of his people among Muslims and Christians and the ruins of Jerusalem^[11]. Two of his religious poems entered Jewish practice: the Sabbath song Deror yikra, still sung at Sabbath tables, and Devai hasser, which became part of the grace after the wedding meal^[11]. A Genizah fragment shows that a set of ten rhymed riddles once attributed to Ibn Gabirol was in fact his^[11]. His career in Córdoba did not last. After difficulties with Ḥasdai he left Andalusia, and nothing definite is known of his later life beyond a poem written in 985 in honour of a prominent Andalusian Jew^[11].

A voice from the Genizah

One of the most remarkable documents of the Dunash circle is a short poem attributed to his wife, whose name is not known. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that Ezra Fleischer published a short poem possibly written by her when her husband was leaving Andalusia^[11]. Cole, who describes Fleischer’s identification of the poem among the papers of the Cairo Genizah in 1984 as a marvellous discovery, calls it, following Fleischer, the first realised personal poem in the post-biblical Hebrew canon^[53].

The poem is brief. In Cole’s translation it opens with a question, “Will her love remember his graceful doe, her only son in her arms as he parted?”, and describes an exchange of keepsakes, ring for bracelet and mantle for mantle^[53]. It ends by observing that the departing husband “won’t settle in the land of Spain, though its prince give him half his kingdom”^[53]. Cole goes so far as to suggest that the credit for the qualitative lyric breakthrough of the period belongs to her rather than to her husband, whose surviving work he judges more innovative than masterly^[53].

The attribution is not certain, and the encyclopaedia’s word is possibly. The poem nonetheless shows how quickly the new forms could carry intimate feeling, and it reminds the reader that the Genizah, the storeroom of discarded writings in the Ben Ezra synagogue of Fustat, has repeatedly altered what is known of Andalusian literature.

Two languages, two purposes

The revival of Hebrew did not displace Arabic from Jewish intellectual life. The division between the two languages followed function. Saadia had written mostly in Judaeo-Arabic, which Cole describes as a middle register of Arabic written in Hebrew letters, so that his young Jewish contemporaries would understand him^[47]. Ḥayyuj and Ibn Janāḥ wrote their grammars in Arabic, and Moses ibn Ezra wrote his treatise on Hebrew poetry in Arabic as well^[40][54][55]. Philosophy, science, law and biblical commentary were mostly written in Judaeo-Arabic until the twelfth century.

Poetry was the great exception. It was written in Hebrew because its purpose was to display the beauty of the sacred language, and because the competition with Arabic could only be won in Hebrew. Some poets also composed in Arabic; the Encyclopaedia Judaica records that Samuel ha-Nagid translated poems from Arabic and wrote in that language himself^[56]. But the poems that defined the period, and that were copied and read across the Jewish world, were Hebrew poems whose grammar had been worked out in Arabic.

This arrangement explains a feature of the later history. When Jews in Christian Spain and Provence lost their command of Arabic, the grammars, philosophy and science of the Andalusian period had to be translated into Hebrew to survive, a task carried out above all by the Ibn Tibbon family^[54][47]. The poetry needed no translation, and it continued to be read in the original wherever Hebrew was known.

Ḥayyuj and the three-letter root

The decisive advance in Hebrew grammar came from one of Menahem’s own pupils. Judah ben David Ḥayyuj, who had defended his teacher against Dunash, went on to replace the theory on which Menahem’s dictionary rested. In two works on the verb, the Book of Weak Letter Verbs and the Book of Geminate Verbs, both written in Arabic, he developed the view that all Hebrew roots consist of three letters, one of which may be changed, elided or assimilated when it is a weak letter^[40].

The importance of this is easily missed. A grammarian who believes that a verb such as the one meaning to strike has a root of a single letter cannot relate its forms to one another, or to the forms of regular verbs. Ḥayyuj’s theory allowed the apparently irregular verbs of the Bible to be described as variations on a single pattern. It was a departure, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, from the earlier view that recognised roots of two letters and even of one^[40]. The same article records a modern argument, by Gideon Goldenberg, that Ḥayyuj’s major invention was not triliterality as such but his concept of the weak letter^[40].

His works, written in Judaeo-Arabic, spread rapidly through the Eastern countries and even became popular in Germany^[40]. They were translated into Hebrew by Moses ibn Gikatilla and by Abraham ibn Ezra, and a third Book of Plucked Feathers explained difficult verses of the Prophets by linguistic method^[40]. Through these translations the three-letter root became the common basis of Hebrew grammar in Christian Europe as well as in the Islamic world, and it remains the basis of Hebrew grammar today.

Ibn Janāḥ and the flower-beds

The grammarian who completed Ḥayyuj’s work was Jonah ibn Janāḥ, known in Arabic as Abū al-Walīd Marwān. Little is known of his life. He may have been born in Córdoba or in nearby Lucena, and he was educated at Lucena under Isaac ibn Mar Saul and Isaac ibn Gikatilla; the latter encouraged him to study Arabic language and literature^[54]. He tried his hand at poetry in his youth but later gave it up. He studied medicine in Córdoba, which supported him for the rest of his life, and he left the city when it was besieged by the Berbers in 1012, settling after much wandering in Saragossa, where he lived until his death^[54].

His names illustrate the bilingual world in which he worked. Contemporary authors writing in Arabic called him Abū al-Walīd, Marwān or Ibn Janāḥ, while Hebrew writers called him Rabbi Jonah or Rabbi Marinus^[54]. The Hebrew names were translations. Ibn Janāḥ means the winged one, hence Jonah, the Hebrew for a dove, while Marinus renders the Arabic personal name Marwān^[54]. A single scholar thus carried an Arabic name at the court and in the market and a Hebrew name in the synagogue and in learned citation, a pattern already seen in the case of Ḥasdai.

In Saragossa he gathered a circle of young scholars and wrote his philological works, which, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, aroused the opposition of some local talmudic scholars^[54]. His first major work, the Book of Criticism, accepted Ḥayyuj’s system entirely but supplemented it under almost every root. By his own count it dealt with more than fifty roots that Ḥayyuj had not mentioned, some fifty meanings he had overlooked and more than a hundred verbal forms^[54]. A series of polemical works followed, including replies to the criticisms of Samuel ha-Nagid and his friends in Granada, whose role in the controversy is discussed in the next chapter^[54].

His last work was his greatest. The Kitāb al-Tanqīḥ, the Book of Minute Research, is, in the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s words, the first complete book on Hebrew philology to be preserved in its entirety, and in range and theoretical basis no other work of Hebrew grammar can be compared to it^[54]. It has two parts, a grammar titled the Book of Variegated Flower-Beds and a complete dictionary of biblical Hebrew titled the Book of Roots. Judah ibn Tibbon later translated both into Hebrew^[54]. The grammar runs to forty-five or forty-six chapters, beginning with a survey of the parts of speech and passing through the consonants, the vowels, the formation and inflection of words and the functions of the verb^[54].

Ibn Janāḥ drew freely on Arabic grammar and on comparisons with Arabic vocabulary, the method that Menahem had refused and Dunash had championed. Within a century of the Maḥberet, Hebrew scholarship in Spain had moved from an empirical Hebrew word list to a comprehensive grammar built on Arabic linguistic theory. The language that the poets used was now described with a precision that matched the descriptions of Arabic made by Muslim scholars.

One passage of Ibn Janāḥ also shows the limits he set on inquiry. Cole quotes the grammarian’s warning, in the Book of Variegated Flower-Beds, against books that deal with the origin and foundation of things and the creation of the upper and lower worlds, which “brings no pleasure”^[53]. The warning, as Cole suggests, may be read against the speculative cosmology of Ibn Gabirol, the subject of the eighth chapter.

Pegs and cords

The quantitative metre that Dunash introduced was based on a regular pattern of short and long syllables rather than of stressed and unstressed ones^[51]. Hebrew metres were derived from Arabic, but they differed from their models, and from Greek quantitative verse, because Hebrew has very few genuinely short syllables. The Hebrew poets in Spain did not follow the distinction between long and short vowels in the biblical vocalisation; they treated only the reduced vowels, the mobile shewa and the ḥataf vowels, and the conjunction pronounced u, as short, and every full vowel as long^[51].

The result was a system in which the short syllable was the marked element. Since in Hebrew a short syllable is practically always followed by a long one, the medieval theorists described the metre through a contrast between the yated, or peg, a short syllable followed by a long, and the tenuah, or cord, any other syllable^[51]. A line by Ibn Gabirol cited in the Encyclopaedia Judaica can thus be written as a sequence of feet each consisting of one peg and two cords^[51].

Twelve of the sixteen basic metres of classical Arabic prosody were adopted by Hebrew poets; the others could not be imitated in Hebrew^[51]. With their variants, the regular metres numbered several dozen, and David Yellin’s list of them runs to sixty-seven^[51]. The classification inherited from the Middle Ages, the encyclopaedia notes, relied on Arabic cataloguing and remained essentially unchanged for eight hundred years^[51].

The traditional names of the metres conceal this structure. The encyclopaedia gives the example of two metres known by separate names, ha-merubbeh and ha-marnin, which differ only in the length of the line, while two other patterns that differ in the same way share a single name^[51]. Its author proposes instead to describe each metre by three features, the basic foot, the number of feet in the line and the form of the final foot, much as English prosody speaks of an iambic pentameter^[51]. Medieval poets did not need such an analysis. They learned the metres by ear and by example, as Arabic poets did, and a well-trained poet could improvise in any of them, as Samuel ha-Nagid is reported to have done^[52].

Rhyme followed rules of its own. Rhyme in Hebrew poetry in Spain was terminal: it disregarded stress and morphology and included all sounds from the consonant before the last vowel to the end of the line^[51]. The obligatory consonant before the final vowel was peculiar to medieval Hebrew poetry. The principle derived from the rhyme of the Palestinian piyyut after it had dropped the requirement of two root consonants, and poets eased their task by using open syllables and suffixes, such as the plural endings, so that they needed to change only one root consonant^[51].

The forms of the new poetry

The Encyclopaedia Judaica distinguishes five major types of Hebrew verse in Spain^[51]. The first, used in most Spanish Hebrew poetry and especially in secular poetry, was the non-strophic poem with a single rhyme running through every line, in one of the classical regular metres. The second was the strophic girdle poem, whose metrical pattern might be irregular in itself but was constant throughout the poem. The third was the poem in plain syllabic metre, mostly strophic; the fourth was strophic poetry in free verse, used mainly in the liturgy; the fifth was rhymed prose, used chiefly for storytelling^[51].

The single-rhyme poem was the Hebrew equivalent of the Arabic qaṣīda. Its lines were divided into two hemistichs, and one rhyme could run through as many as sixty or eighty lines^[51]. This was the form of most panegyrics, elegies, wine poems and the long war poems of Samuel ha-Nagid. Because there was no requirement for individuality in imagery or theme, the encyclopaedia observes, poets could use the Hebrew plural suffixes freely as rhymes throughout their long poems^[51].

The girdle poem, the muwashshaḥ, was an original development of Arabic poetry in al-Andalus^[51]. It appeared in Hebrew almost from the beginning of the eleventh century and became the form of some of the best Hebrew lyrics of the twelfth. It combined two principles, strophes with changing rhymes and a girdle, a recurring section with the same rhyme or rhymes throughout the poem, which ran through it like a refrain^[51]. Originally used for love poetry, it was taken up widely for religious verse, especially by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Ezra^[51].

The last girdle, the kharja, was often written not in Hebrew but in colloquial Arabic or in the early Romance language of Spain. It was usually a quotation from a love conversation, and it determined the metre and rhyme of the girdle and the melody of the poem, since most girdle poems seem to have been composed as songs^[51]. These closing lines, preserved in Hebrew and Arabic poems, are among the earliest surviving texts in a Romance language of the peninsula, and they offer a rare glimpse of the vernacular world in which the learned poets lived.

Rhymed prose, the maqāma, belonged to storytelling. The encyclopaedia describes it as a genre in which the prose rhymes throughout but has no metre, while the metrical poems set into it follow the classical rules strictly^[51]. It flourished in Christian Spain later, with Judah al-Ḥarizi. One exceptional work in rhymed prose belongs to the first generation, Ibn Gabirol’s Keter Malkhut, which the same article describes as a kind of richly adorned free verse, moving between dense sound-orchestration and prose with parallelism^[51].

Sung and recited

The new poetry was meant to be heard. Cole notes that it seems often to have been sung or recited to musical accompaniment when it was performed in public, and that the patterns and expectations created by the new metres made the Hebrew sound like the flowing Arabic poetry the Jewish poets admired^[47]. The preface that Samuel ha-Nagid’s son wrote to his father’s collection indicates, according to Cole, that the shorter poems were recited to music, although very little is known about the nature of that music or its relation to the words^[52]. The girdle poems, as the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, were apparently composed as songs^[51].

Performance also shaped criticism. The encyclopaedia records that Samuel ha-Nagid’s poems were read at gatherings of poets, some of whom found them faulty in grammar and style while others praised their novelty^[56]. A poem was judged in company, by listeners who knew the metres and could hear a false quantity or a weak rhyme, and the grammarian’s rules thus became the audience’s standards. The precision that Ḥayyuj and Ibn Janāḥ brought to the description of Hebrew had an immediate practical use in the evening assemblies where poems were recited and argued over.

A biblical diction

The new poetry was Arabic in form and biblical in language. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes the return to biblical Hebrew as a great innovation: the Andalusian poets regarded the post-biblical Hebrew of the Talmud and especially of the older liturgical poetry as arbitrary and chaotic, and treated the language of the Bible as the only accurate form of Hebrew^[50]. It was seen as clear, precise and beautiful, a divine tongue superior to all others.

The encyclopaedia links this view to the cultural competition with the Arabs, who took the style of the Qur’an as a theological and aesthetic model and developed tools to interpret it^[50]. The Jewish answer was a biblical style which, because of its antiquity, diversity and accuracy as preserved by the Masorah, could stand comparison. Cole calls the corresponding ideal fasaaha, the purity and clarity of scriptural diction, and treats it as one of the elements that Dunash’s revolution brought into Hebrew^[47].

Moses ibn Ezra made the comparison explicit in his treatise on poetics, written in Arabic around 1135. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, he illustrated each rhetorical figure with contemporary Arabic and Hebrew poetry but drew chiefly on the Bible, so that, in the article’s quotation, the Arabs would not think “that the Hebrew tongue (i.e., biblical Hebrew) lacks aesthetic rules”^[50]. The treatise was written in answer to eight questions about Hebrew poetry put to him by a friend, and the second half of it is devoted to what he called poetic ornaments^[55].

The cult of biblical Hebrew could be severe towards older Jewish poetry. The Encyclopaedia Judaica cites Abraham ibn Ezra’s criticism, in his commentary on Ecclesiastes, of the style and language of Eleazar Kallir, the greatest of the early liturgical poets of the Land of Israel^[50]. For the Andalusians, Kallir’s bold coinages and dense allusions were exactly the kind of Hebrew that a purified biblical style was meant to replace. The judgement was not universal, and Kallir’s poems remained in the liturgy, but it shows how far the Spanish school saw itself as a new beginning.

The most characteristic of these ornaments was the inlaid biblical phrase. The encyclopaedia names the style mussiv and stresses that it was not a mechanical mosaic of quotations but a new combination that often produced a surprising change of meaning^[50]. Cole makes the same point about the nineteenth-century term shibbutz, setting or inlay, which in his view implies something static. He relates the practice to its Arabic counterpart, iqtibās, the use of Qur’anic phrasing, whose name means “the lighting of one flame from another”^[53]. For a reader who knew the Bible by heart, as the poets’ audience did, every borrowed phrase carried its original context into the new poem, and a love poem could thus echo a prophecy or a psalm.

Court, patron and poet

The social setting of the new poetry was the court. The Encyclopaedia Judaica attributes the conditions for secular Hebrew poetry to the patronage of the Jewish courtier, whether a government official, a financier or a landowner; eminent courtiers attracted scholars and poets as their Muslim counterparts did, and most of the later Andalusian poets were court poets^[50]. The arrangement had a cost in convention, since the panegyric for a patron and the elegy for his relatives demanded familiar motifs. It also brought security, an educated audience and a critical public, and it fostered genres with no immediate social function, such as wisdom poems and personal complaints^[50].

The life of the court poet could be precarious. The encyclopaedia notes that the poet depended on his patron’s favour and was bound to the patron’s fate, and that some patrons, such as Ibn Gabirol’s Jekuthiel, were executed as a result of court intrigue^[50]. Cole rejects the older picture of a refined and harmless court culture, insisting that the ideal of the best poets was leisure for serious work, involving formidable scholarship and a demanding, self-conscious art^[47].

One figure of the generation after Dunash shows the professional side of the system. Isaac ibn Khalfun, born probably in the last decades of the tenth century, is described by Moses ibn Ezra, in a passage quoted in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, as “the only Hebrew poet to make poetry his tool of trade and to turn verse into a source of income”^[57]. Like Arabic wandering poets, he travelled through North Africa and the East praising wealthy patrons and asking for payment; he seems to have lived for some years in Córdoba, where he became a friend of Samuel ha-Nagid^[57]. About seventy of his poems survive. Cole credits him with widening the tonal and prosodic range of Hebrew verse and adding a personal, graceful and often comic dimension to it^[53].

Two other figures connected the new poetry to the liturgy. Cole names Isaac ibn Mar Saul of Lucena, a liturgical poet and teacher who took up Dunash’s prosodic innovations and was reportedly the first Hebrew poet to write of the gazelle, the young beloved of so much later erotic verse^[53]. He also names Joseph ibn Abitur, who developed the lyrical preludes, the reshuyot, for neglected parts of the Sabbath and festival liturgy, a genre of which Ibn Gabirol was later the first master^[53]. Ibn Abitur’s career at the Córdoban court was described in the third chapter.

A revolution of sensibility

By the early eleventh century the elements of the new literature were in place. Hebrew had a grammar founded on the three-letter root and a dictionary tradition in two languages. It had a prosody adapted from Arabic, with rules for metre and rhyme that every competent poet knew. It had a repertoire of forms, from the long single-rhyme poem to the girdle poem with its vernacular close, and an aesthetic of biblical purity sustained by a competitive awareness of Arabic. It also had a social institution, the patron’s court, in which poetry was performed, judged and copied.

Cole calls Dunash’s achievement a revolution of sensibility as well as of metrical method^[47]. The innovations spread quickly. They were developed in Spain for the next five centuries, tentatively in caliphal Córdoba and then fully in the taifa kingdoms that followed it, and the same style took hold in the East, North Africa and Italy^[47]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica adds that the Spanish metrical system came to dominate Hebrew poetry throughout the Islamic world, from Egypt to Yemen and the Ottoman Empire, and reigned in Italy until the nineteenth century^[51].

The poetry also travelled with remarkable speed in its own time. The encyclopaedia cites Moses ibn Ezra’s testimony that the poems of Samuel ha-Nagid were known in his lifetime from Babylon and the Land of Israel to Egypt and Ifrīqiya, and records Genizah evidence that manuscripts of Spanish poems were carried to Egypt and from there to Yemen^[50]. Lucena, Seville and other towns, it adds, were known as cities of poetry^[50].

The first great master of the new art was a man who was also a grammarian, a talmudist, a general and the chief minister of a Muslim kingdom. Samuel ha-Nagid is the subject of the next chapter.

6. Samuel ha-Nagid, Vizier of Granada

No figure embodies the hopes and the contradictions of Jewish life in al-Andalus more fully than Samuel ibn Naghrela, known to Jewish tradition as Samuel ha-Nagid. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes him as vizier of Granada, statesman, poet, scholar and military commander, and says that his rise and his political and military career mark the highest achievement of a Jew in medieval Muslim Spain^[56]. He led the army of a Muslim kingdom for nearly two decades, served as its chief minister, presided over the Jews of al-Andalus, wrote a code of Jewish law and composed some of the finest Hebrew poetry of the Middle Ages.

His career is documented unusually well. Arabic chroniclers wrote about him, admiringly and with hostility. His Hebrew poems survive in collections arranged by his own sons, who added headings that date many of them and describe the occasions on which they were written. Abraham ibn Daud, the twelfth-century historian, gave an account of his rise that became the standard Jewish version. Peter Cole, who has translated a large selection of the poems, notes that the Muslim sources describe him with a mixture of admiration and condescension^[52].

This chapter follows his life from the fall of Córdoba to his death on campaign in the 1050s. It then turns to his poetry, his learning and his place among his contemporaries. The fate of his son Joseph, and of the Jews of Granada in 1066, belongs to the next chapter.

From Córdoba to Málaga

Samuel was born in Córdoba in 993 to a prominent family which had come originally from Mérida^[56]. He received an excellent Jewish and general education, including training in Arabic and the Qur’an, and studied Jewish law under Ḥanokh ben Moses, the chief rabbi of Córdoba whose appointment was described in the third chapter^[56]. As a young man, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, he began to allude to his descent from King David, a belief that sustained his confidence in his career^[56].

His youth coincided with the collapse of the caliphate. In 1013 Berber troops took Córdoba, and Samuel was among those forced to flee^[56]. Cole’s notes describe the event in stark terms: after three years of unrest, Berbers under the leadership of Sulaymān al-Mustaʿīn stormed the city and massacred its population, including some sixty scholars^[52]. Samuel made his way to Málaga by an indirect route through Écija, Osuna and Morón, a journey that would normally have taken four days^[52]. Málaga was safe because its Slavic governor had made a pact with the Berbers^[52].

One of the poems in his collection records the departure. Its heading, as translated by Cole, reads “And this in his youth, on leaving Cordoba”^[52]. Cole gives the opening lines in literal form as “Soul from that which it desires is cut off, and soul from that which it wants is blocked”^[52]. He also reports the view of Bernard Septimus that the longing expressed in the poem is neither religious nor philosophical so much as aristocratic or high-minded^[52]. The exile from Córdoba thus enters Hebrew poetry not as a religious catastrophe but as the frustration of a young man of good family and great ambition.

The letter-writer of Málaga

The story of what happened next is told by Abraham ibn Daud. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s summary of his account, Samuel opened a spice shop in Málaga, and shortly afterwards a maidservant of Ibn al-ʿArīf, secretary to the vizier of Granada, asked him to write letters to her master^[56]. The vizier was so impressed by Samuel’s Arabic style that he advised King Ḥabbūs, the Berber ruler of Granada, to appoint him to his staff^[56].

The story has the shape of a legend, and Ibn Daud wrote more than a century later with a clear purpose. His Sefer ha-Qabbalah was, in the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s description, less a work of history than a use of history against the Karaites, tracing the chain of rabbinic tradition from Moses to the academies of Spain, to which a full third of the book is devoted; its emphasis on the Spanish centre reflects Ibn Daud’s insistence on its independence from Babylonia^[12]. A refugee shopkeeper raised by his learning to the leadership of the nation suited that design perfectly. Its central point is nevertheless plausible. In the Arabic administration of al-Andalus, a fine epistolary style was a professional qualification, and a refugee who could write elegant Arabic letters had a skill that rulers needed. The Berber dynasty of Granada, recently established and alien to the Arab elites of the old caliphate, had particular reason to value secretaries who owed their position to the ruler alone.

Samuel advanced quickly. He rose from tax collector to secretary after Ibn al-ʿArīf’s death and then, in 1020, to assistant to the vizier Abū al-ʿAbbās; later he became vizier himself^[56]. In 1027 the Jews conferred on him the title nagid, prince or leader, of Spanish Jewry^[56]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Granada explains his rise by the character of the principality, controlled by a Berber military clique that had not struck roots in the country; amid constant intrigue the king could depend on a Jew who had no aspirations to the throne^[28]. The same article estimates the Jewish population of Granada at that time at about 5,000 people, around a fifth of the city’s population^[28].

The ruling family was a branch of the Zirids, a Berber dynasty which governed Ifrīqiya, the region of modern Tunisia, and which extended its rule into Spain in the eleventh century with its capital at Granada^[58]. Under the Zirids, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, the Jews of Granada were able to pursue cultural and political activity without particular restriction, especially once the dynasty appointed Samuel and his son as viziers; one reason for their good treatment was their contribution to the dynasty’s financial stability^[58].

The meaning of nagid

The title that the Jews gave Samuel in 1027 had a biblical ring, since nagid is a biblical word for a leader, which Cole renders as governor when he describes Samuel’s office^[53]. By the eleventh century it had also become a title of Jewish communal office in the Islamic West. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on the Zirids notes that in Kairouan, the main Jewish centre of Ifrīqiya, the central Jewish leadership was headed by a president called the nagid, and that the most illustrious of them, Ibrahim ben ʿAta, court physician to the Zirid rulers, received the title negid ha-golah in recognition of his services to his community and to the academy of Pumbedita^[58].

Samuel’s title thus placed him in a recognised line of Jewish leaders who combined service at a Muslim court with authority over their own people, and who were honoured by the Babylonian academies for their support. It also suited his own sense of his destiny. His allusions to Davidic descent, and his habit of casting his victories in the language of the Psalms, gave the title a messianic resonance that the Kairouan office did not have. Cole notes that in a wine poem he also reminds his listeners that he was a Levite, of a lineage descended from the Temple singers and so befitting a poet^[52]. His Hebrew name, Samuel ben Joseph ha-Levi, recorded that descent, and he could draw on both biblical identities, the king and the singer, as occasion required.

Granada of the Jews

The city in which Samuel made his career had a strong Jewish identity in the imagination of its inhabitants. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records a tradition, preserved by Solomon ibn Verga, that some of the Jews exiled by Nebuchadnezzar settled in Granada and called it the pomegranate of Spain, and adds that even the Muslims believed the Jews had founded the city, which they called Garnāṭat al-Yahūd, Granada of the Jews^[28]. The earliest information about the community, according to the same article, is that the garrison stationed there after the conquest of 711 was composed of Jews and Muslims^[28].

Such traditions cannot be taken as history, but they show how prominent the Jews of Granada were in the eyes of their neighbours. The Jewish quarter itself was not fixed in one place during the centuries of Muslim rule, moving, growing or contracting under successive dynasties; one source places the city of the Jews on the hill near the Alcazaba^[28]. In Samuel’s time Granada was the capital of a young Berber kingdom^[58], and its Jewish community was large enough to make its leader a figure of political weight.

The succession of 1038

The turning point of Samuel’s career came with the death of Ḥabbūs in 1038. A struggle for the succession followed between his sons Bādīs and Buluggīn, and with Samuel’s help Bādīs won the throne^[56]. Jewish opponents of Samuel had backed the other side, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica records that prominent Jews were among his political opponents who fled from the principality after the victory of his faction^[28]. Several of them went to Seville, Granada’s great rival^[59].

The episode shows that Jewish politics in the taifa period was not a simple matter of a community united behind its leader. Jewish courtiers were members of the political class of their states, attached to factions and exposed to their fortunes. Samuel’s loyalty to Bādīs secured his position for the rest of his life, and, in the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s words, he became the leading influence on the new king^[56].

A commander in the field

Much of Samuel’s work as vizier consisted of leading the army of Granada, which was almost continuously at war with Seville. The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls it remarkable that a Jew stood at the head of a Muslim army which, from 1038 to 1056, the span of his command, knew only two years of respite from fighting^[56]. A major source for his campaigns is his own poetry, much of it addressed to his son Joseph^[56].

The first major battle came in 1038 and 1039, against the army of Almería, ruled by Zuhayr, a Slav, and his vizier Ibn ʿAbbās^[56]. Ibn ʿAbbās, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Almería, had published libellous tracts against Samuel and the Jews, and his hostility led to war^[60]. Both Zuhayr and Ibn ʿAbbās were killed, and Samuel’s victory was celebrated by the Jews of Granada with a special Purim of their own^[56]. In 1039 came a victory over Seville near Carmona, which was finally taken in 1043; in 1042 he came to the aid of Lorca in the east; and his campaigns against Abū Nūr of Ronda in 1045 and against Málaga in 1049 brought him narrow escapes from death^[56]. In the 1050s he was constantly on the move through Andalusia, fighting Seville and its allies^[56].

Cole’s notes preserve the headings that Samuel’s son attached to several of the war poems, and they read like dispatches. The heading of a poem on a campaign of 1041 describes how a cousin of King Bādīs named Yaddayir, who aspired to the throne, took the town of Argona with two Andalusian commanders, how the Granadan forces killed the commanders, and how Yaddayir fled and was imprisoned^[52]. It ends: “And my lord, my father, spoke of what happened to him and how he fared, praising God for having granted him this great victory”^[52]. A poem written after the relief of Lorca carries a heading which reports that the besiegers fled when they heard the troops approaching, and that the army camped at Lorca, “where he wrote me the following”^[52]. Cole notes that the poem mentions carrier pigeons, which were not unusual in medieval Spain^[52].

The detail matters because it shows how the poems were exchanged. Samuel wrote from the field to his son in Granada, and the son copied the poems into the collection with notes on their occasion. The war poetry was thus at once a family correspondence, a public celebration and a record of events.

The poet of war

The Encyclopaedia Judaica credits Samuel with introducing the poetry of war and battle into Hebrew literature, and calls his war poems, which show great skill in creating epics, unique in Hebrew poetry^[56]. Nothing like them had been written in Hebrew since the Bible. They combine the conventions of Arabic battle poetry, the boast, the description of the enemy’s fear and the vivid scene of combat, with a biblical diction that casts the commander in the role of a psalmist giving thanks for deliverance.

Their religious framing raises a question that modern readers often ask. A Jewish commander who led a Muslim army against other Muslims, and who celebrated its victories as signs of divine favour to himself and to Israel, had obviously found a way to reconcile his position with his faith. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that his triumphs were viewed by the Jews as national victories^[56]. Samuel identified himself with biblical figures, above all with David, and Cole points to studies by Ross Brann of this typology and of how Muslim writers perceived him^[52]. The poems present the vizier as a new David, fighting the battles of a foreign king while remaining the servant of Israel’s God.

The same poems express anxiety. The Encyclopaedia Judaica observes that despite his success Samuel was never content, that a note of pessimism sounds even in his poems of love and wine, and that at court many secretly envied him and others were openly hostile^[56]. He saw the suffering of the Jews in exile as his own and expressed a yearning for Zion^[56]. The war poems record his victories but also the precariousness of a position that depended on the favour of one king.

Three books

Samuel’s poems have come down in three collections, Ben Tehillim, Ben Mishlei and Ben Kohelet, named after the biblical books of Psalms, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes^[56]. The arrangement reflects three kinds of poetry: the longer occasional poems, including the war poems and the poems of friendship, love and mourning; the epigrams and proverbs; and the reflective poems on the vanity of life.

The collections were a family enterprise. Samuel, the Encyclopaedia Judaica records, charged his sons with copying and arranging his poems and paid them for each completed work, praising them when they performed the task well^[56]. His eldest son Joseph began copying Ben Tehillim at the age of eight and a half^[56]. Cole adds that its 222 poems were copied by Joseph from that age until 1056, and that Joseph added descriptive headings, possibly as dictated in Arabic by his father^[52]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that the copying of a father’s poems by his children was also characteristic of Arabic culture at the time, and that in eleventh-century Granada no one was considered educated unless he could compose poetry^[56].

Samuel’s household was the first audience of his poetry. He had three sons and a daughter. Of the daughter and of a son named Judah nothing is known, and both probably died during their father’s lifetime^[56]. Joseph, the first-born, was the most beloved and was regarded by Samuel as his successor; Eliasaf, the youngest, also copied his father’s poems from early childhood^[56]. Samuel dedicated Ben Mishlei to Joseph and Eliasaf, and the children added captions describing the contents and origins of the poems^[56]. A body of poetry that celebrated war and power was thus preserved through an education in which the sons of the vizier learned Hebrew by copying their father’s verse.

The other two collections are larger. Ben Mishlei contains, according to Cole, 1,197 epigrams and was copied by the youngest son Eliasaf, who was born in 1049 and began the work in 1056 at the age of six and a half^[52]. Its preface states that many of the poems were taken from other languages and traditions, a common practice that was not regarded as plagiarism, since the merit of a poem lay in the poet’s treatment of conventional material^[52]. Cole notes, for example, that one epigram on war is based on an Arabic epigram attributed to the pre-Islamic poet Imruʾ al-Qays^[52].

Ben Kohelet contains 411 poems, presented without a preface; its editor is unknown^[52]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica attributes its copying to Eliasaf, while Cole reports that scholars have variously proposed Samuel himself or his son Joseph as the editor^[56][52]. Moses ibn Ezra considered it the summit of Samuel’s work. Cole translates his judgement that it is “more beautiful and more profound than Ben Tehillim and Ben Mishle, because it was written after its author reached middle age”^[52].

Proverbs in verse

The epigrams of Ben Mishlei show a different side of Samuel. Cole’s selection includes poems whose titles summarise their themes, among them The Rich, People Welcome the Rich, If You Leave a Long-Loved Friend, You Who’d Be Wise, It’s Heart That Discerns and Man’s Wisdom Is in What He Writes^[52]. They are short, usually of two or four lines, and they condense the experience of a courtier into maxims about wealth, friendship, speech and learning.

Their sources are as varied as the culture of the court. Cole’s notes trace them to the Bible, the Talmud and the Wisdom of Ben Sira, and to Arabic models; one of them, on the man who works and buys himself books, is compared with a passage of Ibn Khaldūn on the necessity of mastering the composition of speech, and another is based on an Arabic poem by Ibn Ḥamdūn^[52]. The epigram on war, mentioned above, adapts an Arabic image of war as a beautiful girl who becomes a hideous old woman^[52]. In these poems the boundary between Jewish wisdom literature and the Arabic tradition of adab, the cultivated learning of the courtier, almost disappears.

Loss and recovery

The survival of these books is a story in itself. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that the poems were copied many times in the Middle Ages and that Samuel took pains to circulate them among knowledgeable readers, but that his secular poetry came to be known in modern times only in the nineteenth century^[56]. A. E. Harkavy published the first substantial selection in St Petersburg in 1879, and David S. Sassoon published the three volumes at Oxford in 1934^[56].

Cole describes how close the poems came to being lost. In his account only fragments of Samuel’s poetry circulated for centuries, and a sixteenth-century copy of the collected poems surfaced in a crate in Syria early in the twentieth century; it was another thirty years before it appeared in an edition that a general reader could use^[53]. The loss had political as well as personal causes, as Cole notes: the Almoravid and Almohad invasions from the south, the Christian conquests from the north and finally the expulsion of the Jews^[53].

Wine, gardens and the gazelle

Alongside the war poems Samuel wrote the full range of courtly genres. The Encyclopaedia Judaica lists poems of love and wine, praise, friendship and polemic, mourning, holiness, wisdom and meditation, and notes that he wrote of his children’s illnesses as well as of wine and victory^[56]. The poems of pleasure were written for the gatherings at which poetry was recited, and some were improvised on the spot.

A heading translated by Cole describes one such occasion. It records that at a house where a poet recited an Arabic poem about a bowl of apples, one of the company translated the poem into Hebrew, “And then they implored him to respond with a version of his own, and he improvised the following”^[52]. Cole explains that the poems in this group belong to a series of fifteen that Samuel improvised in various classical metres, and that they seem to concern the aesthetic and ethic of the Andalusian court^[52]. The scene shows the bilingual character of these gatherings, where an Arabic poem could be translated into Hebrew and answered in Hebrew within a single evening.

The love poems use the conventions of Arabic erotic verse, including the figure of the gazelle, the young beloved, which Cole discusses in his notes^[52]. The wine poems often turn on the theme of mortality. Cole summarises Dan Pagis’s reading of one of them: the poem accepts the memento mori tradition’s belief that the soul survives, but rejects its call to restraint; it rejects the carpe diem tradition’s belief that the soul perishes, but accepts its conclusion, to drink and take pleasure in life while one can, and even treats this as a commandment^[52].

Samuel’s poetics also drew on Arabic literary theory. Cole notes that one of his epigrams plays on the Arabic proverb, “The best of a poem is its falseness”, which was central to the poetics of the Spanish Hebrew writers, and that Moses ibn Ezra cited the same formulation^[52]. The phrase did not mean that poetry should deceive. It meant that the poet’s art lay in invention and figure rather than in literal statement, a view the Hebrew poets shared with their Arabic models.

The preacher of Granada

The reflective poems of Ben Kohelet take their name and their mood from Ecclesiastes. Several of those in Cole’s selection consider the brevity of life and the indifference of the world to human ambition. One, which Cole calls The Child at One or Two, is a poem on the stages of human life, which he relates to the saying in the Mishnah tractate Avot that assigns each decade of life its task, and to Shakespeare’s seven ages of man^[52]. Another, which he calls Earth to Man, is set beside a line of the Syrian poet al-Maʿarrī on a place from which escape is impossible, where time is running out for those who dwell there^[52].

Cole’s notes repeatedly compare these poems with the work of Samuel’s Muslim contemporary and adversary Ibn Ḥazm. For a poem on age he cites Ibn Ḥazm’s answer to a question about his years: “I consider all my life to have been but a short moment and nothing else”^[52]. The parallel suggests that the two men, who debated religion with hostility, shared a common idiom of reflection on time and mortality.

A third poem, Gazing through the Night, contemplates the night sky and the sleeping earth. Cole notes that it appears in Ben Kohelet and in Ben Tehillim, where it forms part of a poem of friendship that opens: “It’s upon you, sons and supporters of the Law, it’s upon you to reveal its secrets, because humankind upon earth is in darkness, and you are its sun”^[52]. In the same note he cites a parallel image from Ibn Gabirol, of God scattering his stars like a shepherd sending his flock across a field^[52]. Samuel’s cosmic imagery, like his war poetry, prepared the ground for the younger poet who would push such imagery much further.

An adventure at sea

One of the strangest poems in the collection describes a voyage. Its heading, as Cole translates it, says that Samuel “sailed the sea in his youth with merchants and they encountered a beast called tina by those who know the creatures of the sea”, and that God saved them from its attack^[52]. Tova Rosen, whom Cole cites, called it in many respects the strangest poem in the diwan and in medieval Hebrew poetry at large, and argued that it follows the conventions of the fantastic voyage, perhaps drawing on stories like the voyages of Sindbad, rather than recording a literal experience^[52].

Scholars disagree about whether the voyage happened. Some place it during Samuel’s student years in Córdoba, possibly as part of a commercial apprenticeship, others after he settled in Málaga^[52]. Rosen and Schirmann identified the creature with a large shark, which could easily have overturned the small ships of the time^[52]. Whatever its basis, the poem ends as a profession of faith, and Cole notes that its closing passage resembles the lists of principles of belief that culminated in Maimonides’ Thirteen Articles^[52].

Elegies for a brother

Samuel’s most personal poems are his elegies. The Encyclopaedia Judaica mentions the poems on the death of his brother Isaac among the subjects of his verse^[56]. Cole explains that they form a series of eighteen elegies, composed after Isaac died at the age of forty-eight^[52].

The headings trace the stages of mourning. One poem is introduced with the words “And he recited this in which he describes his going in to see him and his kissing him while he was lying on his bed”^[52]. Another bears the heading “And he said, describing his being wrapped in the shroud and lowered into his grave, may God have mercy upon him”^[52]. Others follow the funeral and its aftermath, until a poem is introduced with “And he recited this after a year had passed since his death”^[52]. Cole gives the first line of the sequence in literal form as “Firstborn of my mother, the first of death [the angel of death] has stolen you”^[52].

The sequence follows the Jewish rites of mourning, the rending of garments, the dust on the clothes and the breaking of cups, and Cole’s notes trace their talmudic sources^[52]. The final poem in his selection carries the heading “And when his grief had passed and he was consoled in his mourning, he recited the following”, and Cole cites an Arabic parallel to its thought, that God created grief large and made it smaller with time^[52]. Taken together, the elegies form a narrative of bereavement unusual in medieval literature.

Talmudist and communal leader

Samuel was also a scholar of Jewish law. His major halakhic work, Hilkheta Gavrata, was a compilation and explanation of law based on both Talmuds, the decisions of the geonim, the Midrash and the Sheʾiltot of Aḥai of Shabḥa^[56]. It survives in fragments, apparently written in Aramaic and Hebrew and possibly partly in Arabic, and was probably completed in 1049; it influenced later Spanish authorities such as Isaac ibn Ghayyat, Isaac Alfasi and Judah al-Bargeloni^[56].

The work had political implications. Some readers, among them Solomon ibn Gabirol, saw its appearance as the victory of the Spanish grandee over Hai Gaon of Pumbedita, the head of the Babylonian academy; accused of insulting the gaonate, Samuel wrote a poetic apology acknowledging its supremacy^[56]. Ibn Daud, by contrast, counted Samuel among “the first of the generation of the rabbinate”, the generation that marked the end of geonic predominance in talmudic learning^[56]. Spanish Jewry was beginning to see itself as a centre of authority in its own right, and Samuel was both the symbol and an agent of that shift.

As leader of Spanish Jewry he corresponded with the leading scholars of his age, including Ḥushiel, Ḥananel and Nissim of Kairouan, whose daughter married Samuel’s son Joseph^[56]. His relations with the Babylonian academies were generally good, and the exilarch Hezekiah ben David was a friend; he maintained friendly relations with the Palestinian communities and supplied the synagogues of Jerusalem with olive oil^[56]. One of his poems, which Cole titles The House of Prayer, satirises an incompetent teacher; Cole notes its reference to Hai Gaon, the last of the Babylonian geonim and the leading talmudist of Samuel’s time, who died in 1038^[52].

Patron and polemicist

Samuel was the greatest Jewish patron of his age. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he bestowed gifts on his favourite poets, who praised him in their verse, while those from whom he withheld his generosity deprecated his poetry^[56]. Isaac ibn Khalfun, the wandering professional poet, lived for some years in Córdoba and became his friend; a poetic correspondence between them is preserved in Samuel’s diwan^[57]. Cole notes that Joseph ibn Ḥasdai of Saragossa dedicated to Samuel the single poem by which he is known, the so-called Orphaned Qasida, which many Andalusian Hebrew poets regarded as a model^[53].

The most famous of his protégés was Solomon ibn Gabirol, who, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, addressed Samuel as “my father, my rider, my chariot” and dedicated several poems to him^[56]. Cole describes how the young poet wrote to the vizier at length from Saragossa when he was sixteen, and how the relationship ended in a still mysterious falling-out in Granada some years later^[53]. That story is told in the eighth chapter.

Samuel could also be severe as a critic. One poem in Ben Tehillim carries the heading “In which he responds to someone who sent him a weak poem”^[52]. Cole’s notes show that it contrasts the correspondent’s earlier poems, likened to bridegrooms, with the new one, which Samuel judged impure^[52]. The verdict of the most powerful Jew in al-Andalus on a poem was a matter of real consequence for its author, and the exchange shows how literary judgement, patronage and social standing were bound together.

Samuel also had critics. Cole names the satirist Moses ibn al-Taqana and the grammarian Jonah ibn Janāḥ as outspoken detractors^[53]. The quarrel with Ibn Janāḥ was conducted in a series of Arabic treatises. Samuel and his friends criticised Ibn Janāḥ’s supplement to Ḥayyuj, and Ibn Janāḥ, who learned of the criticism from one of Samuel’s friends visiting Saragossa, replied in two works, one answering criticisms conveyed in conversation and the other answering a treatise of Samuel’s called the Epistles of the Companions^[54]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that Ibn Janāḥ often mentioned his reply with pride^[54]. For Samuel, grammar was not a pastime but a field in which, as in poetry and law, he expected to lead.

As Muslim writers saw him

The Arabic sources on Samuel are among the most valuable evidence for how a Jewish vizier was perceived. According to Cole, Muslim chroniclers single out his learning, wisdom, courtesy, energy and political skill, and his excellent command of classical Arabic, while noting his ignorance in the choice of religion^[52]. The great Córdoban scholar Ibn Ḥazm, who had debated religion with him, was far more scathing, writing of his materialism, arrogance and religious backwardness^[52].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica adds that Samuel was said to have written a critique of the Qur’an, which was cited by a contemporary Muslim author, and that after reading that author’s version Ibn Ḥazm wrote a bitter polemic against it^[56]. Whether Samuel wrote any such work is uncertain, since his supposed critique is known only from his opponents. Cole refers readers who want a fuller account of Samuel’s role in the Muslim administration, and of the way Muslim writers portrayed him, to Ross Brann’s study of the subject, Power in the Portrayal, published in 2002^[52]. The polemic shows that his prominence was itself a provocation to some Muslim scholars, for whom a Jew in authority over Muslims violated the order that the law of the protected peoples was supposed to maintain.

Mark Cohen, in his survey of the myth and reality of a golden age, names Samuel ha-Nagid as one of the luminaries whose careers the Arabic language made possible, and observes that for such figures in the Jewish elite those centuries were indeed a golden age^[6]. He also notes that the vizier assassinated in 1066 was Samuel’s son^[6]. The two judgements belong together. Samuel’s career shows how far a Jew could rise in an Islamic state, and the career of his son shows how quickly that position could be destroyed.

Death on campaign

Constant campaigning wore Samuel down. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that he died on a campaign in 1055 or 1056, giving both years for his death, and that his position passed to his son Joseph^[56]. Cole gives the year as 1056^[53]. He was about sixty-two or sixty-three years old.

His legacy was double. As a statesman he left his son a position of unprecedented power, together with the enmities that power had created. As a poet he left a body of work that later generations judged the first great achievement of Hebrew poetry in Spain. The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls his poetry more developed and more diverse than that of his contemporaries, the first generation of Hebrew poets in Spain^[56]. Moses ibn Ezra testified that his poems were known in his lifetime from the Islamic East to Spain^[50].

The comparison with Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut, a century earlier, is instructive. Ḥasdai, as the Jewish Encyclopedia put it, was in reality a minister of foreign affairs without bearing the title of vizier^[35]. Samuel bore the title, commanded armies and governed in the name of a king. The difference reflects the change from a powerful caliphate, which could use a Jewish physician and diplomat without giving him formal authority over Muslims, to a small taifa state whose ruler needed every capable servant he could find and could not afford to be particular about his religion. Samuel’s career was possible because the caliphate had fallen.

His son inherited the position but not the circumstances that had sustained it. Joseph, born about 1031, succeeded his father as vizier and as rabbi of the community of Granada, and directed an important school^[61]. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes him as highly educated but, unlike his father, proud and haughty^[61]. Within ten years of Samuel’s death the alliance between the Zirid house and the family of Ibn Naghrela, which had lasted for three decades, ended in violence.

Cole remarks that after Samuel died his work was criticised by pedants, as happened later to Ibn Gabirol^[53]. The judgement of posterity has been kinder. Samuel showed that Hebrew could carry the full range of Arabic poetry, from the battlefield to the banquet and the grave, and his example made possible the achievements of the poets who followed. The world in which he had flourished, the Granada of the Zirid kings, survived him by only a decade before the catastrophe of 1066.

7. The Taifa Kingdoms, Lucena and 1066

The caliphate of Córdoba did not survive the early eleventh century. A civil war in the first years of the eleventh century brought Berber armies, Slavic commanders and rival members of the Umayyad house into conflict, and the sack of Córdoba in 1013 drove much of its population, Muslim and Jewish, into the provinces. Within a generation the caliphate had dissolved into a patchwork of independent states, the taifa kingdoms. The word, as Peter Cole explains, means party or faction in Arabic^[52].

For the Jews of al-Andalus the fragmentation was both an opportunity and a danger. Cole reports the judgement of the historian David Wasserstein that the decentralised taifa states increased the opportunities open to Jews but also their exposure and risk^[52]. Each of the new courts needed administrators, financiers, physicians and secretaries, and a small state ruled by an unpopular dynasty had particular reasons to trust servants who had no claim to power of their own. The same conditions made Jewish courtiers conspicuous, and their prominence could provoke resentment among the Muslim population and the rival factions of the court.

This chapter surveys the Jewish communities of the taifa period. It begins with the dispersal from Córdoba and the communities of Saragossa, Seville and the eastern ports, turns to Lucena, the most Jewish town in al-Andalus, and ends with the massacre of the Jews of Granada in 1066 and the arrival of the Almoravids a generation later.

The dispersal from Córdoba

The fall of Córdoba scattered its scholars across the peninsula. Samuel ibn Naghrela fled to Málaga, as the previous chapter described^[56]. The grammarian Jonah ibn Janāḥ abandoned Córdoba during the Berber siege of 1012 and eventually made his home in Saragossa^[54]. Seville, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, served as a refuge for Jews escaping from Córdoba after the Berber conquest^[59]. With the fall of the caliphate, the same encyclopaedia notes, many Jews of Córdoba moved to Almería on the southern coast^[60].

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The dispersal spread the culture of caliphal Córdoba to the provincial capitals. Each of the new courts sought to imitate the old capital, with its own poets, scholars and libraries, and Jewish learning followed the same pattern. Where the tenth century had one great centre of Jewish culture in al-Andalus, the eleventh had several: Granada under Samuel ha-Nagid, Saragossa with its circle of philosophers and grammarians, Seville, and Lucena with its academy. Cole describes the period that followed the dissolution of the caliphate as one of great creativity in Hebrew and Arabic alike, in which the new poetry was realised in the context of what he calls the Renaissance-like city states of the taifas^[47].

The taifa rulers’ reliance on Jewish servants followed from their own position. Most of them were not members of old Arab families with deep roots in the country but Berber commanders, Slavic officers or local notables who had seized power in the chaos of the civil war. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s explanation of Samuel ha-Nagid’s rise in Granada, that a ruler beset by intrigue could rely on a servant who could never claim the throne himself, applies with variations across the peninsula^[28]. Jewish courtiers appear in the sources for Saragossa, Seville, Denia and Almería as well as Granada, and in each case their careers depended on the needs and the survival of a particular dynasty.

Saragossa on the Ebro

Saragossa, in the north-east, was the capital of a taifa kingdom bordering the Christian lands of the north. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes an important Jewish community there under Muslim rule, active in commerce and well represented in the cloth and leather industries, in tanning and in shoemaking^[62]. Jews served as advisers at the court of the Tujībid dynasty, which the encyclopaedia describes as tolerant, in the eleventh century; among them was Jekuthiel ben Isaac ibn Ḥasan, who was killed in 1039^[62].

The city was a cultural centre. The Encyclopaedia Judaica lists among its Jewish residents in the eleventh century the philologist Jonah ibn Janāḥ, the physician and philosopher Menahem ibn al-Fawwāl, the poets Levi ibn al-Tabbān and Moses ibn al-Taqana, the poet and linguist Joseph ibn Ḥasdai, the talmudist David ben Saadia and the philosopher Baḥya ibn Paquda^[62]. Solomon ibn Gabirol was raised there. Cole calls the circle a Saragossan who’s who of Jewish intellectuals^[53].

The community was not large. The historian Eliyahu Ashtor, cited in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, estimated that Jews made up 6.3 per cent of the population of Saragossa, which was under 20,000, in the eleventh century^[62]. The figure is a reminder that the brilliance of Jewish culture in the taifa period rested on small communities, in which a handful of wealthy patrons could support an extraordinary concentration of talent. The same estimate suggests why the death of a single patron, such as Jekuthiel in 1039, could transform the fortunes of a poet.

Saragossa was also open to intellectual currents from the East. Cole notes that the scholar Abū al-Ḥakam al-Kirmānī, born in Córdoba and died in 1066, introduced to Saragossa after his travels the doctrine of the tenth-century Brethren of Purity, whose encyclopaedic Epistles taught that the pattern of the whole is represented in the pattern of the parts^[53]. A new edition of the Epistles, he adds, reached al-Andalus in the first half of the eleventh century, circulated within months among Islamic scholars and also reached Ibn Gabirol^[53]. The city’s Jewish and Muslim intellectuals thus read some of the same books, and the philosophy that Ibn Gabirol developed there drew on the same sources as that of his Muslim neighbours.

Life in this circle could be precarious in other ways. Cole records that the satirist Moses ibn al-Taqana, a learned and sharp-tongued poet and one of the critics of Samuel ha-Nagid, was killed in his twenties when a wall fell on him on the road to Toledo^[53]. The intellectual society of a taifa capital was small, quarrelsome and closely connected with other capitals, and news, books and polemics passed rapidly between Saragossa, Granada and Seville.

Seville and the ʿAbbādids

Seville, the largest of the southern taifas and the great rival of Granada, had one of the four major Jewish communities of Muslim Spain^[59]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that its Jews engaged in commerce and medicine and held a virtual monopoly of the dyeing trade^[59]. Its population increased during the eleventh century, partly through the arrival of refugees from Granada and partly through immigration from North Africa^[59].

Under the ʿAbbādid kings, who ruled Seville from 1023 to 1091, prominent Jews served in various capacities at court^[59]. Abraham ibn Muhājir served as vizier and as head of the Jewish community^[59]. The most notable of the Sevillian courtiers, Isaac ben Baruch Albalia, a scholar of the calendar and of the Talmud, was appointed in 1069 by the king al-Muʿtamid to his retinue and as rabbi and nasi over the Jews of his realm^[63]. He used his influence, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, to improve the status of the Jews of the kingdom^[63]. Albalia was also a scholar of the Talmud who began, at the age of thirty, a commentary on its difficult passages called the Spice-Peddlers’ Basket, which he never completed, and Moses ibn Ezra described him as a poet and grand stylist^[63]. His son Baruch was the uncle of the historian Abraham ibn Daud^[59].

The wars between Seville and Granada, in which Samuel ha-Nagid commanded the Granadan army, thus set Jewish courtiers on opposite sides. Jews who had opposed Samuel in Granada found refuge in Seville^[59]. The taifa period produced no single Jewish political interest. It produced Jewish servants of rival kings, each loyal to his own master.

The eastern ports

The coastal taifas of the east and south were centres of Mediterranean trade. Denia, on the coast of Valencia, became in the eleventh century the capital of the powerful kingdom of the Mujāhid dynasty, which the Encyclopaedia Judaica describes as tolerant^[64]. Documents from the Cairo Genizah show a substantial Jewish community there by the middle of the century, trading by land and sea, especially with the towns of Tunisia and with Alexandria^[64]. The letters of an eleventh-century merchant of Fustat, Nathan ben Naharai, attest to the commercial importance of Denia and the role of its Jews^[64]. Evidence of this kind, preserved by chance in a synagogue storeroom in Egypt, often supplies what the Arabic chronicles of the taifa courts leave out, the everyday business of Jewish merchants who never held office and never wrote poetry, but whose trade sustained the communities that supported the courtiers and the poets.

Denia also had learned men. In the middle of the century Isaac ibn Yashush was court physician there, and a scholar from Baghdad named Samuel ben Joseph corresponded with Samuel ha-Nagid^[64]. The town’s rabbi, Isaac ibn Sikhri, left for Babylonia, where he was appointed head of the academy of Hai Gaon, and was succeeded in Denia by Isaac ben Reuben al-Bargeloni^[64]. The movement of a rabbi from Denia to the headship of a Babylonian academy is a measure of how far the scholarship of al-Andalus had come in a century.

Almería, further south, had a Jewish community formed at the end of the tenth century by refugees from neighbouring Pechina; it became one of the most prosperous and important in Andalusia, with its quarter near the harbour and a population of about two thousand Jews engaged in maritime trade^[60]. Its vizier Ibn ʿAbbās, as the previous chapter noted, published libellous tracts against Samuel ha-Nagid and the Jews, and was executed after the defeat of Almería by Granada^[60].

Lucena, the Jewish city

Of all the towns of al-Andalus, Lucena, south of Córdoba, was the most distinctively Jewish. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that under Muslim rule it was famous as the entirely Jewish city, and that a tradition held that it had been founded by Jews^[4]. Several prominent families, including that of Abraham ibn Daud, claimed that their settlement there went back to the time of Nebuchadnezzar^[4]. The responsum of Natronai Gaon in the ninth century, quoted in the second chapter, already described it as a place without gentiles^[4].

The Arab geographer al-Idrīsī, writing in the twelfth century, also commented on the Jewish character of Lucena, noting that the Muslims lived outside the walls while the Jews lived within the fortified town^[4]. Its Jews lived from olive groves, vineyards, agriculture, commerce and crafts^[4]. The arrangement was unusual in the Islamic world, where Jews were generally a minority within Muslim towns, and it gave Lucena a degree of internal autonomy that made it a natural refuge and a natural centre of learning.

Lucena’s fame rested on its academy. In the eleventh century Isaac ibn Ghayyat taught in its yeshivah; he was succeeded by Isaac Alfasi, who was followed by Joseph ibn Migash^[4]. The grammarian Jonah ibn Janāḥ was educated there, and the poets Moses and Abraham ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi and Joseph ibn Sahl were active in Lucena at some time in their lives^[4]. Moses ibn Ezra was a pupil of Isaac ibn Ghayyat at Lucena, which the Encyclopaedia Judaica, quoting the period’s own description, calls the city of poetry^[55].

The town’s links with the Babylonian academies were old. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that in the middle of the ninth century Amram Gaon sent his prayer book in answer to a question from a scholar of Lucena, and that his contemporary Eleazar ben Samuel Ḥurga of Lucena received honorary titles from the academies and became famous there^[4]. Lucena was therefore a centre of rabbinic learning long before the Andalusian revival, and the academy of the eleventh century continued a tradition that reached back two hundred years.

Its scholars were poets as well as jurists. Isaac ibn Mar Saul, the teacher of Ibn Janāḥ at Lucena, was known chiefly for his liturgical verse^[52]. Isaac ibn Ghayyat, head of the academy until 1089, was also a liturgical poet. Cole translates one of his poems, a geʾulah, a prayer for redemption, written in the form of a girdle poem, which Ḥayyim Schirmann called “a remarkable poem” for the way it carries to an extreme the idea that the hardships imposed on Israel are its greatest source of pleasure and hope^[52]. The combination of legal learning and poetic skill in the same men was characteristic of Lucena, and it explains why the town could be described both as the seat of an academy and as a city of poetry.

Alfasi and the code

The scholar who made Lucena the leading centre of talmudic learning in the West came from North Africa. Isaac ben Jacob Alfasi, known as the Rif, was born in 1013 at Qalʿat Ḥammād, in what is now Algeria, and settled in Fez, from which he took his name^[65]. He remained there until 1088, when, in his seventy-fifth year, he was denounced to the government by enemies and fled to Spain^[65]. After a few months in Córdoba he moved to Lucena, where he became head of the yeshivah in 1089 on the death of Isaac ibn Ghayyat and remained until his death in 1103^[65].

His great work, Sefer ha-Halakhot, was in the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s description the most important code before Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah^[65]. It had two purposes, to extract the halakhic material from the Talmud and determine the law, and to provide an essential summary of the Talmud that would make it easier to study^[65]. Alfasi confined himself to those parts of the Talmud that remained in practice, omitting, for example, the laws of the Temple service^[65].

His students included Joseph ibn Migash, Judah Halevi and Baruch ben Isaac Albalia, and before his death he designated Ibn Migash as his successor, although his own son Jacob was a distinguished scholar^[65]. Moses ibn Ezra praised him as a man of unsurpassed keenness of intellect^[65]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica adds that Alfasi was not influenced by the cultural life of Spain, his intellectual position having been settled long before he arrived^[65]. In Lucena the poetry of Moses ibn Ezra and the law of Alfasi existed side by side, the two traditions of Andalusian Jewish culture sharing a single small town.

Joseph ibn Naghrela

In Granada, Samuel ha-Nagid’s son Joseph succeeded to his father’s offices in 1056. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes him as born about 1031, highly educated and clever, vizier and rabbi of the community of Granada and head of an important school^[61]. He supported scholars, including Isaac Albalia and the poet Isaac ibn Ghayyat, and Arabic poets also praised his liberality^[61]. Albalia dedicated to him in 1065 a work on the calendar^[63]. His wife was a daughter of Nissim ben Jacob of Kairouan^[61]. Unlike his father, Joseph left no known literary work; the Jewish Encyclopedia states that nothing is known of it, apart from a letter to Nissim that has been ascribed to him^[61].

His personality, as the sources present it, differed from his father’s. The Jewish Encyclopedia, an early twentieth-century work which cites the nineteenth-century historian Dozy, calls him proud and haughty, says that he completely ruled King Bādīs, who was nearly always drunk, and that he surrounded the king with spies and appointed so many of his fellow Jews to public office as to attract attention^[61]. Arabic chroniclers, it adds, related that he believed in neither the faith of his fathers nor any other, a claim the encyclopaedia itself treats with doubt^[61].

These judgements come largely from hostile sources and should be read with caution. What is clear is that Joseph held the same position as his father without his father’s military reputation or the long loyalty that bound Samuel to Bādīs. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Granada records that libellous documents against the Jews’ position were issued and circulated through neighbouring principalities, and that an anti-Jewish polemical tone was voiced even in their wars against Granada^[28].

The poem of Abū Isḥāq

The crisis was precipitated by a poem. The Jewish Encyclopedia names its author as Abū Isḥāq of Elvira, an Arabic poet whose hopes of an office at court had been frustrated by Joseph, and describes it as a malicious poem against Joseph and his fellow Jews^[61]. Mark Cohen summarises its content: the poet called the Jews “apes and pigs”, quoting a Qur’anic motif, and attacked them for violating the code of humility that Islamic law required of them^[6].

The poem was not directed at Jewish religion as such. Its charge was political and social, that the Jews of Granada, protected people who were supposed to live in humility, had become masters of the state and of Muslims. The law of the dhimma, discussed in earlier chapters, provided the terms of the accusation. A Jewish vizier who appointed Jews to office was, from this perspective, an offence against the proper order of a Muslim society.

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the poem made little impression on the king, who trusted Joseph, but caused a great sensation among the Berbers^[61]. A rumour spread that Joseph intended to kill Bādīs and deliver the kingdom to al-Muʿtaṣim of Almería, with whom Granada was at war, and then to seize the throne himself^[61]. The rumour became the pretext for Joseph’s downfall and for the plunder of the Jews.

The thirtieth of December 1066

The riot broke out at the end of December 1066. The Jewish Encyclopedia gives the date of Joseph’s death as 30 December 1066 and describes how the mob stormed the royal palace, where he had taken refuge, hiding in a coal pit with his face blackened to avoid recognition^[61]. He was discovered and killed, and his body was publicly hung up for display^[61]. Most of the Jews of Granada, the same article states, also perished^[61].

The Hebrew sources give a sense of the scale. Abraham ibn Daud, as cited in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, wrote that the community of Granada perished along with Joseph, and a later account by Solomon ibn Verga reported that more than 1,500 householders were killed^[28]. A count of householders would imply a much larger number of individuals, but the figure comes from a sixteenth-century source and cannot be verified. What is certain is that the leading Jewish community of al-Andalus was devastated in a single outbreak of violence.

Some survived. Joseph’s wife fled with their son Azariah to Lucena, where the community supported them; Azariah died young^[61]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Lucena records the same flight, citing Ibn Daud^[4]. Isaac Albalia, who had been close to both Samuel and Joseph, spent large sums reassembling the family library, which had been scattered^[63]. The image of the scholar buying back the books of his murdered patron is one of the most telling in the history of the period.

Meanings of 1066

The massacre of 1066 has been read in very different ways. Cohen notes that the episode is regularly cited by proponents of what he calls the neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history as a typical example of Islamic antisemitism^[6]. He stresses, on the contrary, that it was exceptional in targeting Jews as such^[6]. In Cohen’s account, violence of this kind was rare in the Islamic world of the high Middle Ages, and the Granada riot stands out precisely because it is unusual and unusually well documented.

Cohen also observes how such episodes were remembered. During these rare outbreaks, he writes, Jews in Islamic lands felt the impact of violence no less than the Jews of Ashkenaz, but they did not preserve them as part of a collective memory of suffering; they regarded them as temporary lapses of the dhimma arrangement^[6]. In his view this helps to explain why Jews under Islam who faced forced conversion tended to prefer outward conformity, in the expectation that it would later be reversed, to the martyrdom chosen by many Ashkenazi Jews^[6]. The muted place of 1066 in Jewish memory fits this pattern. Ibn Daud recorded it, Ibn Verga later repeated it, but it did not become a fixed date of mourning.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on the Zirids draws a narrower conclusion, that Jewish influence in Granada declined after the murder of Joseph^[58]. Its article on Granada adds that the Jews soon returned to positions of influence in the city, though not for long^[28]. The community was rebuilt within a generation, and families such as the Ibn Ezras remained in Granada until the Almoravid conquest.

The episode also shows the structural weakness of the courtier system. A community whose security depended on the standing of one family at the court of one king was exposed to every change of fortune in that family. Samuel’s success had rested on his usefulness to Bādīs and on a long record of loyalty; his son inherited the office but not the trust, and when the Berber soldiery turned against the vizier, the whole community was treated as his accomplice. The same pattern would recur in Christian Spain, where Jewish courtiers served kings whose protection could fail at any moment.

Granada after the riot

The community of Granada recovered more quickly than the scale of the massacre might suggest. Isaac Albalia moved to Seville, where al-Muʿtamid appointed him to his retinue in 1069, but he died in Granada in 1094, having apparently returned^[63]. The family of Ibn Ezra, one of the most distinguished of the city’s Jewish families, remained there. Moses ibn Ezra, born in Granada around 1055, appears to have held an honoured position in the province, since his name is accompanied by the Arabic title ṣāḥib al-shurṭa, literally head of the police but also used as an honorific^[55].

The same Moses ibn Ezra encouraged the young Judah Halevi in his first poetic efforts and invited him to Granada, where he supported him; the two formed a lasting friendship^[55]. In the generation after 1066, therefore, Granada was again a place where a Jewish patron could receive a gifted young poet, and where the culture of the court that Samuel ha-Nagid had built continued in a smaller form. The recovery ended with the conquest of 1090, which dispersed the Ibn Ezra brothers and closed the history of Jewish Granada under the Zirids.

Toward 1090

The last decades of the taifa period were overshadowed by the advance of the Christian kingdoms. Toledo, the ancient Visigothic capital, fell to the Christians in 1085^[52]. The Muslim rulers of the south, unable to resist the Christian armies alone, appealed to the Almoravids, a reformist Berber movement that had built an empire in North Africa^[52]. Cole explains that the Almoravids came at the request of the Andalusian Muslims but in time turned against them, regarding them as excessively worldly, weak and corrupt^[52].

For the Jews the arrival of the Almoravids marked the end of an era. In 1090, Cole writes, the Islamic and Hebrew courtier cultures of the taifa states were disrupted by the invasion^[47]. When the Almoravid ruler Yūsuf ibn Tāshufīn took Granada in that year, the Encyclopaedia Judaica records, its Jewish community was destroyed and the family of Ibn Ezra was among the refugees^[28]. Moses ibn Ezra eventually fled to Christian Spain and was never allowed to return to the city for which he longed all his life^[55].

The last Zirid king of Granada, ʿAbd Allāh, reported an uprising of the Jews of Lucena during his reign, at the time of the expedition against the Almoravids around 1090^[4]. Lucena itself faced a further threat at the turn of the century, when Yūsuf ibn Tāshufīn demanded that its Jews convert to Islam; the community was saved by a heavy payment, but many of its members moved north to Navarre, where they settled near Tudela and continued to follow the customs of their original community^[4].

The Almoravids did not end Jewish life in al-Andalus. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that they proved tolerant towards their Jewish subjects, though their attitude hardly matched the golden age that the Jews had enjoyed^[58]. Seville under the Almoravids remained a major cultural centre^[59], Alfasi continued to teach in Lucena until 1103, and the poetry of Moses ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi belongs largely to the Almoravid decades. The great courts of the Jewish viziers, however, did not return. The centre of gravity of Jewish life in the peninsula was beginning its slow movement north, into the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, a movement that the following chapters trace.

8. Solomon ibn Gabirol, Poet and Philosopher

Solomon ben Judah ibn Gabirol was the most original mind of the Jewish golden age in Spain and its most difficult personality. He wrote secular poems of fierce pride and bitter complaint, liturgical poems that are still recited in synagogues across the world, a long meditative poem on God and the cosmos that is read on the Day of Atonement, and a philosophical treatise that influenced Christian scholastics for centuries while its author’s identity was forgotten. The Jewish Encyclopedia, citing earlier scholars, records that Heinrich Graetz called him the Jewish Plato and Moritz Steinschneider the most original philosophical writer among the Jews and Arabs^[66].

Peter Cole, his most recent English translator, opens his introduction with a portrait in paradoxes: his metaphysics emerge from desire, his ethics evolve into a science of sense, and in his verse, as Cole puts it, “Hebrew is Arabic, Muslim Jewish, his resistance a form of embrace”^[53]. The judgement captures something essential. Ibn Gabirol absorbed the Arabic culture of his time more deeply than any Hebrew poet before him, and used it to write a Hebrew poetry and a philosophy that were entirely his own.

This chapter follows his short life, which is known mostly from his own poems, and then considers his secular poetry, his liturgical verse, the Keter Malkhut and the Fountain of Life. It ends with the long history of his reputation, which includes the loss of his name, its recovery in the nineteenth century and the rescue of his poems from destruction in the twentieth.

Málaga and Saragossa

The facts of his life, as Cole says, are few and reconstructed^[53]. The main source, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, is his own poetry, which often offers no more than hints; further details come from the Arabic historian Ṣāʿid of Toledo, from Moses ibn Ezra’s book on poetics and from the introduction to Ibn Gabirol’s ethical treatise^[67]. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Ṣāʿid, the qadi of Toledo, was the first to mention him, describing him as a resident of Saragossa and a keen student of philosophy, especially logic^[68].

He was born in 1021 or 1022, probably in Málaga^[53]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he regarded Málaga as his native city and signed some of his poems Malaki, the man of Málaga^[67]. His family seems to have left Córdoba in the unsafe years at the beginning of the eleventh century, and Cole suggests that they may have fled with the same wave of refugees that included Samuel ha-Nagid^[53][67]. As a child he was taken to Saragossa, where he received an extensive education^[67]. In Arabic circles, Cole notes, he was known as Abū Ayyūb Sulaymān ibn Yaḥyā ibn Jabīrūl^[53].

He was orphaned young. His father died while he was still in his early teens, and he wrote several elegies for him; when his mother died in 1045 he mourned both parents in a single poem^[67][53]. He suffered from illness from childhood. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he complained in his poems of a weak physique, small stature and ugliness, and of a serious skin disease which he seems to describe in one of his most disturbing poems^[67]. Cole reports the view of scholars that the disease may have been tuberculosis of the skin, while stressing that the condition has never been precisely identified^[53].

He was precocious. Cole writes that he was composing accomplished poems by the age of sixteen and important ones by nineteen^[53]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica dates his Azharot, a versified enumeration of the commandments, to the age of sixteen at the latest, and notes that he compared himself to a sixteen-year-old with the heart of a man of eighty^[67].

Jekuthiel and his elegies

In Saragossa the young poet found a patron. Jekuthiel ben Isaac ibn Ḥasan, a Jewish notable at the Saragossan court, looked after him after his father’s death, and Ibn Gabirol praised him for his knowledge of the Talmud and the sciences, his interest in poetry and his generosity^[53][67]. The Jewish Encyclopedia dates the beginning of the friendship to the poet’s seventeenth year^[66].

The patronage did not last. In 1039 Jekuthiel became involved in court intrigue and was killed^[67][62]. Ibn Gabirol wrote two elegies for him, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica regards one of them as one of the greatest secular poems of the Jewish Middle Ages^[67]. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes an elegy of more than two hundred verses^[66]. With the loss of his patron, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, Ibn Gabirol’s financial and social standing fell sharply, and his constant quarrels with the notables of the town caused him great suffering^[67].

In 1038, the year before Jekuthiel’s death, he had also written elegies on the death of Hai Gaon, the head of the academy of Pumbedita^[67]. The two sets of elegies, for a local patron and for the most eminent rabbinic authority of the age, show the range of his early poetry. He was already a public voice, writing on events that mattered to Jews far beyond Saragossa.

The grammar in verse

At about the age of nineteen he completed Anaq, a didactic poem on the Hebrew language^[67]. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes it as a versified Hebrew grammar, alphabetical and acrostic, of four hundred verses in ten parts, of which ninety-five lines were preserved by the grammarian Solomon Parḥon^[66]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, citing Abraham ibn Ezra, speaks of four hundred stanzas of which eighty-eight are extant^[67]. The poem opened with a section on the superiority of the Hebrew language and explained how its words relate to the twenty-two letters of the alphabet in the way that form relates to matter^[67].

The comparison is revealing. Even in a teaching poem on grammar written in his youth, Ibn Gabirol reached for the philosophical pair of matter and form that would dominate his later thought. The Jewish Encyclopedia adds that in the surviving lines he reproaches his fellow townsmen for their neglect of the holy tongue^[66]. Abraham ibn Ezra admired the work and regarded it as an important contribution to the understanding of Hebrew^[67].

Corridors of influence

Ibn Gabirol read widely in Arabic, and Cole lists the figures whose work echoes in his. Among them is the blind Syrian poet Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, known for the dense patterning of his caustic poems, who turned against the court poetry of his day and its maxim that the most pleasing poetry is the most feigning, seeking instead, in Cole’s words, “to speak the truth”^[53]. Another is Ibn Ḥazm of Córdoba, author of The Ring of the Dove and of a vast work on comparative religion, whose moral essay Cole quotes in John Kritzeck’s translation: “I have found only this: the one aim of escaping anxiety”^[53].

The most important intellectual influence came from the East. The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, an encyclopaedic work of the tenth century, taught that man is a microcosm and that correspondences link the astronomical, ethical and social orders; the sciences, in their view, are vehicles by which mankind becomes aware of the harmony and beauty of the universe^[53]. Cole quotes a passage from the Epistles in which the soul of the educated man, contemplating the size of the spheres, longs to ascend to them, cannot do so because of the weight of the body, but on its separation from the body “arrives there in an instant, with the blink of an eye”^[53]. He offers the passage as an approach much closer in spirit to Ibn Gabirol’s cosmic poem than the cautious views of his Jewish contemporaries^[53].

On the Hebrew side, Ibn Gabirol looked back to the founders of the new poetry. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he spoke of Dunash ben Labrat as the greatest poet of his generation and imitated his style in one of his poems^[11]. Cole also names the liturgical poets Isaac ibn Mar Saul of Lucena, whose penitential petition finds direct echoes in the Keter Malkhut, and Joseph ibn Abitur, whose mystical poems on the angels had a marked influence on Ibn Gabirol^[53].

A quarrel with the town

Ibn Gabirol’s relations with the Jews of Saragossa were bitter. Cole quotes a poem in which he complains that the people around him “quarrel with all my teachings and talk, as though I were speaking Greek”, and in which they tell him to speak as the people speak^[53]. Cole suggests that he may have been forced to leave Saragossa because of his particular mix of philosophy, mysticism, religion and science^[53]. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cites a poem written on his departure which describes his enemies as men who are “giants they deem themselves, for me to rate no more than grasshoppers”^[69].

His contemporaries noticed his temper. Moses ibn Ezra, Cole writes, remembered him for his philosophical temperament and for his “angry spirit which held sway over reason, and his demon within which he could not control”^[53]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that his character, at times verging on arrogance, brought him into frequent conflict with influential men, and that since he wished to devote his life to philosophy and poetry he depended on wealthy patrons, a dependence against which he rebelled from time to time^[67].

The Stanford Encyclopedia warns, however, that the picture of his misanthropy has been exaggerated by a translation error. Abraham ibn Daud, criticising Ibn Gabirol’s philosophy, concluded that through it he had led the Jewish people into error, but a mistranslation of the Arabic into Hebrew turned this into the claim that he had slandered the Jewish people^[69]. A difficult man whose philosophy disturbed his successors became, through the error, an enemy of his own nation, which he was not.

The poet and the vizier

The most important relationship of Ibn Gabirol’s career was with Samuel ha-Nagid. Cole writes that the young poet first contacted Samuel when he was sixteen and the vizier was at the height of his power, writing to him at length in verse from Saragossa^[53]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that he dedicated several poems to Samuel^[56]. Some scholars believe, the same encyclopaedia notes, that he later lived for a time in Granada under Samuel’s patronage and quarrelled with him as a result of his criticism of Samuel’s poems^[67].

Cole describes the episode with a candour that the older literature avoids. Most scholars, he notes, assume that the poet went south to Granada after leaving Saragossa some time after 1045, and things seem to have worked out for a time, but then the young upstart insulted his elder poet-patron, or wires were crossed, and the trail vanishes^[53]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica also records that Ibn Gabirol saw the appearance of Samuel’s legal code as a victory of the Spanish grandee over the Babylonian gaon^[56]. The relationship of admiration, rivalry and mutual criticism between the two greatest Hebrew poets of their generation is one of the most intriguing in the period, and it is known only in fragments.

Other contacts are recorded. Ibn Gabirol appears to have spent the year 1048–1049 under the patronage of Nissim ben Jacob ibn Shahin of Kairouan, although it is doubtful whether he was ever Nissim’s student, and he was on friendly terms with Isaac ibn Khalfun and Isaac ibn Kapron^[67]. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests that most, if not all, of the patronage he received resulted from his reputation as the greatest Jewish poet of his time in the West^[68].

The secular poems

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy counts some four hundred secular and religious poems attributed to him^[68]. In his secular verse, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, he displays great knowledge of biblical Hebrew and linguistic virtuosity, while avoiding the complexity of many predecessors, including Samuel ha-Nagid; he takes images and idioms from Arabic poetry and fuses them into an original style with brilliant intellectual metaphors^[67]. He was not a purist and allowed himself neologisms that provoked the censure of his strictest critics^[67].

His nature poetry is among his finest. The Encyclopaedia Judaica observes that some of it served as an introduction to panegyrics, since a patron’s generosity was often likened to the plenitude of nature, and that his winter poems, which he called autumn poems, include some of his best work^[67]. Other poems express what the same article calls his lack of social adaptation and his pessimistic view of society, answering a world that would not recognise his merit with contempt; in his ethical poems he addresses the reader directly about the transience of life and the eternal value of the soul^[67]. His only secular poem in strophic form, the encyclopaedia adds, was a humorous wine song that became a popular Purim song^[67].

Some of the poems combine the personal and the cosmic. Cole quotes one in which the moon becomes a teacher: “It was night and the sky was clear, and the moon was pure at its center as it led me along discernment’s sphere, teaching me by its light and direction”^[53]. In another, which Cole sets beside the English metaphysical poets, the poet asks the reader not to be astonished “by a man whose flesh / has longed for wisdom and prevailed”^[53]. Moses ibn Ezra observed, as Cole reports, that Ibn Gabirol’s way in the art of poetry was subtle, like that of the later Muslim poets, which Cole relates to the ornamental new style of Arabic poetry^[53].

Cole reads the self-portrait of the poems through his Arabic honorific. Abū Ayyūb, father of Job, was a purely formal name, the standard kunya for anyone called Sulaymān, but in Cole’s view the poet’s life and writing gave it meaning: like Job he was plagued by friends, fate and a disease of the skin, and like Job he turned sarcastic in his pursuit of wisdom^[53]. Cole is unsparing about the man. He lists the stench of his boasting, his truculence and misanthropy and his inability to sustain friendships or stay in one place, before adding that he was nevertheless one who “rang the cosmic gong”^[53].

The poet as craftsman

Cole interprets Ibn Gabirol’s art through the figure of Bezalel, the craftsman whom the Book of Exodus describes as filled with the spirit of God to build and furnish the desert sanctuary^[53]. Like Bezalel, and like King Solomon, his namesake and the builder of the Temple, Ibn Gabirol in Cole’s reading charged his ornament with complex value, bringing a sublime vision into a space defined by artifice^[53]. The comparison is meant to answer a modern prejudice against ornament as superfluous decoration.

For Cole, ornament in this poetry is structural rather than decorative. He describes the inlaid biblical phrases and the other figures of the verse as acting “like tiny turbines to the current of the verse”, and includes under ornament nearly everything that makes a poem unparaphrasable, from alliteration and assonance to irony, metaphor and manipulation of tone^[53]. On this reading, the elaborate surface of Ibn Gabirol’s poems is not a veil over their meaning but the means by which they produce it, and the poet who wrote of matter seeking form wrote poems in which form is the substance.

A single image shows the method. In a poem that Cole calls The Tree, God “scatters his stars about like a shepherd, / sending his flock across a field”^[52]. Cole notes that the image is also common in Arabic poetry^[52]. The conventional figure is made new by its placement in a poem about the order of the cosmos, where the pastoral simile carries the weight of a theology of providence.

The liturgical poet

In the synagogue Ibn Gabirol became a different poet. The Encyclopaedia Judaica regards his liturgical poems as the apogee of the tradition and the basis of his standing as the major religious poet of Spanish Jewry; many have been preserved in Sephardi and Ashkenazi prayer books and in those of the Karaites^[67]. Cole suggests that later in life he was probably supported by writing for the synagogue, composing liturgical poems for weekdays, Sabbaths and festivals which are, in comparison with his court poetry, remarkably self-deprecating^[53].

The strong-willed and contemptuous voice of the secular poems, the Encyclopaedia Judaica observes, becomes humble before God, aware of human insignificance and of the inability to overcome desire except through divine compassion^[67]. Unlike Judah Halevi, he does not describe his love for God as that of a lover and beloved, although his expressions of longing sometimes resemble the emotions of the love poems^[67]. Cole quotes a characteristic petition, “Shelter me in your shadow,” in which the poet asks God to “be with my mouth and its word”^[53].

He mastered the short lyrical prelude. Cole calls him the first master of the reshut, the genre of lyrical introductions to parts of the Sabbath and festival liturgy that Joseph ibn Abitur had pioneered^[53]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that most of his religious poems begin with the letter shin, since he set his name, Shelomo, in acrostics through their opening letters^[67]. His national poems, in which Israel speaks to God as a woman to her lover and is promised redemption, form a link between the modest efforts of Samuel ha-Nagid and the great national poetry of Judah Halevi^[67].

The national poems were sharpened by events. The Encyclopaedia Judaica suggests that the fate of Jekuthiel and the murder of an anonymous Jewish statesman by Christians in the forests along the frontier must have reinforced the poet’s awareness of the dangers of exile^[67]. In these poems fear of final destruction mingles with fervent hope for redemption, and a collection of short preludes is marked by intense yearning for the saviour^[67].

The Azharot, his early versified enumeration of the commandments, survives as part of the liturgy; Sefaria’s edition classes it among the liturgical poems and divides it into a prelude, sections on the positive and the negative commandments, and a postscript^[70]. His choice of such a subject as a teenager shows how early he combined poetic ambition with a didactic purpose, as he did again in his verse grammar.

The kingdom’s crown

His most famous poem is the Keter Malkhut, the Royal or Kingdom’s Crown. Cole notes that it has been translated into English at least seven times in the past two centuries, first in 1794 by David Levi, a London hatter with rabbinical training, and that versions exist in German, French, Italian, Dutch, Yiddish, Latin, Persian and Arabic^[53]. It appears in prayer books throughout the Jewish world, where it is read on the Day of Atonement^[53]. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes it as a poem of forty stanzas, whose rhythmical, rhymed simplicity gives it a biblical flavour^[68].

The poem has three parts. Cole describes it as framed by a hymn to the Creator and a concluding confession, with a cosmography based on the Ptolemaic universe in between, ascending from the four elements of the earth through the spheres to the Throne of Glory^[53]. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises it as a celebration of the divine attributes, the last of which is Will, followed by the wonders of creation and a concluding self-analysis of confession, penitence and supplication^[68]. Its cosmological passages, Cole notes, troubled the religious establishment of the time^[53].

The opening hymn is a sequence of affirmations about God. In Israel Zangwill’s translation of 1923, the second section begins: “Thou art One, the first of every number, and the foundation of every structure”^[71]. The ninth turns to divine wisdom and describes God as one who has set apart his purpose “Like a craftsman and an artist / To draw up the films of Being from Nothingness As light is drawn that darteth from the eye”^[71]. The image of creation as light drawn from a source is the poetic counterpart of the doctrine of emanation that Ibn Gabirol set out in his philosophy.

The confession reverses the perspective. After the vast ascent through the spheres, the speaker turns to his own smallness and sin. In Zangwill’s version, the thirty-third section begins, “O God, I am ashamed and confounded To stand before Thee with this my knowledge”^[71]. The thirty-eighth contains the most celebrated paradox of the poem, the resolve to flee from divine judgement into divine mercy: “I will flee from Thee to Thyself, And I will shelter myself from Thy wrath in Thy shadow”^[71].

The scientific content of the poem had critics. Cole notes that Moses ibn Ezra, in his book of poetics, regarded the intrusion of scientific and astronomical matters into the liturgy as more than pure Hebrew could bear, and counselled moderation^[53]. Among the many versions of the Keter Malkhut, he adds, was an Arabic one, found in the manuscript that David Tzemah later rescued in Baghdad^[53].

The form of the poem is neither metrical verse nor plain prose. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on prosody describes it as rhymed prose in which rhyme and rhythm play an important role but are used irregularly, a kind of richly adorned free verse^[51]. Cole identifies the form with the Arabic sajʿ, used in the Qur’an, and suggests that its effect is closer to incantatory free verse than to anything else, a music of the spheres^[53]. He also notes that Ibn Gabirol made clear that he considered it the summit of his work^[53].

The Fountain of Life

Ibn Gabirol’s philosophical masterpiece was written in Arabic and survives complete only in Latin. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that the Arabic original is lost, that the full work is preserved in a medieval Latin translation under the title Fons Vitae, and that a Hebrew translation of extracts by the thirteenth-century scholar Shem Tov ibn Falaquera also survives^[67]. The title comes from Psalm 36:10, which Cole quotes as “For with Thee is the fountain [source] of life”^[53]. The work is a dialogue between a master and a disciple^[66].

Its doctrine is summarised in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ibn Gabirol is known in the history of philosophy for the doctrine that all things, including soul and intellect, are composed of matter and form, which the encyclopaedia calls universal hylomorphism, and for his emphasis on the divine Will^[69]. He was moved above all by the Neoplatonic sense that God’s reality infuses all things, and by the ideal of return, the striving through mind and deed to recover our truest being and likeness to our source^[69]. The same article describes him as a Jewish Neoplatonist who, under the additional influence of ideas attributed to Empedocles, paints a modified Plotinian universe in which all things are rooted in layers of matter and form^[69].

Cole offers a small anthology of passages in translation. One states that matter has no reality apart from its form, and therefore moves towards the reception of form, “to be released from the sorrow of absence to the pleasure of existence”^[53]. Another compares creation, the emanation of form from the Will, to “the upwelling of water flowing from a fountain and descending”^[53]. A third explains the motion of matter as desire and love, since desire and love are nothing but an effort to join the beloved, and matter strives to join form^[53].

The concept of the Will is the most distinctive element of the system. The Stanford Encyclopedia explains that the Fons Vitae names three subjects that the mind must grasp, matter and form, the divine Essence, and the Will, which it describes as an intermediary between the extremes^[69]. Will is the power of God infused in and penetrating all things, the power of unity in the universe, and that which brings forth, moves and sustains all existence^[69]. The texts are not wholly consistent: sometimes Will appears as the creative source of both matter and form, sometimes of form alone, with matter created directly from the divine Essence^[69]. What is constant is that the Will is responsible for the connection between matter and form in everything that exists.

The ethical goal follows from the metaphysics. If all things come from God through the Will, and if the human soul shares the structure of matter and form that pervades the universe, then knowledge is a path of return. Cole’s anthology ends with an exchange in which the disciple asks what fruit the study will bring, and the master answers: “Release from death and adherence to the fountain and source of life”^[53]. The phrase joins the title of the book to the hope of the Keter Malkhut, and shows how closely the philosopher and the poet were related.

The book is remarkable for what it omits. Cole notes that apart from its title it contains not a single reference to Hebrew scripture or Jewish tradition, and that Plato is the only philosopher mentioned by name^[53]. The Jewish Encyclopedia calls Ibn Gabirol the first teacher of Neoplatonism in Europe^[66]. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds that his ethical treatise appears to be an early, perhaps the first, attempt to systematise the basic principles of medieval Jewish ethics independently of religious dogma, ritual or belief^[68].

Avicebron

The Fountain of Life reached Christian Europe through translation. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, it was translated into Latin around 1150 under the patronage of Archbishop Raymond of Toledo by Dominicus Gundisalvi, archdeacon of Segovia, assisted by a converted Jewish physician known as John of Spain or Ibn Daud^[66]. Cole describes the procedure: one translator read the Arabic aloud and rendered it orally into Spanish, and the other translated the spoken Spanish into written Latin^[53].

In Latin the author became Avicebron, a corruption of Ibn Gabirol that passed through forms such as Avencebrol and Avicebrol^[66]. Christian scholastics read him without knowing that he was a Jew. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that for centuries they wrongly took him to be either a Christian defender of Augustine or a Muslim misreader of Aristotle^[69]. Cole records that William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris in the mid-thirteenth century, called the author of Fons Vitae the “most exalted of all the philosophers”, and that the Franciscan Duns Scotus became the work’s leading champion^[53].

The identity of Avicebron was rediscovered in 1846. Cole tells how the French scholar Solomon Munk found among the Hebrew manuscripts of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris the extracts translated by Falaquera, recognised their resemblance to the Latin Fons Vitae, and announced on 12 November of that year that Avicebron was none other than the Jewish poet Solomon ibn Gabirol^[53]. The poet of the synagogue and the philosopher of the schools were the same man.

Among Jews the book had a different fate. Cole suggests that its Neoplatonism, and above all its mediating divine Will, may have seemed too close to the Christian Logos for Jewish comfort, and that this, together with its independence from Jewish dogma, prompted its neglect; its influence was soon eclipsed by the more conservative Aristotelianism of Maimonides^[53]. Ibn Daud, as the Stanford Encyclopedia notes, criticised it as repetitive, wrong-headed and unconvincing^[69]. The ideas survived in other forms, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes elements in his mystical poems that are difficult to reconcile with his philosophy^[67].

Ethics and attributed works

Ibn Gabirol’s ethical treatise, The Improvement of the Moral Qualities, was probably written in 1045^[67]. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that it survives in one Arabic text and four Hebrew versions, and that it treats the impulses of the soul and how they can be trained to virtue^[68]. It belongs, with the Fountain of Life, to the only two works that the Encyclopaedia Judaica regards as certainly his; both were written in Judaeo-Arabic^[67].

Other works are attributed to him with less certainty. The Choice of Pearls, an anthology of ethical and wisdom sayings, is often credited to him, but its authenticity is doubted^[68][67]. Cole dismisses it as a bland gathering, hardly in keeping with the rest of his work^[53]. In one poem Ibn Gabirol boasts of having written twenty books, but only two survive that can be firmly attributed to him^[67]. Later commentators, including Abraham ibn Ezra and David Kimḥi, quote his biblical interpretations, mostly allegorical, but no complete commentary is known^[67].

The date of his death

The end of Ibn Gabirol’s life is as uncertain as much of the rest. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Moses ibn Ezra said he died in Valencia at the age of thirty, while Abraham ibn Daud put his death in 1070, when he would have been about fifty; the most exact date seems to be that given by Ṣāʿid, the year 450 of the Hijra, or 1057–1058, when he was between thirty-six and thirty-eight^[67]. Cole writes that scholars have established the date as 1054, 1058 or 1070, the middle figure being the most probable, and that according to Moses ibn Ezra he died in Valencia, not yet forty^[53]. The Stanford Encyclopedia gives the most likely date as 1057 or 1058 and the place as most likely Valencia^[69]. The Jewish Encyclopedia, which gives about 1058, calls the date of 1070 incorrect and notes that it entered the tradition through the chronicle Yuḥasin and was accepted by many medieval and modern writers, among them Munk and Graetz^[66]. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds that Ṣāʿid, the earliest witness, placed his death around 1058, after he had passed the age of thirty^[68].

Legends gathered around his death. The Jewish Encyclopedia relates a story told in the sixteenth century by Gedaliah ibn Yaḥya, that a Muslim jealous of his poetic gifts killed him and buried him under a fig tree; the tree bore fruit of such extraordinary sweetness that a search was made, his remains were found and the murderer was executed^[66]. Another legend, recorded by the Encyclopaedia Judaica, credited him with making a female golem of wood^[67]. The Stanford Encyclopedia suggests that this story may have grown from his reputation as a man with few companions^[69].

A diwan saved from the fire

His secular poems nearly disappeared. Cole explains that after his death his reputation was attacked by pedants, and that his secular verse, seldom copied, was largely forgotten; while many of his liturgical poems were preserved in prayer books, the others were hard to find^[53]. Nineteenth-century scholars had to assemble his poems from manuscripts in Oxford, Parma, Vienna, St Petersburg and elsewhere^[53]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica names J. L. Dukes, S. D. Luzzatto, S. Sachs and H. Brody among the pioneers of this work^[67].

The decisive discovery came from Iraq. Cole tells the story, from a 1931 letter of the Iraqi Jewish scholar David Tzemah, of a long search for a lost family manuscript that ended in a Baghdad house where a woman was about to use a basket of old papers to heat water for the laundry^[53]. Tzemah wrote that among the papers was the manuscript he had been searching for all those years, and described the moment in his letter as one in which he “beheld both life and death at once”^[53]. The manuscript, copied in the seventeenth century, contained more than four thousand poems, including nearly complete collections of Ibn Gabirol, Moses ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi^[53].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica records the scholarly result. The discovery in the Genizah of an early index of poems by Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Ezra and Halevi had already shown that a collection of his poems once existed, and later a complete diwan was found in manuscript, Schocken 37; Ḥayyim Brody and Ḥayyim Schirmann published a scientific edition of his secular poems in 1974^[67].

The highest reaches

Later poets held Ibn Gabirol in the highest regard. The Encyclopaedia Judaica quotes Judah al-Ḥarizi, writing in the thirteenth century, that “He alone trod the highest reaches of poetry” and that all the poets who followed him learned the use of poetry from him^[67]. Cole notes the hyperbole, and adds that al-Ḥarizi apparently did not know the full extent of Samuel ha-Nagid’s work^[53].

The modern verdict is broader. Ibn Gabirol united in one life the main currents of the Andalusian Jewish achievement: the new Hebrew of the grammarians, the Arabic metres and forms of the poets, the liturgical tradition of the synagogue and the Greek philosophy transmitted through Arabic. He did so as an outsider, without high office, at odds with patrons and townsmen. Cole observes that his religious poems now form part of the regular prayer service in Jewish communities throughout the world, and that a street in Tel Aviv bears his name^[53].

In the nineteenth century his name entered European poetry. Cole recalls Heinrich Heine’s poem on Judah Halevi, written in Paris in the years when German scholars were assembling the first editions of Ibn Gabirol, in which the poet complains that the schoolgirls of Paris know nothing of the Hebrew poets of Spain. In Hal Draper’s translation, Heine imagines asking them about “the trio / Of Jehuda Ben Halevy / And of Solomon Gabirol / And of Moses Ibn Ezra”^[53]. The joke was at the expense of his readers, but it registered a new awareness, among European Jews, of a Spanish Hebrew poetry that the scholarship of the age was then recovering.

The two halves of his legacy travelled separately for eight centuries, the poet in Jewish prayer books and the philosopher, under a Latin name, in Christian schools. Their reunion in the nineteenth century, and the recovery of his secular poems in the twentieth, restored a complete figure who belongs at once to Jewish, Arabic and European intellectual history. In that respect he is the clearest example of what the culture of Sefarad could produce at its height.

9. Baḥya ibn Paquda and Philosophy in al-Andalus

The poets of Córdoba, Granada and Saragossa wrote in Hebrew, but when the Jews of al-Andalus wanted to argue, explain, legislate or teach, they normally wrote in Arabic. Philosophy was one of the fields in which this habit mattered most. The Jewish thinkers of the peninsula read the same Arabic translations of Greek works as their Muslim neighbours, used the same technical vocabulary and asked many of the same questions, and they did so in a language that was, in daily life, their own.

This chapter treats philosophy in al-Andalus as a shared enterprise. It begins with the late arrival of philosophy in the Islamic West and the place of Jewish writers in it, and then turns to the most widely read Jewish book that the period produced, Baḥya ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart. It continues with Joseph ibn Ẓaddik of Córdoba, with a Jewish family of Saragossa whose members moved between Judaism and Islam and between Spain and Egypt, and with the Muslim philosopher Ibn Bājja, known in Latin as Avempace. It closes with the turn towards Aristotle and with the family of translators who carried this Arabic learning into Hebrew after the Jews of al-Andalus had been scattered.

A late and shared beginning

Josep Puig Montada, in his article on Ibn Bājja for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, begins with a judgement that frames the whole subject: “Philosophy in Al-Andalus developed later than in the East; it grew among Muslims and Jews, since both communities were nurtured by a common Arabic”^[72]. The Muslim community was much larger and defined the cultural space, but the two drew on the same body of Arabic translations of Greek scientific and philosophical works.

The early stages, in Puig Montada’s account, are thin. The ideas of al-Kindī, the first philosopher to write in Arabic, may have been known to Ibn Masarra of Córdoba, who died in 931. Material connected with the encyclopaedic Epistles of the Brethren of Purity probably reached al-Andalus by the end of the tenth century, and a scholar from the East, Abū l-Ḥakam ʿAmr al-Kirmānī, who died at Saragossa in 1066, is credited with introducing the Epistles themselves^[72]. Ibn Ḥazm, the great Córdoban jurist and polemicist of the eleventh century, argued against Greek and Arab philosophers whose works he must have read directly or indirectly^[72].

Philosophy in the strict sense, Puig Montada continues, “is first found in Shelomo Ibn Gabirol”, the Málaga-born poet whose Fountain of Life was discussed in the previous chapter^[72]. Ibn Gabirol preceded by more than two generations the first Muslim philosophers of al-Andalus, among them Ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī, who died in 1127, Abū l-Ṣalt of Denia, who died in 1134, and Ibn Bājja himself, who died in 1139^[72]. Puig Montada explains the delay by the peripheral place of philosophy within Islamic intellectual life as a whole. Al-Andalus, he argues, was peripheral geographically but not doctrinally, since it followed Sunni orthodoxy and the Mālikī school of law^[72].

For the historian of Jewish culture the order is striking. In the Islamic West a Jewish poet was the first systematic philosopher, and the Jewish moralist Baḥya ibn Paquda wrote his great work some decades before the Muslim philosophers of Saragossa and Seville. The Jewish and Muslim traditions were not running on separate tracks. They shared the same sources and often the same towns.

Arabic in Hebrew letters

The language of this thought was Judaeo-Arabic. The Encyclopaedia Judaica article on Judaeo-Arabic literature, by Abraham Halkin, defines its subject as Jewish religious writing of all kinds produced under Islam, usually in Arabic but in Hebrew characters, from before Saadia Gaon until after the days of Maimonides and his son Abraham^[73]. The script is the distinctive feature. Apart from some Karaite circles around the year 1000, Halkin notes, “Jews wrote Arabic in Hebrew characters”^[73]. A Jewish reader could follow an Arabic argument on God’s unity in the same alphabet he used for the Bible and the prayer book.

The Jews of the West at first learned from the East. Halkin writes that, just as the Muslims of Spain looked to the East for learning for a time, so in Judaeo-Arabic letters it was Babylonia, Palestine and Egypt that flourished first^[73]. Saadia Gaon, the tenth-century head of the academy of Sura, was the great model. He used reason to support the accepted articles of Jewish faith and was considerably influenced by the rationalist theology of the Muʿtazila, though he did not follow it blindly^[73]. His influence runs through the Spanish writers discussed here.

By the eleventh century the balance had shifted. “Jewish works of importance written in Arabic were far more abundant in Muslim Spain than in the East”, Halkin writes^[73]. The grammarians Judah Ḥayyuj and Jonah ibn Janāḥ, whose work is described in Chapter 5, wrote in Arabic, as did the biblical commentator Moses ibn Gikatilla. Philosophy and ethics followed the same rule. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states the division plainly in its article on Abraham ibn Ezra: “Hebrew was the language of poetry, and Judeo-Arabic was the language of prose”^[20].

Halkin also insists that this was more than a Jewish culture that happened to be written in Arabic. In his words it was rather a Judaeo-Islamic culture, and the writers who used Arabic were influenced by ideas current in Islam^[73]. The point matters for Baḥya, whose book is at once deeply Jewish and saturated with the vocabulary of Muslim piety.

The dayyan of Saragossa

Almost nothing is known of Baḥya’s life. The Encyclopaedia Judaica article by Georges Vajda, the great modern student of his thought, says only that he lived in Muslim Spain, probably at Saragossa, in the second half of the eleventh century^[74]. The Jewish Encyclopedia adds that he bore the title of dayyan, a judge of the rabbinical court, and that nothing else of his life is known^[75]. He was also a liturgical poet. Vajda notes that about twenty piyyutim signed with the name Baḥya are assumed to be his, some of them metered in the new Andalusian manner^[74]. The Jewish Encyclopedia singles out his penitential hymn Bareki Nafshi, which entered the Roman rite and later some modern liturgies for the Day of Atonement^[75].

The date of his great work is disputed. The Jewish Encyclopedia, written at the start of the twentieth century, placed its composition in 1040 and made Baḥya a slightly older contemporary of Ibn Gabirol^[75]. Vajda’s Encyclopaedia Judaica article dates it to around 1080^[74]. The Stanford Encyclopedia article on the influence of Arabic philosophy on Jewish thought gives the period 1050 to 1080^[76]. The later date now prevails, but the exact year cannot be fixed, and the difference matters because it affects whether Baḥya could have known Ibn Gabirol’s philosophy.

The Arabic title of the book was al-Hidāya ilā Farāʾiḍ al-Qulūb, the Guidance to the Duties of the Hearts. The Arabic text was edited by Abraham Shalom Yahuda in 1912^[74]. It became famous in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation of 1161, Ḥovot ha-Levavot, the title by which the book has been known ever since^[74].

Duties of the limbs and of the heart

The book rests on a single distinction. Baḥya divides the obligations of a religious person into duties of the limbs, which involve outward actions, and duties of the heart, which involve the inner life^[74]. The first class includes the ritual and ethical observances of the Torah, such as keeping the Sabbath, prayer and charity. The second includes beliefs, such as faith in the existence and unity of God, and inner dispositions, such as trust in God, love and fear of Him and repentance. Vajda notes that the biblical prohibitions against bearing a grudge and taking revenge also belong to the second class, because they concern attitudes rather than deeds^[74].

In the introduction Baḥya explains why he wrote. He had studied the works of his predecessors and found that they dealt fully with the outward commandments. In the English translation by Yosef Sebag, published on Sefaria, he writes that he looked for a book devoted to the inner wisdom and “found that this wisdom, which is the duties of the heart, had been entirely neglected”^[77]. He asked himself whether the inner duties might be merely optional, and he tested the question by reason, Scripture and tradition before concluding that they are the foundation of all the commandments^[77].

The argument from reason is simple. A human being consists of body and soul, one visible and one invisible, and so owes the Creator both visible and invisible service. Outward service includes prayer, fasting, charity, the study of the Torah and the ritual commandments. Inward service includes acknowledging God’s unity, trusting Him, loving Him and reflecting on His benefits^[77]. Baḥya then reverses the usual order of priority. Since outward acts cannot be complete without the consent of the soul, he argues that a system of the duties of the heart should come first, because “the hinge and pillar of all deeds rests on the foundation of intention and hidden sentiment of the heart”^[77].

He was aware of the language in which he was writing. In the same introduction he describes his hesitation at the size of the task and his doubts about his mastery of Arabic, the language the book would need, because it was “the easiest language for most of my contemporaries to grasp”^[77]. The remark confirms Halkin’s picture. For an eleventh-century Jewish moralist in Saragossa, Arabic was the natural language of a book addressed to ordinary educated readers, and Hebrew was reserved for Scripture, liturgy and verse.

Ten gates

The book is divided into ten treatises, which the Hebrew tradition calls gates. Vajda lists their subjects: the affirmation of God’s unity, the examination of the world as a disclosure of God’s wisdom, divine service, trust in God, sincerity of purpose, humility, repentance, self-examination, abstinence and the love of God^[74]. Baḥya himself explains in his introduction that he built the work on ten principles covering all the duties of the heart, and gave each its own part^[77].

The sequence forms an ascent. The first treatise establishes the existence and unity of God by rational argument, using the reasoning of kalām, the dialectical theology of the Muslim schools^[73]. Halkin observes that this first chapter gives a brief summary of a theological position derived from Saadia, but that the proofs were not Baḥya’s main concern. They were only the first requirement of the right attitude towards God^[73]. The second treatise studies the order of the universe and the structure of the human being, the microcosm, and leads to gratitude towards the Creator. The third presents worship as the expression of that gratitude^[74].

The middle treatises describe the virtues of the inner life. Trust in God, Vajda explains, does not mean neglecting one’s work and leaving everything to Him. It means carrying out one’s duties conscientiously while trusting that God will remove the obstacles to their fulfilment^[74]. Sincerity requires a perfect correspondence between conscience and behaviour. On abstinence Baḥya took a moderate view. Vajda writes that he regarded total withdrawal from society as an ideal rarely attained in the biblical past and hardly to be recommended in the present, and that he defined the true ascetic as a person who directs all his actions to God’s service while continuing to fulfil his place in society^[74].

The last treatise, on the love of God, describes the soul’s longing for union with the divine light. Vajda calls the idea distinctly mystical in character, but adds that Baḥya did not develop it in all its implications and cannot be called a mystic in the strict sense^[74]. The book remained a guide to the inner life within the framework of Jewish law.

Its success was immense. Halkin judges that, “Of all the religious literature produced in the Islamic world, his work was probably the best known and most widely studied among Jews”^[73]. The Jewish Encyclopedia records that parts of it were read for devotional purposes during the penitential days^[75]. Vajda lists later translations into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Yiddish, as well as several Hebrew abridgements, and notes the strong influence of the Hebrew version on later Jewish pietistic literature^[74].

Borrowed frames

Baḥya was open about learning from non-Jewish writers. Vajda writes that he drew a great deal on non-Jewish sources, borrowing from Muslim mysticism, from Arabic Neoplatonism and perhaps from the Hermetic writings. From Muslim authors he took the basic structure of the book, as well as definitions, aphorisms and illustrative examples^[74]. The ascending stages of the inner life follow the pattern of Muslim works of mystical piety, which lead the reader through successive stations towards perfection^[74].

The direct sources are hard to identify. Vajda considered the old theory that Baḥya depended on al-Ghazālī to be ill-founded^[74]. The Stanford Encyclopedia article notes that Vajda also found possible agreements with the cosmology of the Brethren of Purity in the second treatise, though not proof of direct use^[76]. The same article records a first trace in Baḥya of the doctrine of the five internal senses, which he may have taken from an Arabic compendium inspired by Avicenna^[76].

None of this made the book less Jewish. Vajda insists that, despite its liberal borrowing, the Ḥovot ha-Levavot remains an essentially Jewish book^[74]. Its proofs come from the Bible and the rabbis, its examples from Jewish life, and its aim is the right performance of the commandments. Halkin puts the balance in a different way. He suggests that the book, though written about Judaism for Jews and full of biblical and talmudic quotations, belongs to the sphere of religion in general, which is why Baḥya did not hesitate to adduce proofs from outside sources^[73].

A second Arabic treatise, on the nature of the soul, was long attributed to Baḥya. Vajda states that it has been definitely established that he did not write it, and modern scholars refer to its anonymous author as Pseudo-Baḥya^[74]. Halkin describes the work as tracing the soul from its separation from its source to its eventual return, with an account of emanation and creation along the way^[73].

The Microcosm of Córdoba

In the generation after Baḥya, the most explicitly philosophical Jewish writer in al-Andalus was Joseph ibn Ẓaddik, a rabbinical judge of Córdoba who died in 1149^[76]. His Arabic book on the microcosm is lost, but an anonymous medieval Hebrew translation survives under the title Olam Katan, and it has been edited and translated into English^[76]. Halkin describes it as a short guide to self-knowledge as the way to knowledge of the world, its Maker, the soul and the ethical life. He also judges it unoriginal, following Neoplatonism in its psychology, Aristotelianism in its physics and kalām in its proofs of God’s existence^[73].

The Stanford Encyclopedia article identifies the book as one of the first two Jewish works, both written around 1130, with sure traces of the doctrines of the Brethren of Purity. The other is the Treatise of the Garden by Moses ibn Ezra, discussed in the next chapter^[76]. Ibn Ẓaddik’s reputation suffered later from a sharp remark by Maimonides. In a letter to his translator Samuel ibn Tibbon, Maimonides wrote: “I have not read Joseph Ibn Zaddiq’s Microcosm, but I know the author, his value and the value of his book: surely he follows the ideas of the Brethren of Purity”^[76]. Sarah Stroumsa, the article notes, reads the comment as a substantial criticism of Ibn Ẓaddik’s philosophical views^[76].

Ibn Ẓaddik was also a poet, and he belonged to the same circle as the great poets of the age. Peter Cole’s anthology includes a teasing wedding poem that Ibn Ẓaddik, the dayyan of Córdoba, sent to the newly married Abraham ibn Ezra^[52]. Judah Halevi addressed poems of praise to him^[78]. The line between philosopher, judge and poet was not sharply drawn in this society.

The Banū Ḥasday and Avempace

The most revealing case of a shared philosophical culture comes from Saragossa. Sarah Stroumsa has traced the descendants of Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut, the Córdoban courtier of Chapter 4, through several generations^[48]. His grandson, Abū l-Faḍl Ḥasday, served the Hūdid kings of Saragossa, al-Muqtadir, al-Muʾtaman and al-Mustaʿīn. Stroumsa describes him as thoroughly trained in philosophy and accomplished as a poet in both Hebrew and Arabic^[48]. The historian Ṣāʿid of Toledo, who knew him, described him as “of the city of Saragossa and of the Jewish nobility in al-Andalus”, and credited him with being the first to read Aristotle’s Physics and On the Heavens in al-Andalus^[72].

Abū l-Faḍl also converted to Islam, or was believed to have done so. Stroumsa’s study weighs the anecdotes told about him by the Arabic writer Ibn Bassām. In one, a rival vizier saw him reading a book at the court of al-Muqtadir after his conversion and asked mockingly whether it was the Torah. Abū l-Faḍl answered that it was, and added a jibe at his rival’s humble ancestry^[48]. Some historians read such stories as allusions to his Jewish origins; Eliyahu Ashtor took them as evidence that he was still a Jew. Stroumsa’s conclusion is that the family shows more nuance and ambivalence than the word conversion normally suggests^[48].

Abū l-Faḍl’s grandson, Abū Jaʿfar Yūsuf ibn Ḥasday, emigrated to Egypt. There, according to Stroumsa, he was asked by al-Maʾmūn al-Baṭāʾiḥī, vizier to the Fatimid caliph al-Āmir, to write commentaries on Hippocrates and Galen^[48]. From Egypt he kept up a close correspondence with a Muslim friend in Saragossa, the philosopher Ibn Bājja^[48]. Puig Montada notes that one of Ibn Bājja’s surviving letters is addressed to him, and that in it Ibn Bājja describes his own order of study, beginning with the mathematical sciences, music and astronomy^[72].

Ibn Bājja’s own career reflects the turbulence of the time. Puig Montada places his birth in Saragossa some years before 1085 and his service at the court of the last Hūdid kings. After the Almoravids took the city in 1110, he served as vizier to an Almoravid governor of the province, and after Alfonso I of Aragon conquered Saragossa in 1118 he moved south. He spent years in the Almoravid service in al-Andalus and the Maghrib, and he died at Fez in 1139^[72]. Maimonides later held him in the highest regard, writing that “he was a great and wise philosopher, and all his works are right and correct”^[76]. The Stanford Encyclopedia article on Jewish thought adds that Judah Halevi, Ibn Bājja’s countryman and contemporary, drew on his Epistle on the Conjunction of the Intellect with Man when he summarised the views of the philosopher at the start of the Kuzari^[76].

Toward Aristotle

Andalusian Jewish thought in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries was largely Neoplatonic. Halkin writes that, apart from Baḥya’s use of the theology of Saadia, the great Spanish Jewish thinkers worked under the influence of Plato, Aristotle or a combination of the latter with Neoplatonism, and that Ibn Gabirol was drawn to the views of Ibn Masarra^[73]. Moses ibn Ezra’s philosophical essay, Abraham ibn Ezra’s scattered remarks and Ibn Ẓaddik’s Microcosm all belong to this world of emanation, the soul’s descent and the soul’s return.

Two developments of the twelfth century changed the direction. The first was Judah Halevi’s critique of philosophy in the Kuzari, discussed in Chapter 11, which rejected the claim that reason alone could reach the truths of revelation. The second was the arrival of a fuller Aristotelianism. Abraham ibn Daud of Toledo, whose chronicle of the Spanish rabbinate is cited earlier in this essay, wrote The Exalted Faith around 1160. Resianne Fontaine and Amira Eran describe it in the Stanford Encyclopedia as the first systematic attempt to integrate Aristotelianism into Jewish thought^[13].

Ibn Daud explained his purpose in terms of a problem that his contemporaries felt sharply. Those who had begun to study philosophy, he wrote, could not keep the lamps of philosophy and religion burning together, “for if the lamp of philosophy is kindled, the lamp of religion goes out”^[13]. His book was meant to show that the two could shine together. Fontaine and Eran note that it was soon superseded by Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, which had much in common with it^[13]. Maimonides, a native of Córdoba, was the last and greatest product of this Andalusian philosophical culture, but his career belongs to Egypt and is treated in a separate essay on this site.

The greatest Muslim philosopher of al-Andalus, Ibn Rushd, known in Latin as Averroes, was Maimonides’ older contemporary. His later influence on Jewish thought was enormous. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia article, almost all his philosophical works were translated from Arabic into Hebrew between 1230 and 1330, and some survive only in those translations^[76]. That chapter of the story lies beyond the period considered here, but it grew from the same shared Andalusian soil.

Into Hebrew

The Arabic learning of al-Andalus might have stayed inside the Arabic-reading world if the Almohad conquest had not driven many of its bearers north. The family that did most to carry it into Hebrew was the Ibn Tibbon family. Its founder, Judah ibn Tibbon, was born in Granada about 1120 and left in 1150 because of the Almohad persecution. He settled at Lunel in Provence, where he practised medicine^[79].

Judah ibn Tibbon’s translations created much of the Hebrew vocabulary of medieval Jewish philosophy. R. Krinsky, in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, credits the family with making works previously inaccessible available to Jews who did not read Arabic, and with establishing Hebrew as a vehicle for scientific expression by enriching it with new words and an appropriate style^[79]. Judah’s own list included Baḥya’s Duties of the Heart, Ibn Gabirol’s ethical treatise, Halevi’s Kuzari, Saadia’s Beliefs and Opinions and the grammar and dictionary of Ibn Janāḥ^[79]. In the preface to the Duties of the Heart he expressed doubts about his own Hebrew, excused his invention of new words and argued for a literal rendering^[79].

His son Samuel ibn Tibbon translated Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed into Hebrew and corresponded with its author about difficult passages^[79]. Later members of the family translated Euclid, al-Fārābī, Avicenna and Averroes^[79]. Through their work, the Judaeo-Arabic books of al-Andalus became Hebrew classics for readers in Provence, Italy and northern Europe who knew no Arabic.

Baḥya’s book followed that path. Written for Arabic-speaking Jews in an eleventh-century taifa kingdom, it reached most of its readers in Hebrew, and it is still printed, studied and translated. In this it mirrors the history of Andalusian Jewish culture as a whole. The poets, grammarians and philosophers of al-Andalus thought in Arabic and prayed in Hebrew, and the survival of much of their thought came to depend on translators working far from the cities in which it had been written.

10. Moses ibn Ezra and the Art of Poetry

Moses ibn Ezra was the poet of a vanished world. Born into one of the leading Jewish families of Granada in the generation after Samuel ha-Nagid, he grew up among courtiers, scholars and poets, and he spent most of his long life as an exile in the Christian north, longing for the city he had lost. He wrote love poems, wine songs, elegies, meditations on death and some of the most admired penitential poems in the Hebrew liturgy. In old age he also wrote the only medieval treatise on Hebrew poetry that describes the Andalusian school from within.

Raymond Scheindlin, his most careful modern interpreter, opens his account in The Literature of Al-Andalus with a comparison: “Of all the Arabized poets of the Hebrew Golden Age in al-Andalus, Moses (Abū Hārān) Ibn Ezra is the one whose poetry most resembles that of an Arabic poet”^[80]. Yet his career, Scheindlin adds, was more varied than that of most Arabic poets, and the interplay of Arabic and Jewish elements in his life was so fully developed as to make him “a model case of an Andalusian Jewish intellectual”^[80]. This chapter follows that life through the catastrophe of 1090 and the long exile that followed, and then considers his poetics, his philosophy and his poetry.

A Granadan family

Moses ben Jacob ibn Ezra, known in Arabic as Abū Hārūn, was born in Granada about 1055^[55]. Scheindlin describes the family as distinguished. Several of its members, like Samuel and Joseph ibn Naghrela in the previous generation, served the Zirid kings Ḥabbūs and Bādīs, and Moses’ elder brother Isaac, known as Abū Ibrāhīm, seems to have married one of the Nagid’s daughters^[80]. The family therefore belonged to the circle of courtier-rabbis whose rise and fall is described in Chapters 6 and 7. Moses was about eleven years old when the massacre of 1066 struck the Jews of Granada and ended the career of Joseph ibn Naghrela. The family survived it, and the community recovered enough for the Ibn Ezra brothers to hold positions of honour in the following decades.

Scheindlin stresses that his life is known only in outline^[80]. Most of what we know comes from his own poems and from the few remarks about himself in his prose works. The Arabic honorific attached to his name, noted in Chapter 7, implies that he held a position of some standing in the province of Granada^[55]. What the office meant in practice is not known.

Lucena and the schooling of a courtier

Like many young men of his class, Moses was sent to Lucena. Scheindlin describes its academy as the training ground for many of the courtier-rabbis of al-Andalus. It was headed at the time by Isaac ibn Ghayyat, the leading rabbinic authority of al-Andalus and the foremost liturgical poet of his generation^[80]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica adds that Lucena was known as the city of poetry, and that in his youth Moses acquired a very comprehensive Jewish and Arabic education^[55]. The Museo Sefardí in Toledo likewise describes a bilingual education in a cultivated setting, combining traditional Jewish learning under Ibn Ghayyat with Arabic culture^[81].

The combination mattered. A courtier in a taifa kingdom needed to write Arabic prose in the high style, to know the Arabic poets and the rules of their metres, and to be at home in the sciences and philosophy that circulated in Arabic. A Jewish communal leader needed the Bible, the Talmud and the liturgy. Ibn Ezra’s later work shows both kinds of learning at every turn. His treatise on poetry quotes the Bible and the Arabic critics side by side, and his liturgical poems borrow the imagery of Arabic love poetry, as later sections of this chapter show.

The young poet of Granada

The poems of Ibn Ezra’s youth belong to the world of the Andalusian banquet. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that poems in celebration of life, on love, wine and nature, belong mostly to his early poetry^[55]. Many of them form part of his Sefer ha-ʿAnak, the Book of the Necklace, also called Tarshish because the Hebrew letters of that word have the numerical value of its 1,210 verses. The Museo Sefardí likewise describes the Book of the Necklace as a youthful work of songs on wine, love and gardens^[81].

The Book of the Necklace was a technical feat. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that its poems end in homonymic rhyme, in which the same word recurs at the end of different lines with a new meaning each time, a style known in Arabic as tajnīs. The poems are the first of their kind in Hebrew literature, and the work served as a model for later medieval poets^[55]. It is divided into ten chapters, and besides love and wine its themes include rural life, betrayal in friendship, old age, the turns of fortune, death, trust in God and the beauty of poetry^[55].

Ibn Ezra’s secular poetry, in the judgement of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, is the most sensual in the Spanish Hebrew school, and it continues the tradition of Samuel ha-Nagid, one of his favourite poets^[55]. Peter Cole describes one of his girdle poems as among the more explicit depictions of physical love in medieval Hebrew poetry, and notes that scholars disagree about its tone and meaning^[52]. The garden poem that opens Haim Brody’s standard edition of the secular poems, Cole notes, uses the Arabic rhetorical figure of the boast, fakhr, in a particularly gentle manner^[52]. Another early poem, written to describe a meadow where violets grew, takes its title in Cole’s translation from the image of flowers weak with wine^[52].

Cole’s notes to these poems recover the material world behind them. Ink and paper, he observes, were sometimes scented, especially for poems sent to friends, and Scripture itself associates sweetness and scent with what is written^[52]. In a wine poem known in English as A Shadow, the poet’s tears take the place of the water with which wine was usually mixed to reduce its strength^[52]. In Bring Me My Cup modern editors have not agreed whether the thing that changes colour is the setting sun or the cup into which the wine is poured, and Cole records that Brody gave both readings in different places, while Schirmann preferred the sun^[52]. Of the explicit girdle poem mentioned above, Cole reports Scheindlin’s suggestion that it treats philosophical notions about an ideal, Platonic plane of pleasure in a frivolous way, while Schirmann read the poem as quite explicit about the pleasures of love^[52]. The secular poems were court entertainment, but they assumed an audience that knew Scripture, philosophy and the Arabic poets.

The Almoravid conquest of 1090

The world of these poems ended in 1090. The Almoravids, a confederation of Berber tribes from the Moroccan Sahara, had built an empire in the Maghreb in the second half of the eleventh century, and toward its end they extended their rule into al-Andalus, where they temporarily held back the Castilian advance^[82]. Cole describes how, in 1090, the invasion of the Almoravids disrupted both the Islamic and the Hebrew courtier cultures of the taifa states^[47].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica, in its article on Moses ibn Ezra, states that Granada was captured by the Almoravids, that its Jewish community was destroyed and that the members of the Ibn Ezra family were dispersed^[55]. Its separate article on the Almoravids, by Michael Laskier, takes a different view. It describes the position of the Jews under Almoravid rule as apparently free of major abuses, and contrasts it with the persecution under the later Almohads^[82]. The two articles are not easily reconciled. The likeliest reading is that the conquest destroyed the courtier class of Granada, to which the Ibn Ezras belonged, without amounting to a general persecution of the Jews of al-Andalus. For Moses ibn Ezra the distinction made little difference. His world was gone.

A mysterious departure

What happened next is obscure. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that it is not known why Ibn Ezra remained in Granada for some time after the conquest, and that he succeeded only after much effort and suffering in escaping to Christian Spain. He was never allowed to return to his native city, for which he longed for the rest of his life^[55]. Cole speaks of the poet’s forced and mysterious departure from Granada and his emigration to the far less cultured north^[52].

His later poems allude to a family quarrel. The Encyclopaedia Judaica reports that, according to the poet’s own rather vague references, the misfortunes of his later years were caused by his niece, the daughter of his eldest brother Isaac, though this interpretation has been disputed^[55]. Older scholarship built a romance on these hints, in which the poet loved his niece and was refused her hand. The evidence for it is thin. The same article records other disappointments: his brother Joseph deserted him when he was in trouble, and his own children forsook him^[55].

One poem suggests that he was imprisoned. Its heading, in Cole’s translation, reads: “And he said when he was brought by the enemies’ guile to a cliff on the highest mountain in Castile”^[52]. Cole notes that it is not clear why Ibn Ezra would have been imprisoned, but that it may have had something to do with his association with the former rulers of Granada^[52]. In the poem the speaker is alone on the heights, shepherding the stars, an Arabic motif that expresses both his solitude and his longing for friends far away^[52].

Exile in the Christian north

Ibn Ezra spent the rest of his life in the Christian kingdoms of the north. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes him wandering through Christian Spain, unable to adapt either to the manners of its Jewish population or to what he regarded as their low cultural standard. He was obliged to seek the support of generous patrons and to praise them in return^[55]. The Museo Sefardí notes that in exile he wrote more personal and tormented works^[81].

The exile poems are among his best. Cole groups several of them, among them The Dove, Why Does Time Hound Me So and If You See Me, as poems clearly written after the departure from Granada^[52]. One complains, in Cole’s literal gloss, that the poet dwells among boors^[52]. Another was written, according to its heading, when he heard a dove cooing on a branch. Cole cites the historian Yosef Haim Yerushalmi on the nostalgia these poems express “for the lost paradise of his beloved Granada”, and on a hope of return as intense as the longing for Zion in his liturgical poems^[52].

Scheindlin makes the same point in a sharper form. In the north, as Cole quotes him, the poet “diverts the language of Jewish aspiration for national restoration to his personal longing for al-Andalus, the home of the Judeo-Arab synthesis”^[52]. The language of the exile from Jerusalem, in other words, became the language of exile from Granada. Ibn Ezra did not mourn the Temple less, but in these poems the lost Jerusalem and the lost Andalusian city merge. Even the landscape of the north offered little consolation. Cole notes, following Elitzur, that the untamed natural landscape held little fascination for the poets of Muslim Spain, whose poems of description usually concern a mixture of the natural and the cultivated, the garden rather than the wilderness^[52]. In the poem written on the Castilian mountain, the wild heights express only the poet’s isolation^[52].

The friendship with Judah Halevi

The brightest episode of these years was a friendship. As Chapter 7 noted, the Encyclopaedia Judaica credits Ibn Ezra with encouraging the young Judah Halevi, bringing him to Granada and supporting him there, and the two became lifelong friends^[55]. The article on Halevi tells the story in more detail. The young poet from the north passed through Córdoba and Lucena on his way to Granada, and probably in one of these places he took part in a poetry contest in the Arabic manner. He won by imitating a complicated poem of Moses ibn Ezra, who then invited him to his home^[78].

The chronology of this meeting is disputed. If Halevi was born before 1075, as the Encyclopaedia Judaica holds, the meeting could have taken place in Granada before the conquest of 1090. Cole notes that Yosef Yahalom proposes a different sequence. In his view Halevi was born at Toledo about 1085 and never met Ibn Ezra in Granada. The older poet was already on the move, and the two met at Estrella, near the north-east coast of the peninsula, after which Halevi went on to Granada alone^[52]. The next chapter returns to the question from Halevi’s side.

Whatever its date, the friendship lasted. The two poets exchanged poems, and the deaths of Moses ibn Ezra and his brother Joseph drew from Halevi a lament of strong personal feeling^[78]. Halevi was the younger man and outlived his friend, but he would soon leave Spain himself.

The Book of Discussion and Remembrance

In old age Ibn Ezra wrote the work for which historians are most indebted to him. The Kitāb al-muḥāḍara wa-l-mudhākara, the Book of Discussion and Remembrance, is a treatise on rhetoric and poetry in Judaeo-Arabic. The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls it one of the earliest works on Hebrew poetics and unique in medieval Hebrew literature. It was written after 1135, in answer to eight questions on Hebrew poetry put to him by a friend, and is therefore divided into eight chapters^[55]. Only a small part of the Arabic original was published in 1895. A Hebrew translation by B. Z. Halper appeared in 1924, and Abraham Halkin published the Arabic text with a Hebrew translation in 1975^[55].

Much of the book, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, is a general discussion of poetry, its essence, its nature and its value^[55]. Its framework is borrowed from Arabic criticism, but its subject is the Hebrew poetry of al-Andalus and the poets who wrote it. It is written in the informal style of Arabic adab, the literature of the cultivated gentleman, and it moves easily between anecdote, quotation and judgement^[55]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls it a valuable historical source for Spanish Hebrew poetry and for biographical details of individual authors, and notes that it also tries to establish a relationship between the poet and his environment^[55]. Several of the facts about Ibn Gabirol cited in Chapter 8 come from this book.

The treatise also contains advice on translation. Cole quotes it in his introduction. If you plan to bring a matter from Arabic into Hebrew, Ibn Ezra writes, “grasp the spirit and intention of the work, but do not transpose it word for word, for not all languages are alike”^[47]. If the result does not turn out as hoped, he adds, it is better to abandon it altogether, since silence is sometimes better than speech^[47]. Cole notes that elsewhere in the book Ibn Ezra stresses the primacy of hearing among the senses and the importance of the musical and aural qualities of poetry^[47].

Poetic ornaments

The last chapter of the treatise, about half of the whole work, is a close study of what Ibn Ezra called poetic ornaments, the rhetorical figures and metaphorical language with which a poet embellishes his content^[55]. Here he follows the definitions, linguistic rules and metrical laws set down by scholars of Arabic literature, which provided his categories^[55].

His examples, however, are often biblical. The Encyclopaedia Judaica points out that by taking many of his examples of ornaments and metaphor from the Bible, Ibn Ezra showed an appreciation of its literary charm and beauty, a field neglected until modern times^[55]. The argument had an apologetic edge. If the rhetorical figures that Arabic critics admired in the Qurʾān and in Arabic poetry could be found in the Hebrew Bible, then Hebrew was not inferior to Arabic as a literary language.

He practised what he taught. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he observed the rules of prosody with great precision, and that some of his poems are models of metrical perfection. The later poet Judah al-Ḥarizi bore witness to this when he wrote, in the encyclopaedia’s translation, “and the verse of R. Moses ibn Ezra appeals more than any other poetry to poets because of the rhetoric”^[55]. The same article observes that his desire for perfect form and ornamented language sometimes restricts the free flow of poetic expression, especially in his secular poems, but that a considerable number of poems are perfect in every respect^[55].

The treatise of the garden

Ibn Ezra also wrote a philosophical work in Arabic, known in short as the Treatise of the Garden, al-Maqāla bi-l-ḥadīqa. A small part of it circulated in an anonymous Hebrew translation as ʿArugat ha-Bosem, the Bed of Spices^[55]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica judges his philosophical attainments minor beside his achievements as a poet and critic, and notes that his views are presented unsystematically and are difficult to reconstruct in detail^[55].

The treatise deals with the place of man in the universe, the unknowability of God and the intellect. Its orientation is Neoplatonic, and it cites Ibn Gabirol’s Fountain of Life^[55]. Ibn Ezra uses many quotations, often wrongly attributed to Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle or Hermes, whom he identifies with Enoch^[55]. His conception of man as a microcosm, which he shared with Joseph ibn Ṣaddiq and other Andalusian thinkers discussed in Chapter 9, is typical of this approach.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica summarises his argument. The perfection of man’s creation points to a wise Creator. Because God is absolutely one, His essence cannot be comprehended by the human mind and can be described only by metaphor. As the eye cannot look at the sun in its brilliance, so the mind cannot grasp God in His perfection. Whatever knowledge of God a person can attain begins with knowledge of his own soul, which is possible only after freeing himself from the senses and the appetites^[55]. The rational soul, Ibn Ezra wrote, is like a horseman and the body like his weapon. As the horseman attends to his weapon, so the soul attends to the body^[55].

Ha-Sallaḥ, the penitential poet

Among Ibn Ezra’s liturgical poems the penitential prayers, seliḥot, are the most impressive. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that early scholars probably regarded them as the most consummate expression of his talent and called him Ha-Sallaḥ, the writer of seliḥot^[55]. Cole adds that his collected liturgical works contain a great many such poems for the period leading up to the New Year and the Day of Atonement^[52].

Their form is elaborate. Most of them, the Encyclopaedia Judaica explains, show intricate variation in their strophic structure, and their rhymes and rhythms show a highly developed musical sense^[55]. Their content is introspective. Ibn Ezra calls on his listener to look at himself, at the absurdity of life, the emptiness of worldly ambition, the disenchantment that awaits the pleasure-seeker and the inevitability of divine judgement. Hope lies in penitence and contrition^[55].

His most popular liturgical poem, Cole notes, is a neʿilah, a prelude to the solemn closing service near sunset on the Day of Atonement, which marks the annual closing of the gates of heaven to prayers for repentance. It is found in many prayer books, though its author was not always identified^[52]. Because its opening lines were recited as a refrain after each stanza, its editor also called it a pizmon^[52]. Some of his liturgical poems have a national theme as well. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he condemned those who read the biblical prophecies of redemption as mere spiritual symbols, or explained them rationally, or doubted the miracles that would accompany the redemption^[55].

The gazelle and the congregation

Ibn Ezra’s religious poetry draws freely on his secular verse. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes traces of ideas, images and idioms from the secular poems, themselves directly influenced by Arabic literature, and judges that the Jewish religious and Arabic secular elements are very effectively interwoven^[55]. Cole writes that even more than Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Ezra was known for incorporating the strategies and images of secular Hebrew and Arabic poetry into his poetry for the synagogue^[52].

One poem shows how thin the border could be. Known in Cole’s translation as The Gazelle’s Sigh, it has long been treated as an ahavah, a liturgical poem for the part of the service that speaks of God’s love for Israel. Cole reports Ezra Fleischer’s observation that it appears in many manuscripts of the secular diwan, appears in no prayer book and carries no acrostic or other liturgical marker. It is in fact a secular poem that gives an Arabic motif a Jewish allegorical meaning^[52]. The motif is the atlāl, the abandoned campsite of the beloved over which the lover weeps at the start of the classical Arabic ode. In Ibn Ezra’s poem the abandoned dwelling is the Land of Israel, the gazelle is the congregation of Israel and her bridegroom is God^[52].

In another poem, an ahavah signed with his name in acrostic, the scene again begins like a secular love poem, and only the last two lines reveal a loyalty quite foreign to the conventions of the love lyric. Cole, following Scheindlin, describes this attitude as tawakkul, complete trust or even surrender, usually associated with individual piety but here applied to the whole people of Israel^[52].

Poems of old age and loss

The Encyclopaedia Judaica considers that Ibn Ezra’s poetic power found its greatest expression in his reflective poetry, his meditations on life and death, which continue the tradition of Samuel ha-Nagid. He was original neither in thought nor in approach, the article continues, but he holds and moves the reader by the honesty of his emotions and the vigour of his style^[55]. His poems on the vanity of the world and on the feelings aroused at the sight of a cemetery blend direct expression with analysis and moral teaching^[55].

Several of these poems are known in English through Cole’s translations. In Ancient Graves and Ivory Palaces the poet asks where the builders and the inhabitants of great houses have gone^[52]. In Let Man Remember, as Cole reports the scholar Elitzur’s reading, each pair of lines is loaded with antitheses, so that every good thing is made equal to its opposite and life itself appears as a gradual death^[52]. Another poem, headed in Cole’s translation as written while consoling himself as he turned toward asceticism, is described by Scheindlin as a poem of old age that presents a kind of spiritual autobiography^[52].

Personal grief entered these poems as well. Cole translates part of a series of eight short poems that Ibn Ezra wrote on the death of his young son Yaʿaqov^[52]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that much of his poetry bears a note of personal grief, and that his loneliness in the exile of Edom and his longing for his native city are sometimes expressed with warmth and great simplicity^[55]. Even in this period, however, he continued to celebrate the joys of life. The same article points to the exquisite verse on banquets and romance in the introduction to the poems of his old age, written when the poet was bitter and dejected, as evidence that his mood did not undermine his mastery^[55].

Epigrams and small things

Not all of Ibn Ezra’s poems are long or solemn. Cole’s selection includes a number of short pieces in which a single image carries the whole poem. One describes a pen, whose paper, in Cole’s gloss, seems to suck at it out of thirst^[52]. Another, on a miserly host’s garden, plays on the festive language of the Bible, and a third is a brief lament on blindness that ends with a talmudic sage’s answer to the question of how he had reached a good old age^[52].

A poem known in English as The World takes its central image from Kalīla wa-Dimna, the Arabic book of animal fables, and the same image appears in a medieval collection of maxims, the Choice of Pearls^[52]. Cole notes that the poem carries the somewhat heretical suggestion that God built the instinct for transgression into human beings from the start, a thought that Ibn Gabirol also put forward in one of his poems^[52]. Such poems show the range of reading behind Ibn Ezra’s work, from the Bible and the Talmud to Arabic fables and wisdom literature.

The compunctious poet

Ross Brann’s study The Compunctious Poet takes its title from a feeling that Ibn Ezra expressed more often than any of his contemporaries. Brann examines what Cornell University’s description of the book calls a major theme of medieval Hebrew poetry: the unease of poets writing secular verse at odds with what they held sacred^[83]. He sees this unease both as a key to the literary history of the period and as an emblem of the cultural ambiguity peculiar to Andalusian Jewish society^[83].

Ibn Ezra embodies that ambiguity. He wrote wine songs and penitential prayers, sometimes in the same metres and with the same images. He defended Hebrew against the claims of Arabic using the categories of Arabic criticism. He mourned his exile from Granada in the language of exile from Zion. He drew his philosophy from Neoplatonic sources and his rhetoric from Arabic critics, and he used both to praise the Hebrew Bible. The tension was not a sign of failure. It was the condition under which the Hebrew poetry of al-Andalus was written.

Nobody knows exactly when he died. The Encyclopaedia Judaica places his death after 1135^[55], and the Museo Sefardí gives 1138 with a query^[81]. He died far from his native city^[55]. His friend Judah Halevi, who mourned him, would soon leave Spain altogether.

An enduring voice

His poems survived in manuscript and in the prayer books of many rites. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that his secular diwan, girdle poems and letters were published in a critical edition by Haim Brody in two volumes between 1935 and 1942, and that Brody and Solis Cohen published a selection with English translations in 1934^[55]. Many of his liturgical poems are scattered through the prayer books of the different Jewish rites, and an incomplete edition of 237 of them appeared in 1957^[55].

Modern critics place him in the first rank. Cole names him, with Samuel ha-Nagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol and Judah Halevi, among the four giants of Hebrew verse in Spain, and he dates the disruption of the courtier culture that formed them to the Almoravid invasion of 1090^[47]. Of the four, Ibn Ezra was the one who lived longest after that disruption, and the one whose poetry records it most directly. The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls him one of the most prolific poets of the Spanish school, whose mastery of the language is attested by the beauty and versatility of both his secular and his sacred verse^[55].

For the historian he has another value. He was the last major Hebrew poet to be formed entirely in the courts of the taifa kingdoms, and the first to spend most of his career in the Christian north. His treatise on poetics records the Andalusian school as it saw itself at the moment of its dispersal. His life connects the generation of Samuel ha-Nagid with that of Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Ezra, and his exile anticipates the long movement of Iberian Jewish culture from the Muslim south to the Christian kingdoms that is traced in the later chapters of this essay.

11. Judah Halevi, from Tudela to Alexandria

Judah Halevi is the most loved of the Hebrew poets of Spain, and the one whose life has been most often turned into legend. He wrote love poems and riddles, poems of friendship and lament, hundreds of liturgical poems and the cycle of poems on Zion that made him famous across the Jewish world. He was also a practising physician, a merchant with partners in Egypt and the author of the Kuzari, a dialogue in defence of Judaism that remains one of the most widely read works of medieval Jewish thought. At the end of his life he left Spain for the Land of Israel, and he died there, or on the way, in 1141.

Ehud Krinis, in the new Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Halevi, describes him as a Jewish poet, thinker, physician and public figure, one of the exemplary figures of the period known as the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry, and one of the greatest Hebrew poets of all time^[84]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls him perhaps the most mature and representative model of Jewish culture in al-Andalus^[78]. This chapter follows his life from the north of the peninsula to Egypt, reads his poetry and his book, and separates what the documents tell us about his last journey from what the legend added.

Tudela or Toledo

Only a few details of Halevi’s early life are known. Krinis notes that his year of birth is unknown, and that circumstantial evidence places it in the 1070s or the first half of the 1080s^[84]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives before 1075^[78], the Museo Sefardí in Toledo gives 1070 or 1075^[85], and Peter Cole notes that Yosef Yahalom argues for Toledo and about 1085, not 1075^[52]. The difference of a decade affects the reconstruction of his early friendships, especially with Moses ibn Ezra.

His birthplace has also been disputed. The older tradition, followed by the Jewish Encyclopedia in 1904, made him a native of Toledo, born about the time of its conquest by Alfonso VI of Castile in 1085^[86]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that modern research since Jefim Schirmann’s study of 1939 prefers Tudela, then still under Muslim rule and close to the Castilian border, as the birthplace of both Halevi and Abraham ibn Ezra^[78]. Krinis also considers Tudela the likely birthplace^[84]. Tudela was also the home of the twelfth-century traveller Benjamin of Tudela, the subject of a separate essay on this site.

Wherever he was born, Halevi grew up in or near the Christian north. Krinis writes that hints in the poems of his contemporaries suggest that he grew up in the Christian regions of the peninsula^[84]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that some manuscripts call him the Castilian, and that he lived for some time in Christian territory, as his own letter and the testimony of contemporaries confirm^[78]. His Arabic name, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, was Abū l-Ḥasan al-Lāwī^[86].

A northern youth in the south

The young poet travelled south to the Jewish centres of al-Andalus. His first success there, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, came on the road, when a skilful imitation of one of Moses ibn Ezra’s most intricate poems won him a contest and an invitation from the older poet^[78]. The episode is discussed in the previous chapter, together with Yahalom’s alternative chronology, in which the two poets met in the north and Halevi went on to Granada alone^[52]. In Granada, the same article notes, he wrote his first important poems, mainly eulogies and poetic letters, and apparently some of his wine and love poems, in an atmosphere of wealth and culture^[78].

Krinis points out that Halevi was at first an outsider in the Jewish Andalusian elite because of his northern upbringing, and that his early talent as a poet was his entry ticket to its circles^[84]. Members of this elite, he adds, adopted the values and curriculum of the dominant Islamicate culture, and some served in the courts of both Christian and Muslim kingdoms^[84]. Poetry was the passport into that world.

Halevi also studied Jewish law. Krinis writes that while living in Lucena he acquired legal learning from the great Andalusian rabbis of his generation, and that despite his rabbinic education and the title Rabbi attributed to him he never served as rabbi of a community^[84]. The Jewish Encyclopedia names his teacher as Isaac Alfasi, head of the academy of Lucena, on whose death Halevi wrote an elegy, and his fellow pupils as Joseph ibn Migash and Baruch Albalia^[86]. Alfasi and his school are described in Chapter 7.

Physician in Toledo

Halevi earned his living as a doctor. Krinis states that medicine was his primary livelihood, and that he practised in Toledo during the period when the city passed into Christian hands^[84]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica adds that he worked there apparently in the service of the king and his nobles^[78]. The Jewish Encyclopedia cites a letter in which he complained to a friend that his large practice left him no tranquillity or leisure^[86].

His medical work entered his poetry. One poem bears the heading, in Cole’s rendering, “And he wrote this when he drank a potion”^[52]. Cole notes that the speaker is clearly personal, and that the poem insists that all knowledge, even medical knowledge, is nothing without divine guidance. In the Kuzari Halevi uses the same comparison, likening the person who has properly prepared himself to receive the divine influence to a well-trained physician who knows how to prepare medicines and explain their use^[52].

Toledo also taught Halevi a political lesson. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that, like many Jews of his time, he trusted that the status of Jewish nobles close to the royal house would secure peace for the Jews of the Christian kingdoms. He was disillusioned by the murder in 1108 of his patron, the nobleman Solomon ibn Ferrizuel, who had reached high rank in the service of Alfonso VI^[78]. Halevi’s lament for him, the same article notes, joins the tragedy of the individual to the catastrophe of the people and turns to rage against Christendom, which the poem curses^[78]. He left Toledo, apparently before the death of Alfonso VI in 1109, and resumed his travels^[78].

Wanderings and friendships

For about twenty years after the Almoravid conquest, the Encyclopaedia Judaica says, Halevi moved between Jewish communities, in contact with Jewish and non-Jewish notables, among them Joseph ibn Migash in Lucena and the vizier Meir ibn Kamniel in Seville^[78]. Krinis adds that in a later period he lived for years in Córdoba, which was still under Muslim rule^[84]. His fame spread, and his circle of friends and admirers grew.

He was also a merchant. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that besides practising medicine he traded, apparently with Jewish merchants in Egypt, and especially with the great merchant Abū Saʿīd Ḥalfon ha-Levi of Damietta, who came to Spain on one of his many journeys^[78]. Five of Halevi’s letters to Ḥalfon, written between 1127 and 1140, have been found in the Cairo Genizah^[78]. He also took part in community affairs, helping to collect money to ransom captives^[78].

The list of his friends reads like a roll of the Andalusian Jewish elite. The Jewish Encyclopedia names Levi al-Tabban of Saragossa, Judah ibn Ghayyat of Granada, Moses ibn Ezra and his three brothers, Meir ibn Kamniel and the physician-poet Solomon ibn al-Muʿallim of Seville, among others^[86]. Above all there was Abraham ibn Ezra. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes their friendship as especially close and long-lasting, and notes that Ibn Ezra often quotes Halevi in his biblical commentaries on matters of grammar, exegesis and philosophy^[78]. Later tradition made the two cousins, or made Ibn Ezra Halevi’s son-in-law. The Genizah letters suggest instead that Halevi’s son-in-law was Isaac, Abraham ibn Ezra’s son^[78].

Love poems and riddles

About eight hundred of Halevi’s poems are known, covering all the subjects and forms of Spanish Hebrew poetry^[78]. His love poems number about eighty, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica. They are addressed to a deer or a gazelle, or, in the case of wedding poems, to bride and groom together, and their themes are those of Arabic and Hebrew love poetry in general: the lover’s longing, the cruelty of the beloved, her face shining through the dark and her lethal glances^[78]. Cole observes that, beside the dark beauty favoured in Arabic convention, blond or reddish hair was also prized, and that it is not surprising to find a poet from the Christian north celebrating fairer-haired beauty^[52]. He cites Ibn Ḥazm, the Arabic author of The Dove’s Neck-Ring, who confessed a similar preference after loving a blonde slave girl in his youth^[52].

Halevi also wrote strophic girdle poems, muwashshaḥāt, a form that Cole notes was considered nonclassical and at first looked down upon in the Arabic tradition^[52]. Its final lines, the kharja, were often given to a female voice. Halevi carried the form into the synagogue, and Cole describes one liturgical poem whose closing lines allude to the female voice of the secular kharja while marking the poem’s function as a prelude to the morning prayer^[52].

Interpretation of the love poems varies. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that some readers take them as personal experience and others as literary exercises in accepted themes^[78]. Cole discusses one short poem that is essentially a translation of a poem by the tenth-century Arabic poet al-Mutanabbī, in which a woman kisses her own reflection in her lover’s eye. Halevi freely adjusts the situation, changing the gender of the self-infatuated lover from female to male, which neither convention nor metre required^[52]. Halevi also loved riddles. Cole notes his distinct fondness for the form, and that his diwan contains some forty-nine of them, which, like all medieval Hebrew and Arabic riddles, rely on deliberately misleading paradoxes and oppositions^[52]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica finds the same playfulness in his epigrams, which are mostly witty, and notes that, following the fashion of the time, he also wrote poems in praise of wine and its pleasures^[78]. The young Halevi was, in this respect, an entirely conventional Andalusian poet, and his later renunciation of the courtly life gains its force from his mastery of it.

Poems of friendship and lament

The largest group of Halevi’s secular poems, about 180 in number, consists of poems of praise and friendship^[78]. Most are qaṣīdas written for famous contemporaries, poets, philosophers, scholars, nobles and patrons. The Encyclopaedia Judaica judges their praise often conventional and exaggerated, and finds the frank and sensitive poems among them in those written for people he loved and admired, such as the Ibn Ezra family^[78].

About forty-five poems are laments^[78]. They combine grief, reflection on the power of death and of arbitrary fate, and conventional praise of the dead. The deaths of close friends, however, drew from him poems of strong personal feeling, such as the lament on Moses ibn Ezra and his brother Joseph, in which the usual motifs gain originality^[78].

Cole singles out a poem of friendship addressed to Solomon ibn al-Muʿallim, the Seville-born close friend of the poet. Cole calls it a remarkably lush poem of friendship, now counted among the poet’s finest works, which was discovered in the Firkovich collection in Leningrad and first published in 1963^[52]. Its late discovery illustrates how much of Halevi’s poetry has come to light only in modern times, from manuscript collections and from the Cairo Genizah.

Poems for the synagogue

Halevi composed about 350 liturgical poems for the festivals and the fast days^[78]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica identifies a large group as poems of the Diaspora, which express the suffering of the Jewish people and the poet’s identification with it. He often uses the old midrashic image of Israel as a beloved who has been abandoned but remains faithful, and he takes much of his imagery of love and spring from the Song of Songs^[78].

The personal liturgical poems are among the most admired. The Encyclopaedia Judaica places his penitential poems among the greatest in Jewish religious poetry after the Psalms^[78]. They swing between dread of sin and a joy in God that pervades the whole being, and their tone, the article notes, is generally gentle, humble and quiet^[78].

Cole’s notes stress the inwardness of this poetry. The attitude of tawakkul, the trust in God already met in Moses ibn Ezra’s liturgical poetry, is in Cole’s judgement at the heart of Halevi’s religious experience^[52]. In one poem, the stars, the angels and the congregation gathered at dawn in the synagogue praise God in turn, with the congregation as the human part of a cosmic chorus^[52]. Halevi, Cole writes, blends private and public religious concerns more thoroughly than any other poet of the period^[52].

Halevi was also aware that the Arabic forms he used so well raised questions. Cole notes that, about two centuries after the quarrel between Menahem and Dunash described in Chapter 5, Halevi “would return to the essence of this early debate” over the adoption of Arabic metre^[47]. Cole also points to Ross Brann’s discussion of the social context of Halevi’s campaign against what Brann calls “the cult of Arabic”^[52]. Yet Halevi went on writing in the Arabic measures and forms to the end of his life, and his late poems from Egypt are among his most accomplished.

The book of the despised religion

Halevi’s prose masterpiece is known as the Kuzari. Krinis gives its original title as Kitāb al-radd wa-l-dalīl fī l-dīn al-dhalīl, the Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Religion^[84]. Like other Jewish works of its kind in al-Andalus, it was written in Judaeo-Arabic. It became one of the most widespread and influential works of Jewish theology in the Hebrew translation of Judah ibn Tibbon, who died about 1190^[84].

The book has a long history of composition. Older scholars, among them S. D. Goitein, Moshe Gil and Ezra Fleischer, thought that Halevi worked on it for many years and revised it repeatedly. Cole records Fleischer’s view that a preliminary version existed by the summer of 1129^[52]. Krinis reports that more recent research, led by Mordechai Akiva Friedman, places the writing in a much shorter period, in the few years before the journey of 1140^[84]. The redating rests on new dates for the Genizah letters that record Halevi’s first acquaintance with the Egyptian merchant Ḥalfon ben Nethanel, now placed in Ḥalfon’s visit to Spain in 1138 and 1139. One of these letters refers briefly and enigmatically to the circumstances in which the book was written^[84].

Halevi explained his purpose in the opening sentence. In Hartwig Hirschfeld’s English translation of 1905, it reads: “I WAS asked to state what arguments and replies I could bring to bear against the attacks of philosophers and followers of other religions, and also against [Jewish] sectarians who attacked the rest of Israel”^[87]. Krinis accordingly describes the book as a polemic aimed at three targets: the philosophers, Christianity and Islam, and the Karaites, the Jewish minority that rejected the rabbinic tradition^[84].

The king’s dream

The book is framed as a story. A king of the Khazars, the Turkic people whose conversion to Judaism Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut had asked about in his letter described in Chapter 4, has a recurring dream. In Hirschfeld’s translation an angel says to him, “Thy way of thinking is indeed pleasing to the Creator, but not thy way of acting”^[87]. The king is zealous in his own religion, but the dream returns, and he sets out to find the way of acting that God desires.

Krinis notes that Halevi sets the story four hundred years before his own time, in the Jewish year 4500, which corresponds to 739 or 740 of the Common Era^[84]. The king first questions a philosopher, then a Christian scholar and a Muslim scholar, and only when none of them satisfies him does he call a Jewish sage, called in the Arabic text the ḥabr, in Hebrew ḥaver^[84]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica summarises the result. The philosopher presents a wholly impersonal God who does not care what humans do, which contradicts the king’s dream. The Christian and the Muslim claim that their actions please God, but the king rejects their creeds as illogical and unsubstantiated respectively^[78].

The dialogue with the Jewish sage occupies most of the five treatises. The king converts to Judaism at the start of the second treatise, and the conversation continues until the sage announces his departure for the Land of Israel at the end of the fifth^[78]. Krinis notes an unusual feature. The king is not merely a pupil. He sometimes acts as an equal and even points out weaknesses in the sage’s arguments, and when the two part at the end they part as friends but not in agreement^[84].

Halevi drew on history but altered it freely. Krinis observes that the earlier Jewish and Muslim accounts of the Khazar conversion include a debate between representatives of the three religions, but no philosopher. Halevi added the philosopher and made the journey to the Land of Israel, not the conversion of the Khazars, the goal of the whole story^[84]. Both changes, Krinis argues, reflect Halevi’s own situation at the time of writing, when he was preparing to leave Spain^[84].

Against the philosophers

Krinis calls Halevi the premier formulator of Jewish fideism, the view that religious truth rests on revelation and tradition rather than on reason, and notes that he distinguished himself by using sceptical philosophical arguments in support of it^[84]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, in the article on his philosophy by Daniel Lasker, explains that he rejected both of the reigning intellectual systems of his day, kalām and Aristotelianism, because both relied on theoretical constructs rather than reliable experience^[78]. Kalām reached correct conclusions, such as the creation of the world and the unity of God, but was useful mainly for apologetics. Aristotle, lacking a reliable tradition, reasoned his way to error, for example on the eternity of the world^[78].

The alternative was tradition grounded in public experience. Lasker summarises Halevi’s argument that the reliability of the Jewish tradition rests on the vast number of witnesses to the exodus from Egypt, the revelation at Sinai and the entry into the Land of Israel, and on the public transmission of their testimony through the generations^[78]. Philosophical knowledge of God, Halevi argued, is possible but deficient compared with the immediate experience of God in prophecy, for which he used the Sufi term dhawq, taste^[78].

Though he attacked philosophy, Halevi knew it well. Krinis notes that the Kuzari mentions only Greek philosophers by name, but that the doctrines it attacks are mostly formulated in the terms of philosophers of Halevi’s own time and culture^[84]. Lasker adds that his account of philosophy drew on Ibn Bājja and on Avicenna, whose treatise on the soul is transcribed in the fifth treatise, and that his opposition to philosophy was inspired in part by al-Ghazālī^[78]. The Stanford Encyclopedia article on Arabic influences notes, following Shlomo Pines, that the philosopher’s speech at the opening of the book reflects Ibn Bājja’s epistle on the conjunction of the intellect with man^[76]. Halevi’s Andalusian contemporary is thus present at the start of the book in which philosophy is rejected. The Jewish Encyclopedia adds that Halevi’s quarrel was with speculation about creation and God, and that on the formation of the material world he followed the Greek philosophers, holding that every being is made of matter and form^[86]. The same article notes that he regarded the rational soul as a spiritual substance and therefore imperishable, and that he defended free will against the Epicureans and the fatalists while trying to reconcile it with God’s providence and foreknowledge^[86]. His critique of philosophy, in other words, was selective. He rejected its claims to knowledge of God, not the whole of its natural science.

The divine thing

At the heart of the Kuzari is a single term. Krinis points out that the book constantly uses the phrase al-amr al-ilāhī, which he translates as the Divine Thing, as an all-embracing name for the presence of God in the world. The term does not appear systematically in the works of Halevi’s Jewish predecessors and contemporaries, and its use is an innovation of Halevi’s^[84]. Its manifestations, in his view, are what distinguish the chosen people from the rest of humanity^[84].

Krinis connects this term with the great theme of both the poetry and the prose. In the biblical past the signs of God’s nearness to Israel were abundant. In the present, the long exile from the Holy Land, they are almost entirely absent. Halevi’s poems give intense emotional expression to this gap, and the Kuzari seeks to diagnose it and to point to a way in which the signs of God’s presence might be restored^[84].

The same distinction explains his objection to the philosophers. Krinis explains that, for Halevi, the signs of God’s presence are concrete and particular: miracles that can be seen and prophecy that can be experienced, at specific times, in specific places and by specific people. The philosophers seek God in the universal, in the regularities of nature and in general claims about God and the world, and their method cannot grasp what is unique and circumstantial^[84]. Halevi illustrated this by contrasting two biblical names of God. The name Elohim stands for the God that reason can reach, the first cause and orderer of the world, exalted far above it. The personal name of God stands for His direct presence in the lives of those He has chosen, as the people of Israel experienced it in their history^[84].

The heart among the organs

The Kuzari’s doctrine of Israel’s distinctiveness follows from this. In Hirschfeld’s translation, the sage tells the king: “Israel amidst the nations is like the heart amidst the organs of the body; it is at one and the same time the most sick and the most healthy of them”^[87]. Israel’s suffering in exile, in this view, is a sign of its special relationship with God, not a refutation of it.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes the unity that Halevi saw between the God of Israel, the people of Israel to whom He chose to reveal Himself through prophets, the Land of Israel as the only place where prophecy is possible, and Hebrew as the language of Israel^[78]. Lasker notes that recent scholarship has paid attention to the way in which Shiʿite and Sufi concepts helped to frame Halevi’s understanding of the special status of the Jewish people^[78].

This doctrine has troubled modern readers. Cole records that the historian Salo Baron characterised the thought of the Kuzari as “Extreme racialism”, and summarises the passages in which the sage presents the Jews as set apart from the rest of humanity^[52]. Baron, Cole adds, warned that these “racialist contentions” should be read not in modern terms but in the context of Halevi’s argument about Jewish powerlessness and of the race-conscious Andalusian world in which he lived^[52]. Cole also quotes Schirmann’s warning against modern political readings of Halevi’s attachment to the land: “there is nothing in the poet’s worldview remotely reminiscent of modern political Zionism”^[52].

Songs of Zion

The poems on Zion are the most famous part of Halevi’s work. The Encyclopaedia Judaica counts about thirty-five of them, and notes that their very subject was uncommon at the time^[78]. They fall into several groups: poems of longing for the Land of Israel, poems of dispute in which Halevi argues for his choice against friends who opposed it, and poems of the sea voyage, some written on board ship and some imagined in advance^[78]. The poems of dispute, the same article explains, carry a strong intellectual argument overpowered by personal emotion, and at times they voice the poet’s own uncertainties. It seemed to Halevi that for many Jews life in Spain was a kind of slavery, a pursuit of worthless enticements and a betrayal of God, and that true freedom lay in service to God^[78]. In these poems, the Encyclopaedia Judaica argues, he developed his doctrine of the Land of Israel and raised national consciousness to a new level. He argued that there was no secure place for the Jewish people except the Land of Israel, and he answered the objection that it lay desolate by noting that it had been given to the patriarchs in the same state^[78].

The sea poems have a pattern of their own. Some of the most important, the same article notes, are shaped by biblical models such as the psalm of those who go down to the sea in ships. They begin with a view of the whole world, narrow to the stormy Mediterranean and the frail ship at its mercy, and end with the poet himself at prayer, followed by the calm after the storm^[78]. The poet identifies his prayer with that of Jonah, and the roaring of the waves with the moaning of his own heart^[78]. Whether written on board or imagined beforehand, these poems turned a dangerous voyage into a spiritual exercise.

The best known is a short poem of six lines. In Nina Salaman’s translation, published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1924, it begins, “My heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west”^[88]. The speaker asks how food can taste sweet to him while Zion is in the bonds of Edom and he in Arab chains, and ends with the claim that it would be a light thing to leave all the good things of Spain for the sight of the dust of the ruined sanctuary^[88]. Cole notes that the poem is a song of antitheses, contrasting West and East, ease and hardship, waste and worth, and the material and spiritual planes of existence, and that it recalls the early Arabic poem of longing written by the first Spanish emir, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I^[52].

The longest and most influential is the ode to Zion. In Salaman’s version its first line reads, “Zion, wilt thou not ask if peace’s wing”^[88]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that its inclusion in the Ashkenazi lamentations for the Ninth of Av made it part of the annual mourning for the Temple, and that numerous imitations and translations followed^[78]. The poem keeps a single rhyme throughout and moves through the holy places of the land, the sites of revelation, prophecy and kingship and the graves of the patriarchs^[78]. Cole cites Gabriel Levin on its later fame. After reading Johann Gottfried Herder’s translation of 1791, Goethe wrote with admiration of its rare “fire of longing”^[52]. Fleischer and Gil suggest that it was most likely written in Egypt, during Halevi’s last journey^[52]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that it ends quietly, with lines of hope that bless those who will be fortunate enough to see the redemption^[78].

The decision to leave

The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes Halevi’s decision to emigrate as gradual, the product of political thought, disillusionment with the security of Jewish life in the Diaspora, longing for an act of redemption and the messianic climate of the time^[78]. He once dreamt that the redemption would come in the year 4890, that is 1130^[78]. Cole notes that recent scholarship, drawing on Genizah letters, indicates that he tried to leave Spain shortly before 1130, may have reached North Africa, and turned back for reasons that remain obscure^[52].

His friends argued against the journey. The Encyclopaedia Judaica lists what he had to overcome: the dangers of the voyage by sea and desert, the hard conditions of a land then under Crusader rule, his attachment to his only daughter and her husband, his students and friends, and his high standing in Spain^[78]. The Kuzari itself gives the counter-argument to the king. In Hirschfeld’s translation, the king objects that “with a pure mind and desire, one can approach God in any place”, and asks the sage why he would run into danger on land and sea^[87]. The sage’s answer insists that the land is especially chosen by God and that some commandments can be perfectly fulfilled only there^[87].

Halevi described the life he was leaving as a kind of servitude. Cole quotes a passage from the Kuzari, in Hirschfeld’s version, that sheds light on his poem on the slaves of time: “I only seek freedom from the service of those numerous people whose favor I do not care for, and shall never obtain”^[52]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica reads the same theme in the poems of dispute, which present life in Spain as slavery and service to God as true freedom^[78].

Alexandria and Cairo

The last part of Halevi’s life is the best documented, thanks to the Cairo Genizah. Krinis explains that the relevant letters are all connected with Ḥalfon ben Nethanel, and that they describe Halevi’s circle, some of his business and the journey itself^[84]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that five letters in Halevi’s own hand were published by Goitein, and further documents by Gil and Fleischer in 2001^[78]. The letters are part of the great Genizah collections now in Cambridge and other libraries^[15].

Halevi reached Alexandria on 8 September 1140, accompanied among others by Isaac, the son of Abraham ibn Ezra^[78]. His arrival caused great excitement, and the judge Aaron ibn al-ʿAmmānī was his host. Some months later he went to Cairo, where he stayed with Ḥalfon^[78]. Krinis gives the length of the stay in Egypt as about eight months, from early September 1140 to mid-May 1141^[84].

Egypt tempted him to stay. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that the scenery, the pleasures of the country, the admiration and honour shown to him everywhere and the friendships he enjoyed all prolonged his stay, even as he began to fear that he would die before reaching his destination^[78]. The same article records that he wrote no fewer than fifty poems in praise of his Egyptian friends, and that they tried to persuade him that Egypt was as important as the Land of Israel, since the first prophecy and great miracles had taken place there^[78]. Halevi tried the land route from Cairo to Jerusalem but had to turn back. Isaac ibn Ezra went his own way, and Halevi returned alone to Alexandria^[78].

The last voyage

The ship was delayed by the weather. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that Halevi boarded at Alexandria on 8 May 1141^[78], while Cole gives 7 May, citing a letter-writer who noted that the ships for Spain, Tripoli, Sicily and Byzantium had all left while Halevi’s waited for a wind to carry it north-east^[52]. Finally, on 14 May 1141, the first day of the festival of Shavuot, the same correspondent recorded, in Cole’s translation, “The west wind has risen, the ship has sailed”^[52].

Cole believes that Halevi’s poem on a western breeze, the harbinger of the wind that would carry him to the Holy Land, was probably written on board outside the harbour of Alexandria as the ship prepared to depart. Halevi would have had time to give it to a friend who came aboard to say farewell. If Fleischer, Gil and Goitein are right, Cole writes, this poem, one of his finest, may well be the last word we have from Halevi^[52]. The voyage to Acre or Ashkelon normally took about ten days^[52][78]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica judges it very likely that he reached the Land of Israel, and notes that a letter of Ḥalfon reports his death in July^[78]. Krinis concludes from the letters that he died there in the summer of 1141, about two months after leaving Alexandria^[84].

Legend and memory

The documents end there. The legend begins. The Encyclopaedia Judaica tells the famous story, first found in the sixteenth-century chronicle Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah and later retold by Heinrich Heine in his Hebrew Melodies. Halevi reached Jerusalem, and as he kissed its stones, reciting his ode to Zion, a passing horseman rode him down^[78]. The article adds that Jerusalem was then under Crusader rule, and treats the tale as a legend that supplied what life had denied him^[78]. The Museo Sefardí, in its short biography, still gives Jerusalem as the place of his death^[85].

The legend took hold because it completed the story the poems told. Halevi had written of the West and the East, of exile and return, of the heart and the land. His death on the threshold of Jerusalem gave that story an ending. The historian can only say that he probably reached the Land of Israel and died there within a few months, and that the place of his grave is unknown.

His influence has been immense in every field he touched. The Kuzari became, through Ibn Tibbon’s translation, a classic of Jewish theology^[84]. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that Ibn Tibbon’s version passed through eleven printed editions, the first at Fano in 1506, that a second Hebrew translation was made by Judah ben Isaac Cardinal early in the thirteenth century, and that no fewer than six commentaries on the book appeared in the first half of the fifteenth century^[86]. His liturgical poems entered prayer books across the Jewish world, and the ode to Zion entered the liturgy of the Ninth of Av^[78]. Cole quotes the philosopher David Hartman’s observation that religious nationalists in modern Israel regard Halevi, rather than Maimonides, as the spiritual precursor of religious Zionism, while noting Schirmann’s insistence on the distance between Halevi’s attachment to the land and modern politics^[52]. Like Moses ibn Ezra before him, Halevi was formed by Arabic culture and wrote some of his finest poems in its forms, yet he gave Hebrew poetry a voice that seemed to speak beyond the Andalusian world in which it was made.

12. Abraham ibn Ezra, the Wandering Scholar

Abraham ibn Ezra was the last of the great figures formed in the Hebrew culture of al-Andalus, and the one who carried it furthest from home. For about fifty years he lived in Spain and North Africa as a poet who depended on patrons. Then, about 1140, he left the Muslim south and spent the rest of his life wandering through Italy, Provence, northern France and England. In those years he wrote the biblical commentaries that made his name, a series of Hebrew books on grammar, and textbooks of arithmetic, the calendar and astronomy that brought Andalusian learning to Jewish readers who knew no Arabic.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica, in its article by Uriel Simon and Raphael Jospe, calls him one of the most important Jewish Bible exegetes, and also a poet, liturgical poet, grammarian, translator, philosopher and astronomer, and counts him among the last creative geniuses of the Spanish golden age^[20]. Peter Cole describes him as a fifth major poet beside Samuel ha-Nagid, Ibn Gabirol, Moses ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi, and as one who straddles both periods of Hebrew poetry in Spain, carrying both sacred and secular elements of his Arabized learning to Italy, northern France and England^[47]. This chapter follows his life and then considers four of his fields: grammar, biblical exegesis, mathematics and the calendar with astronomy, and poetry.

Tudela and the dates of a life

The dates of Ibn Ezra’s life vary from source to source. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 1089 to 1164^[20]. Tamar Rudavsky, in the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, gives about 1089 to about 1167^[89], and Shlomo Sela’s study gives 1089 to 1167^[90]. Y. Tzvi Langermann, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, places his birth in or around 1093^[91], the Jewish Encyclopedia in 1092 or 1093^[92], and the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive in 1092^[93]. Martin Levey, in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, gives about 1090 for his birth and about 1164 to 1167 for his death^[94].

His birthplace is also disputed. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, Langermann and MacTutor all name Tudela, then on the northern edge of Muslim Spain^[20][91][93]. As the previous chapter noted, modern research since Schirmann prefers Tudela for both Ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi^[78]. The Jewish Encyclopedia, written before that research, reports that Moses ibn Ezra described both Abraham and Halevi as natives of Toledo who later settled in Córdoba, that Abraham himself named Toledo as his native place in one acrostic and Córdoba in another work, and that the scholar Albrecht thought birth at Toledo certain^[92]. Levey also gives Toledo^[94]. The question cannot be settled from the sources fetched for this chapter, and the reader should treat Tudela as the modern consensus rather than a proven fact.

The family name links him to the Granadan family of Moses ibn Ezra. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that his father was called Meir, that his family was probably a branch of the Ibn Ezra family to which Moses belonged, and that Moses mentions him in his poems by his Arabic name, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm ibn al-Mājid ibn Ezra^[92]. The relationship, if any, cannot be traced in detail.

A poet without a profession

The Encyclopaedia Judaica corrects several common assumptions about Ibn Ezra. He was not a talmudic scholar, and the suggestion that he studied at the academy of Lucena has been refuted. He was not a physician either, and he explained his opposition in principle to medicine in his commentaries on Exodus^[20]. He lacked the skills needed for business or public office, and could not make a living in the usual professions of his social class, as rabbi, judge, physician, merchant or courtier. For lack of an alternative, he became a professional poet, supported by patrons who loved poetry and sought fame^[20]. Rudavsky, by contrast, includes physician among his occupations^[89], an example of the inconsistency of the reference literature on his life.

Patronage meant movement. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that his dependence on a succession of benefactors is evident in the exaggerated praise of his eulogies, and that the need to move from patron to patron, together with his restless character, made his life one of wandering. Before 1140, besides Tudela, he lived in Córdoba, in Seville, where he raised his son Isaac, in Christian Toledo, in Gabès in Tunisia, and in Algeria and Morocco. He did not reach Egypt or the Land of Israel^[20]. One of his poems refers to the damage that this long wandering did to his family life^[20].

Poetry was his first identity. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that in this period his creative activity was chiefly occupied with poetry, and that he liked to call himself the poet or the father of poems^[92]. In a long lament, it records, he looked back on his youth: “Once in my youth I used to compose songs with which I decorated the Hebrew scholars as with a necklace”^[92].

Friends in Córdoba

The Jewish Encyclopedia names Córdoba as his permanent residence in these years, and Joseph ibn Ṣaddiq and above all Judah Halevi as his friends there^[92]. Moses ibn Ezra, who was also close to him, praised him as a religious philosopher and a man of great eloquence^[92]. A younger contemporary, the historian Abraham ibn Daud, ended his chronicle by calling Ibn Ezra the last of the great men who had been the pride of Spanish Jewry and who had “strengthened the hands of Israel with songs and with words of comfort”^[92].

The friendship with Halevi was the most important. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that Ibn Ezra mentioned Halevi frequently in his Bible commentaries, and that the two were almost certainly related by marriage, since Ibn Ezra’s son Isaac married Halevi’s daughter^[20]. Langermann describes their exchanges as very instructive for the history of Jewish philosophy^[91]. In a long note on the first of the Ten Commandments, Ibn Ezra records a conversation in which Halevi asked why God revealed Himself at Sinai as the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, rather than as the creator of heaven and earth^[91]. The question went to the heart of the difference between the two men. Ibn Ezra answered it within his own philosophical system, and Halevi, Langermann observes, expanded his theme of Jewish particularism in the Kuzari^[91]. In his commentary on Daniel 9:2 Ibn Ezra describes another exchange, on a question of biblical chronology, which ended, by his account, with Halevi falling silent^[91].

Jospe, in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, draws a sharper contrast between the two. For Halevi, he writes, the distinctiveness of the Jewish people made possible the revelation of the Torah to them. For Ibn Ezra, it is the divinely revealed Torah that makes possible the existence of Israel as a special group, and without the Torah there is no difference between Jew and non-Jew^[20].

The son who left

Ibn Ezra’s son Isaac followed a path that his father may never have known. The Encyclopaedia Judaica reports that documents from the Cairo Genizah and Isaac’s own poems show that he accompanied Halevi on the voyage to Alexandria in 1140. There the two parted. Halevi went on to the Land of Israel, and Isaac went to Babylonia, where he eventually converted to Islam^[20]. Rudavsky also records Isaac’s conversion^[89]. The Jewish Encyclopedia adds that in 1143 Isaac was in Baghdad, writing songs in honour of a patron named Hibat Allah, whom it also calls by the Hebrew name Nathanael^[92].

What Abraham knew of this is disputed. The Jewish Encyclopedia, following older scholarship, describes Isaac’s conversion as a severe blow to his father, expressed in two moving poems, and reports Albrecht’s view that Abraham left Spain in 1137 in order to bring his son back^[92]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica rejects this reading. The two poems, written as a father Abraham’s elegy for his son Isaac, do not fit the known facts about either man, and Ezra Fleischer concluded that they were written for other people. There is therefore no evidence, it states, that Isaac died in his father’s lifetime or that Ibn Ezra knew of his apostasy^[20]. The Jewish Encyclopedia also infers from a remark in his commentary on Exodus that his marriage produced five children, all of whom probably died early except Isaac^[92].

Leaving Spain

Around 1140, at about the age of fifty, Ibn Ezra’s life changed. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that for political reasons that are not entirely clear he was forced to leave Muslim Spain, and that he arrived alone in Rome, as he records in the poem at the start of his commentary on Ecclesiastes, written in 1140^[20]. Langermann links the departure to the Almohad onslaught of 1140^[91]. The Jewish Encyclopedia treats 1140 as the firm date at which the second period of his life begins, and notes that his travels in North Africa and possibly further east may belong either before Rome or to a later interruption of his stay in Italy^[92].

He never ceased to think of himself as a Spaniard. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that he always called himself Sefardi, and that he wrote an elegy on the Almohad persecution, which began in 1142, listing the Spanish and North African communities that fell victim to it^[92]. In his commentary on the commandment of the festive bundle of branches at the feast of Tabernacles, he gave a glimpse of his longing: “Whoever is exiled from Arabian lands to the lands of Edom [Christian Europe] will understand, if he has eyes, the deep meaning of this commandment”^[92].

The wandering sage

The second half of his life can be traced through the dates and dedications in his books. The Jewish Encyclopedia lists Rome in 1140, Lucca in 1145, Mantua in 1145 and 1146, and Verona in 1146 and 1147^[92]. In Rome his pupil Benjamin ben Joab received the commentary on Job. He reached Provence before 1155, stopping at Béziers, where he wrote a book on the names of God for two patrons^[92]. Langermann adds Rouen to the list^[91].

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He then spent several years in northern France at Dreux. The Jewish Encyclopedia explains that a corruption of the Hebrew name of the town long led scholars to believe that he wrote these works on the island of Rhodes, and later at Rodez in southern France^[92]. In Dreux he completed several exegetical works and, after recovering from an illness, began a new commentary on the Pentateuch. In 1158 he was in London, where he wrote his religious-philosophical work Yesod Mora for his pupil Joseph ben Jacob, and his letter on the Sabbath^[92]. In northern France he also came into contact with Rashi’s grandson, the great talmudist Jacob Tam, and a poem he wrote in praise of Jacob’s brother Samuel ben Meir has survived^[92]. In 1160 he was again in Provence, and at Narbonne he translated an astronomical work from Arabic^[92]. He had known the town earlier. The Jewish Encyclopedia places him at Narbonne in or shortly before 1139, answering questions put to him by David ben Joseph^[92], a date which, if correct, places him in Provence even before his arrival in Rome.

His contemporaries recognised the importance of these journeys. Judah ibn Tibbon of Lunel, whose family of translators appears in Chapter 9, spoke of the epoch-making importance of Ibn Ezra’s stay in southern France, and a century and a half later the Provençal poet Jedaiah Bedersi still spoke of it with enthusiasm^[92]. In one of his best-known poems, the Jewish Encyclopedia records, Ibn Ezra summed up these years: “I resided in that place as a stranger, wrote books, and revealed the secrets of knowledge”^[92].

A Hebrew for Europe

The move north changed his language. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that in Jewish Spain Hebrew was the language of poetry and Judaeo-Arabic the language of prose, so Ibn Ezra wrote his early prose works on science and exegesis in Arabic. None of them survived^[20]. The Jews of Christian Europe did not know Arabic and had no access to Arabic science, philosophy, linguistics or poetry. A Spanish polymath in their midst, fluent in the sciences and in Hebrew grammar and committed to rational interpretation of Scripture, provoked both admiration and hostility^[20].

Affluent patrons nevertheless supported him and enabled him to write his commentaries, his Hebrew translations of important works of grammar and astronomy, and Hebrew textbooks in his various fields, which introduced their children to Spanish-Jewish learning^[20]. In the encyclopaedia’s phrase, the wandering poet thus became a wandering sage. He had to write in Hebrew for his new readers and to coin new Hebrew terms in each discipline in place of the Arabic ones he had used before. Because they were written in Hebrew, most of these later works survived^[20].

The same circumstances explain a peculiarity of his writings. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that different patrons asked him for the same book, and since in his poverty he no longer had the original, he wrote it again, with corrections and new ideas. As a result there are two sets of commentaries on several biblical books and several versions of the same scientific works^[20]. Rudavsky makes the same observation about the scientific treatises, most of which exist in two or more versions written for different groups of patrons^[89]. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes his historical mission in similar terms. He became the propagator among the Jews of Christian Europe of a learning that had been founded long before in Arabic, a task for which his versatility and his clear and charming Hebrew style fitted him as no one else^[92].

The grammarian

Grammar was the foundation of Ibn Ezra’s work. The Jewish Encyclopedia lists his grammatical books. Moznayim, written in 1140, explains the terms of Hebrew grammar. He translated the work of Judah Ḥayyuj into Hebrew, making the foundational Andalusian theory of the Hebrew root, described in Chapter 5, available to readers without Arabic. Ṣaḥot, written in 1145 on correct usage, was in the encyclopaedia’s judgement his best grammatical work, and it includes a brief outline of Hebrew metre. Safah Berurah, his last grammatical book, was left unfinished^[92].

He also took sides in the quarrels of his predecessors. His Sefat Yeter defended Saadia Gaon against the criticisms of Dunash ben Labrat, whose criticisms of Saadia, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, Ibn Ezra had brought with him from Egypt^[92]. That detail sits uneasily with the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s statement that he never reached Egypt^[20], and the discrepancy is left open here. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, on the other hand, that in his commentaries he applied the rules of the Spanish grammarians with great caution, kept exceptions and bold hypotheses to a minimum and rejected out of hand Ibn Janāḥ’s system of lexical substitution, the interchange of similar words^[20]. Whenever he could do without a forced explanation, he used the phrase “there is no need”^[20].

The cords of grammar

Ibn Ezra summed up his method as an exegete in the rhymed introduction to his commentary on the Pentateuch. In the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s translation it reads: “This is Sefer ha-Yashar / by Abraham the poet;/ it is bound by the cords of grammar / and approved by the eye of reason; / happy are those who adhere to it”^[20]. The word yashar, straight, was for him a synonym for peshat, the plain sense of the text, and the method had to pass a double test of exact philology and strict rational plausibility^[20].

Reason was the basis of the whole enterprise. In the same introduction he wrote, in the encyclopaedia’s translation, “Reason is the foundation, since the Torah was not given to those who have no knowledge, and the angel [i.e., mediator] between man and God is his intelligence”^[20]. He sought reason even in the commandments whose purpose is not obvious: “Heaven forbid that a single precept might contradict reason”^[20]. Biblical narrative, too, had to be read with natural and psychological plausibility. Miracles were an exception. They contravene the laws of nature, he argued, but not reason, since God is omnipotent, and not observation, since there were witnesses^[20]. He therefore rejected the midrashic tendency to multiply miracles beyond those that Scripture reports^[20].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica also stresses his methodological care. He varied his terminology to mark how certain he was of an interpretation, from “with clear proofs” to “this is only a conjecture”, offered alternatives when he could not decide, and admitted when he did not understand a verse^[20].

Reason and tradition

Ibn Ezra’s freedom as an interpreter had limits that he set himself. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that, following Saadia Gaon, he held that a verse cannot contradict what is known from the senses or from reason, any more than it can contradict another verse. When it seemed to, the interpreter had to adapt it, by metaphor, allegory or other means, a procedure that Ibn Ezra called tikkun, correction. But he allowed tikkun only when it was absolutely necessary, partly to prevent its use against the stories of the patriarchs, the practical commandments or the messianic promises, which he saw as the danger embodied in Christian exegesis^[20].

The second limit was the rabbinic tradition. Against the Karaites, Ibn Ezra held that the Oral Law was revealed and binding, and that talmudic law could not be set aside unless it was a disputed or isolated opinion^[20]. The homiletic interpretations of the sages were another matter. They were not received tradition but the sages’ own efforts to find support in Scripture, and so they did not bind the interpreter. As he put it, “one who has a heart [i.e., reason] can recognize when they say derash and when peshat”^[20].

He kept science and Scripture apart in the same way. On Isaiah’s description of God sitting above the circle of the earth he commented, in the encyclopaedia’s translation, “Here we have evidence that the world is circular rather than square, although there is no need for a verse, since this is known through manifest proofs”^[20]. The Torah was given to all Israel, to be understood by the learned and the unlearned, and therefore contained few allusions to philosophy and the sciences, which had to be studied separately^[20].

The question of authorship

His confidence in the received text allowed him to raise bolder questions about its authorship. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he rejected conjectural emendation and held that the work of the Masoretes was flawless, yet was deeply troubled by anachronisms^[20]. Phrases such as “the Canaanite was then in the land” in Genesis and the remark about the iron bedstead of Og in Deuteronomy were, in his view, later additions, as were the last twelve verses of Deuteronomy, which he held were written by Joshua^[20].

He expressed this view cautiously. In his comment on the second verse of Deuteronomy, in the translation of H. Norman Strickman and Arthur Silver, he lists these passages and concludes that if the reader understands them, “then you will recognize the truth”^[95]. The translators explain in their notes that Ibn Ezra hinted rather than spoke openly because he did not want readers to generalise and assume that there were other post-Mosaic additions in the Pentateuch^[95].

He applied similar reasoning elsewhere. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he dated the prophecies in the second part of Isaiah to the Babylonian exile, in carefully veiled hints, His reasons, it stresses, were entirely exegetical. He also held that Job and his friends were historical figures, gentile prophets who lived before Moses and did not speak Hebrew, and that the difficult language of the book reflected translation^[20]. Five centuries later Spinoza cited him. Rudavsky notes that Spinoza called him “Aben Ezra, a man of enlightened intelligence and no small learning” in support of his own claim that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch^[89]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica warns against reading Ibn Ezra as a concealed radical. His religious poetry, it argues, shows a genuinely religious personality loyal to the Jewish faith and people, and his final judgements in most exegetical debates take a measured middle course^[20].

Words like bodies

Ibn Ezra had a distinctive theory of language. The Encyclopaedia Judaica quotes his statement, which reflects a view common among Jewish and Muslim scholars in Spain: “The words are like bodies and the meanings like souls”^[20]. The words were only the garments of meaning, and style an external ornament. The view guarded against the old exegetical tradition that every aspect of the text, from apparently superfluous words to dotted letters, required a gloss, and it allowed him to explain the differences between parallel passages, such as the two reports of Pharaoh’s dream and the two versions of the Ten Commandments, as purely external^[20]. The encyclopaedia adds that the price of this approach was a notable neglect of fine turns of expression^[20].

As a poet he also noticed the poetry of the Bible, though less than one might expect. The Encyclopaedia Judaica observes that the literary dimension of his commentaries on the poetic books is not developed as fully as one would expect from so great a poet. He did, however, make what it calls a brilliant conjecture about some of the obscure superscriptions of the Psalms. Spanish poets indicated the melody of a poem by citing the opening words of another poem sung to the same tune, and Ibn Ezra suggested that some psalm headings did the same^[20]. He also commented on figures such as antithesis and parallelism, and noted that chiasmus followed “the custom of the holy tongue”^[20].

The book of the number

Ibn Ezra’s mathematical books were among his most influential. MacTutor summarises his contribution: he wrote three treatises on numbers that helped to bring the Indian symbols and ideas of decimal fractions to the attention of some of the learned people in Europe^[93]. Sefer ha-Mispar, the Book of the Number, describes the decimal system for whole numbers with place value. In it Ibn Ezra uses a zero, which he calls galgal, meaning wheel or circle^[93]. Levey adds that in the body of the treatise Ibn Ezra returned to using the letters of the Hebrew alphabet as numerals, but that the Indian influence is unmistakable^[94]. Rudavsky describes the Book of the Number as a basic textbook of mathematics^[89].

The Book of the Unit, Sefer ha-Eḥad, deals with the numbers from one to nine^[93]. Levey describes the Book of the Number as a treatise on the fundamental operations of arithmetic, in which the decimal system for whole numbers is set out with place value, and identifies the third book, Yesod Mispar, the Foundation of Numerals, as a work concerned with grammatical peculiarities^[94]. MacTutor also notes that Ibn Ezra wrote on permutations and combinations^[93]. Despite these books, it adds, these ideas did not enter mainstream European mathematics for several more centuries^[93].

Ibn Ezra also wrote about the history of the subject. MacTutor and Rudavsky both describe his Hebrew translation of a lost Arabic commentary on the astronomical tables of al-Khwārizmī, attributed by MacTutor to al-Bīrūnī and by Rudavsky to Ibn al-Muthannā^[93][89]. Its introduction gives his account of how Indian mathematics and astronomy, and Greek astronomy, reached Arabic science in the eighth century, and historians of science still study it for that reason^[93][89].

The calendar and the astrolabe

Ibn Ezra’s other technical books served the calendar and astronomy. Rudavsky lists Sefer ha-ʿIbbur, the Book of Intercalation, written in two versions to establish the Jewish calendar and explain its foundations^[89]. Levey adds a treatise on three chronological questions, and the Jewish Encyclopedia identifies it as his answer to questions put by David of Narbonne^[94][92]. His letter on the Sabbath, written in London in 1158, also belongs to his work on the reckoning of time^[92]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica classes both the Book of Intercalation and the letter on the Sabbath under the Jewish calendar^[20].

For astronomy he wrote a book explaining the reasons behind astronomical tables, in four versions, two in Hebrew and two in Latin, and a manual on the astrolabe, Keli ha-Neḥoshet, the Instrument of Brass, in three Hebrew versions and a Latin one^[89]. His list of stars appears in the astrolabe treatise. Rudavsky notes, following Bernard Goldstein, that many of its discrepancies from Ptolemy’s Almagest can be traced to the Arabic versions of that work^[89]. The Hebrew versions of his translation of the commentary on al-Khwārizmī’s tables have helped scholars to interpret a set of Latin canons for tables calculated for the meridian of Toledo^[89].

His most lasting contribution in this field may have been linguistic. Because he was one of the first scholars to write on scientific subjects in Hebrew, Rudavsky explains, he had to invent Hebrew terms for Arabic technical vocabulary, including terms for the centre of a circle, for the sine and for the diagonal of a rectangle^[89]. Shlomo Sela’s study takes this process as its subject. Brill’s description of the book presents Ibn Ezra’s scientific contribution as the very embodiment of “the rise of medieval Hebrew science”, a process in which Jewish scholars gradually adopted the holy tongue as a vehicle for secular and scientific ideas^[90].

The great rebel

Ibn Ezra never stopped writing poetry. Cole records the critic Yosef Tubi’s description of him as a “great rebel”, and notes that he broke new thematic ground and made technical changes too, including a return to poems in the biblical style with neither metre nor rhyme. On the whole, however, he kept the Andalusian system of quantitative metres, while using strophic forms more often than his predecessors^[52].

His secular poems include some of the most personal in the tradition. Cole calls a poem about his threadbare cloak an excellent example of a new realism, in which the subject matter is broadened and personalised, here in a self-mocking way^[52]. Another, on the flies that torment the poet, opens in the solemn register of lament and then turns to something quite different. Cole suggests that Ibn Ezra had in mind an Arabic poem by Ibn Sahl about fleas, and notes that the last line contrasts the poet’s relation to the winged creatures around him with God enthroned upon the winged cherubim^[52]. Several short poems served as preludes to sections of his biblical commentaries^[52].

His religious poetry was widely sung. Later poets admired him. The Jewish Encyclopedia quotes Judah al-Ḥarizi: “The poems of Ibn Ezra provide help in time of need, and cause refreshing rain in time of drought”^[92]. The nineteenth-century historian Leopold Zunz was cooler, writing that “Number and measure lurk in his verses, and flashes of thought spring from his words—but not pictures of the imagination”^[92].

Ḥai ben Meqitz

Ibn Ezra’s most ambitious literary work is a philosophical allegory in rhymed prose, Ḥai ben Meqitz. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that it is based on an Arabic prose work of Avicenna^[92], and Langermann confirms that Ibn Ezra read Avicenna’s allegory Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān^[91]. Cole describes it as a long narrative written before Ibn Ezra left Spain, in which the author and his guide, a figure comparable to Virgil in Dante, soar over creation, ascending through the elements and the spheres to the realm of wisdom^[52]. Cole adds that Ibn Ezra was responsible for introducing an allegorical strain into the Hebrew rhymed-prose narrative^[52].

His philosophy, like that of Moses ibn Ezra, was Neoplatonic. Rudavsky notes that he wrote no strictly philosophical treatises but was strongly influenced by Ibn Gabirol, and that his works contain much Neoplatonic material^[89]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica adds that his thought is hard to characterise systematically because it is scattered and elliptical, and that for him revelation was a rational process and not only a historical event^[20]. In his comment on the creation of humanity in Genesis he described the human body as a microcosm, and he held that one who understands the rational soul and the composition of the body can come to know the things of the upper world^[20].

The last years

The end of Ibn Ezra’s life is as uncertain as its beginning. The Jewish Encyclopedia reports, on the basis of a poem at the end of his commentary on the Pentateuch, that he may have died in Rome, where his second period had begun, after putting the finishing touches to that commentary and beginning his last grammatical work, Safah Berurah^[92]. It also reports the claim of the fifteenth-century chronicler Abraham Zacuto that he died at Calahorra, on the border of Navarre and Old Castile, but notes that the claim is not substantiated^[92]. MacTutor and Levey accept Calahorra^[93][94], while Rudavsky gives Rome or possibly Palestine^[89]. The dates range from 1164 to 1167^[20][92][89].

The introductory verse of Safah Berurah, written for his pupil Solomon, expresses the hope that “it will be a legacy of Abraham the son of Meïr, and will preserve his memory from generation to generation”^[92]. The Jewish Encyclopedia reads these as the farewell words of a writer who felt his end approaching and counted on lasting fame^[92].

A legacy in Hebrew

The hope was fulfilled. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that his commentary on the Pentateuch, like Rashi’s, called forth a host of supercommentaries and did more than any other work to establish his reputation, and that it was first printed at Naples in 1488^[92]. His Yesod Mora was first printed in 1529^[92]. His scientific books waited longer. Rudavsky notes that most of them survive only in manuscript, and her bibliography records nineteenth-century editions of the astrolabe treatise in 1845, the Book of Intercalation in 1874 and the Book of the Number in 1895^[89].

His historical role was to carry Andalusian learning beyond al-Andalus. Langermann suggests that his success owed much to his industriousness, his wide travels and his use of the very popular vehicle of the Bible commentary^[91]. Rudavsky concludes that because his works were widely copied in Hebrew and translated into European languages, he made much Arabic science available in Hebrew and Latin and helped to spread the new Hebrew astronomical literature throughout Europe^[89]. Moses ibn Ezra had mourned Granada from the Christian north. Abraham ibn Ezra, a generation later, took what Granada and Córdoba had taught him to Rome, Béziers, Dreux and London, and wrote it down in Hebrew for readers who would never see al-Andalus.

13. Abraham bar Ḥiyya and the First Hebrew Science

The previous chapter followed Abraham ibn Ezra as he carried the sciences of al-Andalus to readers in Italy, France and England. He was not the first to write such books in Hebrew. A generation earlier, in Christian Barcelona, Abraham bar Ḥiyya had already composed a Hebrew encyclopaedia, a practical geometry, a description of the earth and the heavens, astronomical tables and a treatise on the Jewish calendar. Y. Tzvi Langermann, in the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, credits him with the first works in Hebrew on astronomy and mathematics^[19]. The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive adds that his geometry, in its Latin translation, was the first book to introduce Islamic algebra to Europe^[96].

This chapter is about that achievement. It outlines what little is known of Bar Ḥiyya’s life and offices, describes his main mathematical and astronomical books, explains the arithmetic of the Hebrew calendar on which one of them rests, and places him among the Andalusi astronomers whose work he and his successors used. The geometry itself is treated briefly. His religious and eschatological writings lie outside the scope of this chapter.

A life in Barcelona

Almost nothing is known of Bar Ḥiyya’s life. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, in the article by Geoffrey Wigoder, states that little is known apart from the fact that he lived in Barcelona, and that the dates and places of his birth and death are unknown^[97]. Langermann and MacTutor give 1070 for his birth and 1136 for his death^[19][96]. Martin Levey, in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, says only that he flourished in Barcelona before 1136^[98].

The date of 1136 rests on two inferences. A manuscript dated 1136 refers to him with the formula used for the dead, though the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that this could be a later interpolation. The translator Plato of Tivoli, who cites him as a collaborator up to 1136, does not mention him in connection with a translation of 1138. As there is no evidence that he lived later, it has been assumed that he died about 1136^[97]. The Jewish Encyclopedia gives the manuscript’s date as 10 April 1136 and the completion of Plato’s translation of Ptolemy’s Quadripartitum as 20 October 1138. It also reports that some scholars identify him with the Magister Abraham who dictated a treatise on the astrolabe, probably at Toulouse, to Rudolph of Bruges, who finished it in 1143^[99]. If that identification were correct, he would have lived some years beyond 1136. The question remains open.

Barcelona was by then a Christian city, the seat of the counts of Barcelona. Langermann notes that Bar Ḥiyya held several official positions there although the city was under Christian control, and that he was fluent in Arabic, the leading language of science at the time^[19]. The Jewish Encyclopedia observes that he was always called Sefardi, the Spaniard, and adds that he must have spent several years in southern France, since he composed works for the Jews of Provence in which he complained of their ignorance of mathematics^[99]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica places a visit to France, perhaps to Provence, then ruled by the count of Barcelona, and suggests that it was connected with problems of land surveying^[97].

Savasorda and nasi

Bar Ḥiyya is known by two titles. The Latin name by which European mathematicians knew him, Savasorda, comes from an Arabic official title. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that it is a corruption of the Arabic ṣāḥib al-shurṭa. Originally the title meant captain of the bodyguard, but by Bar Ḥiyya’s time it denoted a functionary with both judicial and civil duties whose exact scope can only be surmised^[97]. Levey translates the title as “Elder of the Royal Suite”, denoting some type of official position^[98]. MacTutor describes Savasorda as a job description showing that he held an official position in the administration of Barcelona^[96].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica adds that a court position was not unique for a Jew in Christian Spain at that time, and that Bar Ḥiyya would have been useful for his mathematical and astronomical knowledge, his skill in surveying and his languages. He wrote that from his early youth he had “gained honor before princes and royalty”^[97]. His other title, nasi, prince, appears in the name of his astronomical tables, Luḥot ha-Nasi, the Tables of the Prince^[19]. Within the Jewish community, the Encyclopaedia Judaica suggests, it may have denoted an office with judicial functions, including the power to impose punishments and regulate communal taxation, although its exact meaning is also undetermined^[97].

The two titles summarise his position. To the Christian court he was an official with an Arabic title who could measure land and calculate the heavens. To the Jewish community he was a leader with a Hebrew title who could explain the calendar. Both roles drew on the same knowledge, acquired in Arabic.

Writing science in Hebrew

Bar Ḥiyya’s decision to write in Hebrew was deliberate. Langermann explains that he produced his series of Hebrew texts in astronomy and mathematics in response to requests from his Jewish coreligionists in Provence, and that he had to create an entirely new Hebrew technical terminology^[19]. The Jewish Encyclopedia reports the reason he gave in the preface to his book on the form of the earth. Because none of the scientific works that existed in Arabic was accessible to his brethren in France, he felt called upon to write books which, though they contained no research of his own, would help to popularise knowledge among Hebrew readers^[99]. Levey notes that in a letter to his contemporary Judah ben Barzillai of Barcelona he deplored the lack of knowledge of Arabic science and the Arabic language among the people of Provence^[98].

The language he created lasted. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that he was one of the very first to write on scientific and philosophical subjects in Hebrew, that many of the terms he coined passed into accepted Hebrew usage, and that his Hebrew is simple and lucid, similar in style to the later Midrashim^[97]. The Jewish Encyclopedia is more critical, noting that his terminology occasionally lacks the clarity and precision of later writers and translators^[99]. It also records that Moritz Steinschneider showed that Bar Ḥiyya wrote his original works in Hebrew and not, as some had thought, in Arabic^[99].

The situation was the reverse of that in al-Andalus. There, as the chapters on Baḥya and the Ibn Ezras showed, Jewish scholars wrote prose in Arabic and kept Hebrew for poetry and liturgy. North of the Pyrenees, Arabic was unknown to most Jews, and a scholar who wished to teach them had to make Hebrew carry the sciences. Bar Ḥiyya was the first to attempt this on a large scale, and Ibn Ezra continued the work a generation later.

An encyclopaedia of the sciences

The most ambitious of his works was an encyclopaedia, Yesodei ha-Tevunah u-Migdal ha-Emunah, the Foundations of Understanding and the Tower of Faith. The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls it the first encyclopaedic work in Hebrew. It was probably based on translations from Arabic, and only sections survive, dealing with geometry, arithmetic, optics and music^[97]. MacTutor describes it as an encyclopaedia of mathematics, astronomy, optics and music and as the first encyclopaedia in the Hebrew language^[96]. The Jewish Encyclopedia, written before the twentieth-century editions, reports that only a few short fragments had been preserved, in manuscripts at Parma, Berlin, Munich and Oxford^[99].

Levey describes its method. The encyclopaedia teaches both theory and practice, including not only the art of practical reckoning and business arithmetic but also the theory of numbers and geometric definition. He calls it probably the earliest algorismic work written in Western Europe, that is, a work on calculation with numerals^[98]. He also notes that its influence is not apparent in the arithmetical works of Abraham ibn Ezra or Levi ben Gershom, although they may have had a common origin^[98].

The encyclopaedia also shows what Bar Ḥiyya had read. MacTutor lists Euclid; Theodosius’ Sphaerics; Autolycus’ On the Moving Sphere; Apollonius’ Conics; Heron of Alexandria and Menelaus. Among Arab mathematicians it names al-Khwārizmī and al-Karajī^[96]. Levey adds that Bar Ḥiyya himself recommended Euclid, Theodosius, Menelaus, Autolycus, Apollonius, Eudemus of Rhodes and Heron for the study of geometry^[98]. This was the Greek mathematical canon as it had reached al-Andalus in Arabic, together with the Arabic algebra of Baghdad.

The treatise on measurement

Bar Ḥiyya’s most influential work by far, in Levey’s judgement, was his Hebrew treatise on practical geometry, Ḥibbur ha-Meshiḥah ve-ha-Tishboret, the Treatise on Measurement and Calculation^[98][96]. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, its original purpose was to help the Jews of France to measure their fields^[97]. It was a book for landowners and surveyors, and it reflects the practical skill in surveying that his offices required.

Its mathematical content was nonetheless substantial. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that it was the first Hebrew work to show that the area of a circle is πr², and the first known work, after an Egyptian papyrus of the eighteenth century BCE, to give the formula for the volume of a truncated pyramid^[97]. MacTutor states that the book contains the complete solution of the general quadratic equation and was the first text in Europe to give such a solution^[96]. Levey adds that it was among the earliest works to introduce Arab trigonometry into Europe, and the earliest to treat Euclid’s Book of Divisions^[98].

Levey also identifies an intellectual ancestry for this practical approach. He traces it to the earliest known Hebrew geometry, the Mishnat ha-Middot, which he dates to about 150 CE and regards as a link in the transmission of mathematics between Palestine and the early Arab world. Al-Khwārizmī and al-Karajī, and later Bar Ḥiyya, followed its method, and so Bar Ḥiyya provided a new bridge between cultures a thousand years after it^[98]. Following Heron rather than Euclid, Levey adds, he preferred definitions and explanations that could be aligned closely with reality^[98]. The geometry of the treatise is a subject for a separate study, and the present chapter does not attempt to describe its contents in detail.

The book of areas

The treatise reached Latin Europe through Plato of Tivoli, an Italian translator from Arabic into Latin. According to MacTutor, the Encyclopaedia Judaica and Levey, Plato translated it as Liber embadorum, the Book of Areas, in 1145^[96][97][98]. The Jewish Encyclopedia gives the date as 1116, with a question mark^[99]. The later date is the one accepted by the modern sources consulted here.

The year 1145 has a particular significance. MacTutor notes that it was also the year in which Robert of Chester translated al-Khwārizmī’s algebra, so that Bar Ḥiyya’s book was quickly joined by a second text giving the complete solution of the quadratic equation^[96]. Levey suggests that 1145 “may well be regarded as the birth year of European algebra”^[98]. MacTutor describes the Liber embadorum as the earliest Arab algebra written in Europe^[96].

Its readers included the most important European mathematician of the following century. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that the Liber embadorum was the chief source for the writings of Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa^[97]. Levey is more specific. Fibonacci, he writes, was influenced by Bar Ḥiyya and devoted an entire section of his Practica geometriae to the division of figures, the topic of Euclid’s Book of Divisions that Bar Ḥiyya had brought into a practical treatise^[98]. MacTutor’s biography of Fibonacci confirms that the Practica geometriae, written in 1220, contains a large collection of geometry problems in eight chapters, with theorems based on Euclid’s Elements and On Divisions^[100]. A Hebrew book written for the landowners of Provence thus became, in Latin, one of the foundations of European practical geometry.

Working with Plato of Tivoli

The collaboration with Plato of Tivoli went beyond this book. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes Bar Ḥiyya as one of the most important figures in the movement that made the Jews of Provence, Spain and Italy intermediaries between Islamic science and the Christian world, and notes that he served this movement not only by his own works but also by translations and by acting as interpreter for Plato^[99]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that he collaborated in several of Plato’s translations from Arabic into Latin, which played an important part in the transmission of Arabic science to Europe^[97].

Which translations he worked on is uncertain. Levey lists several that he helped to translate into Latin between 1133 and 1136, and others, including Theodosius’ Spherics and al-Battānī’s work on the motion of the stars, on which he may have worked with Plato^[98]. The Jewish Encyclopedia warns that a number of Jewish translators named Abraham were active in the twelfth century, so that it is not always possible to identify which one is meant, and gives only a list of titles^[99].

The method of these collaborations is not described in the sources consulted here. The likely pattern, in which a Jewish scholar who knew Arabic explained a text orally to a Latin scholar who wrote it down, appears more clearly in the Toledo translations of the following decades, which Chapter 16 describes. Bar Ḥiyya’s role as Plato’s interpreter, as the Jewish Encyclopedia describes it^[99], suggests that something similar was already happening in the 1130s.

Form of the earth

Bar Ḥiyya’s astronomy was written for the same Hebrew readers as his geometry. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes his main astronomical work as consisting of two parts^[97]. The first, Ṣurat ha-Areṣ ve-Tavnit Kaddurei ha-Raqiʿa, the Form of the Earth and the Figure of the Celestial Spheres, includes a geography, which the encyclopaedia describes as “a short review of lands according to the seven climates”, and which long remained the main source of geographical knowledge among Jews^[97]. It was printed at Offenbach in 1720^[97]. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that a portion was translated into Latin by Sebastian Münster and by E. O. Schreckenfuchs, and that complete Latin and French translations appear to have been made^[99].

The second part, Ḥeshbon Mahalekhot ha-Kokhavim, the Calculation of the Courses of the Stars, was often quoted, and includes a full section on intercalation, the insertion of extra months into the calendar^[97]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica regards the two parts together as probably the first exposition of the Ptolemaic system in Hebrew and the first complete textbook of astronomy in that language^[97]. Langermann places the Form of the Earth in a genre of non-technical exposition of astronomy that was immensely popular in the Middle Ages, especially among Hebrew readers^[19].

Bar Ḥiyya also compiled astronomical tables. Langermann states that the Tables of the Prince, also known as the Jerusalem Tables, are for the most part based on those of the astronomer al-Battānī. Some manuscripts include short essays and further tables, one of which compares the tables of Ptolemy with those of al-Battānī, and these additions have never been properly studied^[19]. Abraham ibn Ezra later used Bar Ḥiyya’s tables, and some manuscripts include tables by Ibn Ezra and glosses by his students^[19]. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that the presence of Ibn Ezra’s notes in these manuscripts has caused confusion between the tables of the two authors^[99]. It also states, following Steinschneider, that Bar Ḥiyya was not Ibn Ezra’s teacher^[99].

The book of intercalation

Bar Ḥiyya’s Sefer ha-ʿIbbur, the Book of Intercalation, was devoted to the Jewish calendar. MacTutor dates it to 1122–23 and calls it the first Hebrew work devoted exclusively to the study of the calendar^[96]. The Jewish Encyclopedia calls it the oldest Hebrew work on the calculation of the calendar^[99]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives the date as 1122 and quotes its stated purpose, “to enable the Jews to observe the festivals on the correct dates.” It explains the principles of intercalation and shows how to calculate both Hebrew and Arabic years, and it was often quoted and accepted as authoritative^[97]. It was first published in London in 1851^[99].

Levey states that the book exerted great influence on Maimonides and on Isaac Israeli the Younger^[98]. Maimonides’ own account of the calendar, written later in the twelfth century as part of his legal code, the Mishneh Torah, is available in a modern English translation, and it shows clearly the kind of arithmetic that Bar Ḥiyya had set out. The following section uses it to explain the calculation.

The calendar as arithmetic

The Jewish calendar combines lunar months with solar years. Its months follow the moon, but its festivals must remain in their seasons, which follow the sun. Twelve lunar months fall about eleven days short of a solar year, and so an extra month must be added in some years. In antiquity the new month was sanctified on the basis of the sighting of the moon. The fixed calendar replaced observation with calculation. Maimonides describes it as the method used when there is no court to sanctify the new moon on the testimony of witnesses who have seen it^[101].

The calculation starts from a unit of time. In Eliyahu Touger’s translation of the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides explains that “An hour can be divided into 1080 units”^[101]. The number was chosen, he says, because it can be divided into halves, quarters, eighths, thirds, sixths, ninths and tenths^[101]. Each unit is therefore three and one-third seconds, and the many divisors make it easy to express fractions of an hour in whole units.

The mean interval between one new moon and the next is then fixed. According to Maimonides, it is “twenty-nine full days, twelve hours of the thirtieth day, and 793 units of the thirteenth hour”^[101]. An ordinary year of twelve such months comes to 354 days, 8 hours and 876 units, a leap year of thirteen months to 383 days, 21 hours and 589 units, and the solar year is taken as 365 days and 6 hours^[101].

The two kinds of year are reconciled by a cycle. Maimonides writes that the fixed calendar is structured in “a nineteen-year cycle, including seven leap years and twelve ordinary years”^[101]. The leap years are the third, sixth, eighth, eleventh, fourteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth of each cycle^[101]. The reason, he explains, is that the total length of twelve ordinary and seven leap years equals nineteen solar years of 365 days and 6 hours^[101].

The equality is approximate, and simple arithmetic shows how close it is. Nineteen years contain 235 lunar months. Multiplying the length of one month by 235 gives 6,939 days, 16 hours and 595 units. Nineteen solar years of 365 days and 6 hours give 6,939 days and 18 hours. The difference is 1 hour and 485 units, or a little under an hour and a half in nineteen years. Over a single cycle the error is negligible, which is why Maimonides can treat the two totals as equal for the purposes of the calendar^[101].

The same arithmetic gives the weekday of each new moon. Because only the day of the week matters for this purpose, whole weeks can be removed. A lunar month then leaves a remainder of one day, 12 hours and 793 units, an ordinary year four days, 8 hours and 876 units, and a full nineteen-year cycle two days, 16 hours and 595 units^[101]. The figure for the cycle can be checked against the total above, since 6,939 days is two days more than an exact number of weeks. The starting point is the first new moon of creation, which Maimonides places on “Monday night, 5 hours and 204 units after nightfall”^[101]. By adding these remainders to that point, Maimonides explains, one can find the time of the new moon “for the years that have passed or for the years to come”^[101].

This is what Bar Ḥiyya meant by the calculation of Hebrew years. The system involves only addition, subtraction and division with remainders, applied to three units of time. Its difficulty lay in teaching readers to carry it out accurately, and his book was the first Hebrew attempt to explain it in full.

The astronomers of Toledo

Bar Ḥiyya drew on a tradition that had developed in al-Andalus in the century before him. Chapter 3 introduced Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī, chief judge of Toledo from 1068, and the group of astronomers he encouraged^[17]. Its most famous member was al-Zarqālī, known in Latin as Azarquiel. Roser Puig, in the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, explains that he was a renowned instrument maker in Toledo who taught himself astronomy and became a leading figure among Ṣāʿid’s astronomers^[102]. Puig names his biographer as Isḥāq Israeli^[102], apparently the Isaac Israeli the Younger whom Levey names as a reader of Bar Ḥiyya’s Book of Intercalation^[98]. If so, a Jewish astronomer was the source for the life of a Muslim one.

Al-Zarqālī’s observations were long and systematic. Puig reports that he was observing in Toledo in 1061, and that a later Seville astronomer credited him with 25 years of solar observations and 37 years of lunar observations^[102]. MacTutor gives thirty years for the moon^[103]. From his solar observations, Puig explains, he established that the solar apogee had its own motion, and he devised a solar model with variable eccentricity that remained influential in the Maghrib and in Latin Europe until the time of Copernicus^[102]. He left Toledo between 1081 and the Castilian conquest of 1085 and settled in Córdoba, under the protection of the ruler of Seville, al-Muʿtamid, and he died in Córdoba in 1100^[102].

The Toledan Tables were the most widely used product of this group. Puig describes them as an adaptation of the best available astronomical material, the tables of al-Khwārizmī and al-Battānī, to the coordinates of Toledo, made by a team led by Ṣāʿid in which al-Zarqālī seems to have been a prominent member. The tables of mean motion are original and based on observation^[102]. MacTutor states that Ṣāʿid’s group consisted of both Muslim and Jewish scholars, and that the Arabic original of the tables is lost, though two versions survive in the Latin translation of Gerard of Cremona^[103]. Gerard appears again in Chapter 16. Al-Zarqālī also designed instruments, among them a universal astrolabe plate that, according to MacTutor, became known in Latin as the saphea Arzachelis and was widely used in medieval Europe^[103].

Jābir ibn Aflaḥ and the correction of Ptolemy

A second Andalusi astronomer of this period shows how the tradition developed after Bar Ḥiyya. Emilia Calvo, in the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, describes Jābir ibn Aflaḥ as a mathematician and astronomer of twelfth-century al-Andalus, probably from Seville, who wrote a Correction of the Almagest in which he made a long series of criticisms and corrections of Ptolemy^[104]. He replaced the theorem of Menelaus that Ptolemy had used with theorems on spherical triangles, and he placed the planets Venus and Mercury above the sun rather than between the sun and the moon^[104]. Calvo describes his work as the first criticism of the Almagest in the Islamic West^[104]. It was a theoretical book, without numerical examples or tables, but it described a large instrument that Jābir claimed could replace the four instruments described by Ptolemy. Calvo notes that, apart from al-Zarqālī’s armillary sphere, this is the first description in an Andalusi text of an instrument designed for astronomical observation, and that it has been considered a forerunner of the torquetum of later European astronomy^[104]. Its influence in al-Andalus was immediate. Ibn Rushd and al-Biṭrūjī, Calvo writes, were clearly influenced by Jābir^[104]. Ibn Rushd, the philosopher known in Latin as Averroes, appears in Chapter 15.

Jābir’s work passed into Jewish hands within a generation. Calvo notes that Maimonides, in the Guide of the Perplexed, claims to have met Jābir’s son, and that Maimonides and one of his pupils revised the text in Egypt around 1185^[104]. It was translated into Hebrew twice, by Moses ibn Tibbon in 1274 and by his nephew Jacob ben Makhir, whose version was revised in 1335. Gerard of Cremona translated it into Latin, and through these translations, Calvo concludes, it reached a wide readership in Europe^[104]. The Ibn Tibbon family of translators appeared in Chapter 9.

The beginning of Hebrew mathematics

Bar Ḥiyya’s importance lies less in any single discovery than in the movement he began. MacTutor suggests that perhaps the most important feature of his work is that it appears to have stimulated interest in Arabic mathematics and, together with the work of Abraham ibn Ezra, marks the beginning of the Hebrew scholarly study of mathematics^[96]. It quotes a modern historian on what followed: “The major part of the mathematical ‘classics’ in Hebrew were translated from Arabic between the second third of the thirteenth century and the first third of the fourteenth century, within the northern littoral of the western Mediterranean”^[96]. That movement, the quotation continues, occurred after the original works of Bar Ḥiyya and Ibn Ezra became available to a wide readership^[96].

The same sources also stress how difficult he is to classify. MacTutor observes that he did not fit neatly into one culture but spanned several, and that this may be the very reason for his importance, since he brought about a cross-fertilisation of ideas between them^[96]. He learned his mathematics in Arabic, served a Christian count, wrote for Jewish readers in Hebrew and helped Latin scholars translate Arabic books. Langermann sums up his role in one sentence: he is credited with writing the first works in Hebrew on astronomy and mathematics^[19].

A moral philosopher

Bar Ḥiyya also wrote a work of religious ethics, Hegyon ha-Nefesh, the Meditation of the Soul. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes it as a treatment of creation, repentance, good and evil and the saintly life, ethical in emphasis and generally homiletical in approach, which may have been designed for reading during the Ten Days of Penitence^[97]. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes it as a homily in four chapters on repentance, and notes that he did not hesitate to borrow ideas from non-Jewish philosophers^[99]. In its reading, he held that a non-Jew may attain as high a degree of godliness as a Jew^[99].

His philosophy, like Ibn Gabirol’s, was Neoplatonic in its account of creation. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, he held that matter, being void of reality, requires form to give it existence, and that creation is the union of the two by the will of God, with time produced together with created things^[99]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica finds in his writings an original mixture of Neoplatonic, Aristotelian and rabbinic ideas, and observes that he was independent enough to prefer rabbinic to philosophical theories when he judged it necessary^[97]. Here too he wrestled, as the Jewish Encyclopedia notes, with a Hebrew not yet adapted to philosophical terminology^[99].

From Barcelona to Europe

Bar Ḥiyya’s career marks a turning point in the story of this book. Until his time, the scholars of Sefarad lived and wrote in al-Andalus, and their prose was in Arabic. Bar Ḥiyya lived in Christian Barcelona and wrote in Hebrew for Jews further north who knew no Arabic, while helping Latin scholars to read Arabic books. Within a decade of his probable death, Abraham ibn Ezra was doing the same in Italy and France.

The pattern he set would be repeated on a larger scale in Toledo. There, after the Castilian conquest of 1085, Jewish scholars who knew Arabic worked with Latin clerics to translate the library of Arabic science and philosophy, and in the thirteenth century King Alfonso X made the work a royal project. Before turning to Toledo, however, the book considers two other subjects: the Jewish physicians who carried the same learning into practice, and the Almohad invasions that drove many Jewish families from al-Andalus to the Christian north.

14. Physicians of Sefarad

Of all the professions open to the Jews of medieval Iberia, medicine was the one in which they were most conspicuous. Several of the figures in earlier chapters practised it. Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut rose to power in caliphal Córdoba as a physician, and Judah Halevi earned his living as a doctor in Toledo. Abraham ibn Ezra, by contrast, refused to practise it on principle. Maimonides, the most famous Jewish physician of the Middle Ages, was born in Córdoba. This chapter steps back from individual biographies to consider the profession as a whole, from the court physicians of al-Andalus to the licensed practitioners of the Christian kingdoms in the fourteenth century.

The scale of Jewish involvement is now known in some detail. In a paper given to the Association for Jewish Studies in 2010, Maud Kozodoy summarised the archival work of social historians such as Michael McVaugh and Joseph Shatzmiller, which has shown a vastly disproportionate number of medical professionals among the Jewish minority of late medieval Castile, the Crown of Aragon and Provence^[105]. In the early fourteenth century, she notes, Jews made up a third of all the doctors listed in the archives of Barcelona, a city whose Jewish population was about 5 per cent of the total, and this proportion was not unusual. After the Black Death, it has been estimated, 20 to 30 per cent of the medical practitioners serving the Christian population of Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia and Majorca were Jews. Next to money-lending, medicine was the most common form of employment for Jews^[105].

Why medicine

The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey of Jewish medicine offers several explanations. Jewish scholars, and physicians among them, commanded the three most important learned languages of the age, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew, and sometimes Greek, which allowed them to translate Arabic and Greek medical works into Hebrew and Latin^[106]. Medicine was also regarded as a spiritual vocation compatible with the career of a rabbi, and an honourable way of earning a living. The curriculum of the talmudic schools often included the philosophy and sciences of the time, so that medieval Jewish physicians were frequently also rabbis, scholars, scientists, translators, grammarians or poets^[106].

The same survey records how the reputation of Jewish physicians was perceived by Christians. The English scholar Roger Bacon, it notes, declared that Christian physicians were ignorant compared with their Jewish colleagues, because they lacked knowledge of the Hebrew and Arabic in which most medical works were written^[106]. Esteem did not bring security. The encyclopaedia records that, from the fourth century onward, numerous regulations, papal bulls and royal ordinances forbade Jewish physicians to treat non-Jews, to hold official positions and later to study at universities. That Jewish physicians nevertheless held high positions at the courts of the very authorities who preached against them, it argues, attests to the esteem in which their skill was held^[106]. Muslim rulers, it adds, were in this respect much more tolerant. Physicians were not singled out in persecutions, and consulting them was not forbidden^[106].

Not every Jewish scholar approved of the profession. Abraham ibn Ezra, as Chapter 12 noted, was not a physician, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he explained his objection of principle to the profession in his long and short commentaries on Exodus 21:19^[20]. His dissent is a reminder that the profession’s religious standing, which the Encyclopaedia Judaica regards as one reason for its popularity, could itself be debated.

The Andalusi tradition

The medicine that Jewish physicians practised in al-Andalus was the Greek medicine of Galen and Hippocrates, transmitted and developed in Arabic. Chapter 4 described the revision of Dioscorides’ book of medicinal plants at the court of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, in which Ḥasdai took part^[46]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey counts Ḥasdai as the first of a line of Jewish physicians of the Arab-Spanish period who, as statesmen, physicians, mathematicians, philosophers and poets, attained high positions at the courts of Muslim and Christian princes^[106].

The greatest surgeon of caliphal Córdoba was a Muslim contemporary of Ḥasdai. According to Sami Hamarneh’s article in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Abū al-Qāsim al-Zahrāwī, known in Latin as Abulcasis, was born at Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ near Córdoba about 936 and died there about 1013^[107]. His only known work, a medical encyclopaedia in thirty treatises, was completed about the year 1000 and was the result of almost fifty years of medical education and experience. It dealt with surgery, midwifery, pharmacy, materia medica, diet, weights and measures and medical terminology, among other subjects^[107]. Hamarneh regards his surgery as the most advanced of the Middle Ages until the thirteenth century, and notes that his illustrations of surgical instruments are the earliest known to be intended for teaching^[107]. Hamarneh also stresses his views on the profession itself. Al-Zahrāwī tried to separate medical practice from alchemy, theology and philosophy, advocated specialisation in the health professions, called for high ethical standards and stressed the part that time plays in treatment and cure^[107]. He devoted a substantial section of his encyclopaedia to the education of children, the school curriculum and academic specialisation, and he encouraged intelligent and gifted students to study medicine once they had completed a primary education in language, religion, grammar, poetry, mathematics, astronomy, logic and philosophy^[107]. The list is close to the education that the Encyclopaedia Judaica attributes to Jewish physician-scholars of the period^[106], and it explains why the same men could be poets, astronomers and doctors.

Gerard of Cremona translated his writings into Latin^[107], and the Encyclopaedia Judaica records that Abraham Shem Tov of Tortosa, who practised in Marseilles at the end of the thirteenth century, translated the encyclopaedia into Hebrew, introducing a new Hebrew medical terminology based largely on terms used in the Talmud^[106]. Thus a Córdoban Muslim surgeon reached Jewish readers in Provence through a Catalan Jewish translator.

A pharmacologist in Saragossa

The taifa courts that succeeded the caliphate also employed Jewish physicians. The best documented is Jonah ibn Biklārish. Levey, in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, describes him as a physician and authority on materia medica at the end of the eleventh century, who served as court physician to the Hūdid dynasty of Saragossa^[108]. In 1106 he completed what Levey calls probably the most important Arabic pharmacological treatise, the Kitāb al-Mustaʿīnī, dedicated to al-Mustaʿīn, the fourth Hūdid ruler of Saragossa^[108].

The book was a work of reference on a large scale. Levey describes it as a work of nearly 500 pages, larger than folio size, which sets out in tables the names of hundreds of drugs, their nature and function, their names in Greek, Persian, Syriac, Latin and sometimes Berber, and lists of substitutes with their properties and methods of use^[108]. Its introduction, based on Galen, Dioscorides and others, shows him to have been one of the outstanding medical men of his time. Maimonides apparently used the work in his Glossary of Medicines, although without naming it^[108]. Three manuscripts survive, at Leiden, Madrid and Naples^[108].

The survey article in the same encyclopaedia describes him as one of the first Jewish scholars to learn Latin, and dates to about 1080 a multilingual dictionary of drugs that it believes to be the earliest work of its kind^[106]. The two articles appear to describe the same work with different dates, and Levey’s date of 1106, tied to the dedication, is the more specific. Chapter 8 followed Ibn Gabirol to the Jewish patrons of Saragossa. Ibn Biklārish shows that the learning of that city also extended to pharmacy.

Physicians at Christian courts

The Christian conquest of Toledo in 1085 did not end the Jewish physician’s role at court. It transferred it. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes Joseph ha-Nasi Ferrizuel, known as Cidellus, as the physician of Alfonso VI of Castile^[109]. He received property in and around Toledo after its capture, and was active on behalf of the Jews of Guadalajara when that town was taken in the same year. His standing at court appears from his part in proposing a marriage for the king’s daughter Urraca on behalf of the Castilian nobles. When Alfonso rejected the proposal, Ferrizuel lost favour^[109]. He helped Jews who fled from Muslim Spain to the Christian kingdoms, and Judah Halevi dedicated poems to him and to his nephew Solomon^[109]. His influence extended to communal affairs. Abraham ibn Daud, the encyclopaedia notes, relates that he treated the Karaites ruthlessly and expelled them from the strongholds of Castile^[109]. In 1110 he witnessed a charter of immunities granted by Queen Urraca, and nothing is known of him after that date. He had probably died by 1145, when Alfonso VII gave his property to the cathedral of Toledo^[109]. Ferrizuel was a physician who acted as a political patron, as Ḥasdai had done in Córdoba. Halevi himself, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, practised medicine for a time in Christian Toledo, apparently for the king and the nobility^[78].

The same pattern appears in the Crown of Aragon. Sheshet Benveniste of Barcelona, who lived from about 1131 to 1209, entered the service of the count of Barcelona in his youth and later served Alfonso II and, from 1196, Pedro II of Aragon as physician, translator into Arabic, political adviser and diplomatic envoy, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica^[110]. He also took part in the fiscal administration, enjoyed exemption from taxes and legal immunity, and regulated the affairs of the Barcelona synagogue by royal privilege. He wrote Hebrew poetry and medical works that survive in manuscript, and Benjamin of Tudela and Judah al-Ḥarizi, who met him in Barcelona, praised him highly^[110]. He was also a patron of letters. Joseph ibn Zabara dedicated to him his Sefer ha-Shaʿashuʿim, the Book of Delight, and Sheshet regarded Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah as the basic authority in Jewish law and vigorously championed Maimonides’ philosophical views^[110], an early sign of the debates that Chapter 15 describes. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey adds that he wrote a well-known gynaecological treatise in Arabic^[106].

In thirteenth-century Castile a prominent example was the physician known as al-Fakhār. The survey records that he died in 1235 and that he bore the title of nasi at Ferdinand III’s court in Toledo^[106]. Such men combined medicine with finance, diplomacy and communal leadership. Their medical skill gave them access to the king’s person, and that access gave them influence.

Physicians of Almoravid Seville

Muslim al-Andalus continued to employ Jewish physicians under the Almoravids, despite the deterioration of Jewish life described in Chapter 10. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Seville records that under ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf, who ruled from 1106 to 1143, Abū Ayyūb Sulaymān ibn al-Muʿallim of Seville served as court physician, while Abraham ibn Kamniel served as a diplomat^[59]. Solomon ibn al-Muʿallim, as Chapter 11 noted, was one of the physician-poets to whom Judah Halevi wrote^[86]. The article adds that Seville was then a major cultural centre, and that its Jews suffered the same fate as the other Andalusian communities after the Almohad conquest^[59].

Ibn Zuhr and the medicine of Seville

The last great Andalusi physician whose work reached Jewish readers was a Muslim of Seville. Hamarneh’s second article in the same dictionary dates the life of Abū Marwān ibn Zuhr, known in Latin as Avenzoar, from about 1092, when he was born in Seville, to 1162, when he died there^[111]. He served the Almoravid rulers, was imprisoned by his patron about 1141 after what Hamarneh calls apparently a misunderstanding, and after the Almoravids fell was welcomed by the first Almohad ruler, ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, who appointed him court physician and adviser^[111]. For his new patron he prepared a theriac, the compound antidote of ancient medicine, as a safeguard against poisoning by his enemies, and wrote a treatise on diet^[111].

His best-known book was written for a philosopher. Hamarneh states that Ibn Zuhr became a close friend of Ibn Rushd, the philosopher known in Latin as Averroes, who asked him to write a book on the treatment of particular diseases, the Taysīr, which Ibn Zuhr dedicated to him. Ibn Rushd wrote his own book on the general principles of medicine as a supplement to it^[111]. Hamarneh notes that Ibn Zuhr’s works were translated and widely circulated in Latin and Hebrew, and that, although a follower of Hippocrates and Galen, he developed numerous original ideas through experiment and observation. He urged physicians to use mild drugs and to watch the patient’s reactions, especially for the first three days^[111]. Medicine ran in his family. Hamarneh notes that his daughter became one of the better-known midwives of the Islamic world and that a son became a physician and poet^[111]. Chapter 15 returns to Ibn Rushd and the Almohad court.

Maimonides the physician

The most famous of all Jewish physicians from Sefarad practised far from it. Maimonides was born in Córdoba, fled with his family during the Almohad persecutions and served the court of Saladin’s family in Egypt. His medical career is described in detail in Nekud’s long read on his life, which discusses the medical works he wrote while serving the Ayyubid court^[112]. The present chapter notes only how his medicine connects with that of al-Andalus.

He remained, in his own self-description, a man of Córdoba. The Posen Library prints the opening of his Medical Aphorisms in Gerrit Bos’s translation, which begins “Says Mūsā ibn ‘Ubayd Allāh, the Israelite, from Córdoba”^[113]. The library’s introduction explains that the work is a large reference book in twenty-five chapters, in which Maimonides selected medical views from Galen’s writings and rearranged and reworked them, and that he worked on it for many years and completed it towards the end of his life^[113]. Maimonides himself disclaimed originality: “I do not claim to have authored these aphorisms that I have set down in writing”^[113]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey states that he wrote ten medical works, all in Arabic, and that most were soon translated into Hebrew and Latin^[106]. As noted above, he apparently drew on the pharmacology of Ibn Biklārish of Saragossa^[108].

His medical training was western. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Maimonides suggests that he was probably first taught medicine by his father and pursued his studies during the years his family spent in Fez^[21]. In his treatise on asthma he describes discussions with a Jewish physician of the Ibn al-Muʿallim family and with a son of Ibn Zuhr^[21]. His commentary on drugs refers to “our physicians in the West”, gives the names of drugs in Berber and Spanish as well as Arabic, and quotes by name only Andalusi and Moroccan physicians, among them Ibn Juljul, whose account of the Córdoban revision of Dioscorides appeared in Chapter 4^[21]. The medicine that Maimonides practised in Cairo was, in this sense, the medicine of al-Andalus.

The same article describes its character. His teaching, based on the humoral pathology of Hippocrates and Galen, was strictly rational. He strongly disapproved of charms, incantations and amulets in treating the sick, spoke out against blind belief in authority and encouraged his students to observe and reason critically^[21]. He also insisted that the physician matters not only in sickness but also in health, and must take a comprehensive view of the patient and his circumstances^[21]. His reputation among Muslims was high. The article cites the testimony of the historians Ibn al-Qifṭī and Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, and of the Baghdad physician ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, who visited him in Cairo in 1201. It also quotes, in B. L. Gordon’s translation, a poem of praise by a grateful patient preserved by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, which opens “Galen’s art heals only the body” and goes on to claim that Maimonides healed the soul as well^[21].

The medical marketplace

After the twelfth century the centre of Jewish medical life moved to the Christian kingdoms and to Provence, and the evidence changes in kind. Instead of court biographies, historians have archives. The work of Luis García-Ballester, collected in his Medicine in a Multicultural Society, deals with medicine and natural philosophy in Castile and Aragon between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Its publisher’s description presents Spain as unique in having a medical marketplace that united Christian, Jewish, Muslim and converso practitioners, and the processes of cultural exchange that resulted as the book’s main theme^[114]. The healers in that marketplace, the description notes, included physicians, surgeons, barbers and apothecaries from all the religious communities^[114].

The book’s contents indicate the questions this research has addressed. They include medical licensing and learning in fourteenth-century Valencia, the Jewish appreciation of fourteenth-century scholastic medicine, the role of Jewish physicians in changes to the regimens of health, and the use of Arabic medical sources by Jewish, Muslim and Christian practitioners in late medieval Spain^[114]. Licensing, the subject of the Valencia study, brought Jewish practitioners within the same system of examination and authorisation as Christian ones. The detailed figures of that study have not been consulted for this chapter.

Kozodoy adds that the archives do not tell the whole story. Hundreds of medical manuscripts from medieval Iberia and Provence survive in libraries around the world, most of them still unedited, including the Hebrew versions of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine^[105]. Recent research, she notes, has clarified what kinds of medical knowledge were valued, the importance of Arabic and of the Occitan and Catalan vernaculars in transmitting it, and how far practising Jewish physicians knew Latin^[105].

Translators and schools

Much of this medical knowledge reached later Jewish physicians through translation. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey explains that the principal service of the Jewish scholars of southern France, many of whom had come from Spain, was the translation of Arabic works into Hebrew and Latin, and that some Arabic works survive only in their Hebrew translations^[106]. Avicenna’s Canon was translated into Latin and Hebrew several times. The most notable translators were the Ibn Tibbon family, who in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries translated most of the well-known scientific and philosophical works, including those of Maimonides, from Arabic into Hebrew^[106].

The same survey describes the learned setting of this work. The medical school of Montpellier, it states, owed its foundation largely to Jewish scholars, and records mention private schools in which Hebrew law, science and medicine were taught for a fee^[106]. It also records the work of Abraham ben David Caslari of Narbonne and Béziers, who wrote a treatise on fevers in 1326 and another on pestilential fevers in 1349, when the Black Death devastated Provence, Catalonia and Aragon^[106]. Women also practised. The survey notes a contract of 1326 in Marseilles in which a Jewish widow, Sara de Saint Gilles, undertook to teach medicine to a pupil for seven months in return for his fees during that period^[106].

A profession at risk

The Jewish physician’s position was always precarious. The same skills that brought him to court made him visible, and the restrictions that the Encyclopaedia Judaica describes, from papal bulls to royal ordinances, were renewed repeatedly^[106]. Kozodoy’s figures for the period after the Black Death show how much Christian society depended on Jewish physicians^[105], but that dependence did not protect the communities of Castile and Aragon from the violence of 1391, which a later chapter describes.

The tradition outlasted the expulsion. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that many eminent physicians had left Spain and Portugal for North Africa, Turkey, Greece, Italy and Holland before the expulsions of the 1490s, and that forced converts and their descendants continued to practise in the Iberian kingdoms, and became leaders in medicine elsewhere in Europe, for centuries afterwards^[106]. The physicians of Sefarad thus carried the medicine of Córdoba, Saragossa and Seville into early modern Europe.

15. The Almohad Storm and Its Scholars

In the middle of the twelfth century the world described in the previous chapters came to an end. A new Berber movement from the Atlas Mountains, the Almohads, overthrew the Almoravids in North Africa, crossed into al-Andalus and abolished the protected status that Jews and Christians had held under earlier Muslim rulers. The Jewish communities of Córdoba, Seville, Lucena and Granada were forced to choose between conversion, exile and death. Many went north to the Christian kingdoms, and the centre of Jewish life in the peninsula moved with them.

This chapter follows that catastrophe and three scholars who lived through it. Abraham ibn Daud fled to Toledo, where he wrote a history of the Jewish tradition and the first Aristotelian treatise of Jewish philosophy. Moses Maimonides left Córdoba as a boy and became the greatest Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages in Egypt. Ibn Rushd, known in Latin as Averroes, was a Muslim of Córdoba who served the Almohad court and whose commentaries on Aristotle found a second home among Jewish philosophers. Maimonides is treated briefly here, since Nekud’s long read on his life covers his career in detail^[112].

From Almoravids to Almohads

The Almoravids, whose conquest of al-Andalus after 1090 was described in Chapter 10, were themselves a Berber confederation with a reforming programme. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on the Almohads, by Michael Laskier, explains that their successors were influenced by puritanical notions of Islam to an even greater degree^[27]. The movement was inspired by the teaching of Ibn Tūmart, who died in 1130. His doctrine combined a strict conception of the unity of God with a programme of moral reform based on the Qurʾān and the Sunna, and the name of his followers, al-Muwaḥḥidūn, means those who advocate the unity of God^[27]. In 1121 he proclaimed himself the Mahdī, the divinely guided leader, openly questioned the legitimacy of Almoravid rule and began a long war against it^[27].

Under his successor ʿAbd al-Muʾmin the Almohads brought down the Almoravid state in 1147 and made Marrakesh their capital^[27]. Their conquest of al-Andalus followed, although Laskier notes that Almoravid domains in Spain were not finally taken until the caliph Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf forced the surrender of Seville in 1172^[27]. The Almohads ruled the south of the peninsula until their defeat by a coalition of Christian kingdoms at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212^[27].

The conquest of al-Andalus

The sources date the beginning of the persecution in Spain differently. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Spain, by Eliyahu Ashtor, states that the Almohads began their conquest of Muslim Spain in 1146, and its article on Lucena dates the persecution of that community to 1146^[2][4]. The Jewish Encyclopedia’s article on Spain dates the conquest of Córdoba to 1148, followed by Seville, Lucena, Montilla, Aguilar and Baena, and states that within a year the whole of Andalusia was in Almohad hands^[3]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Granada gives the period of Almohad rule there as 1148 to 1212^[28]. Abraham ibn Ezra’s elegy on the persecution, discussed in Chapter 12, was dated by the Jewish Encyclopedia to a persecution that began in 1142^[92]. The differences reflect a conquest that proceeded city by city over several years.

The consequences are described in similar terms by all the sources. According to Ashtor, the conquest put an end to the flourishing Jewish communities of Andalusia. The practice of Judaism was forbidden, synagogues and academies were closed, and Jews were compelled to embrace Islam^[2]. The Jewish Encyclopedia adds that the conquerors confiscated Jewish property, that wives and children were taken and many sold as slaves, and that the persecution lasted for ten years^[3]. Of Lucena, which had been one of the principal centres of rabbinic learning in Spain^[112], the Encyclopaedia Judaica writes that the community, like many other Andalusian communities, totally disappeared^[4]. Córdoba’s community was destroyed^[29].

The end of the dhimma

The Almohad policy broke with the established practice of Islamic states. Under the dhimma, Jews and Christians had been tolerated as protected communities who paid a special tax in return for the right to practise their religion^[112]. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on Maimonides summarises the Almohad alternative: they offered all non-Muslims “the choice of conversion, exile, or death”^[115]. Laskier notes that no complaints of excess, coercion or malice by the authorities against Jews had been recorded in the Maghreb before 1147^[27]. Later, under Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb al-Manṣūr, who ruled from 1184 to 1199, many Jews were forced to convert, and those who had converted but were suspected of practising Judaism in secret were compelled to wear distinctive clothing, including a cap reaching down to their ears^[27].

The Jews were not the only victims. Laskier points out that the Mālikī school of Sunni law was banned in Almohad North Africa and its leading works were burned in public^[27]. The movement was also less monolithic than its doctrine suggests. Laskier notes that its puritanical orientation waned among Ibn Tūmart’s followers after his death, that the Almohad rulers built lavish monuments, and that both the Sufi mystical movement and the philosophy of Ibn Ṭufayl and Ibn Rushd flourished under them^[27].

Many Jews remained and conformed outwardly. Ashtor writes that some professed Islam in public while observing Judaism in secret, which he calls “an ominous portent of the Conversos in Christian Spain a century later”^[2]. He adds that in 1162 these secret Jews took part in a revolt against the Almohads, particularly in Granada^[2]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Granada records that only converts to Islam were permitted to live in the city during Almohad rule, and that the attempt of Jews and Christians to overthrow that rule in 1162 failed^[28].

Flight to the north

Those who could leave went north or east. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that a great number fled to Castile, whose ruler, Alfonso VII, received them hospitably, especially in Toledo, and that others went to northern Spain and Provence, where the Kimḥi family of grammarians found refuge^[3]. Maimonides’ family went the other way, to Morocco and eventually Egypt^[115].

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Toledo became the new centre. Chapter 14 noted the physician Joseph Ferrizuel, who helped refugees from Muslim Spain in an earlier generation^[109]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Toledo records that under Sancho III, in 1157 and 1158, the office of almoxarife, the royal treasurer, was held by Judah ibn Ezra, who received lands and tax exemptions from the king and was known for his energetic campaign against the Karaites in Castile^[38]. Under Alfonso VIII, when Toledo was again threatened by the Almohads, Joseph al-Fakhār and his son Abraham, originally from Granada, held the same office, as did members of the Ibn Ezra family^[38]. The language of the Toledan Jews and of their documents in this period, the article notes, was partly Arabic^[38]. The refugees brought the culture of al-Andalus with them into a Christian city.

Abraham ibn Daud of Toledo

Abraham ibn Daud is the Toledan refugee whose writings survive most fully. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives his dates as about 1110 to 1180 and describes him as a historian, philosopher, physician and astronomer^[12]. He was born in Córdoba, a grandson of Isaac ibn Albalia, the astronomer and talmudist who had been close to the Nagids of Granada^[63], and spent his formative years in the home of his maternal uncle, Baruch ibn Albalia, who was his teacher^[12]. Resianne Fontaine and Amira Eran, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, note that this uncle was a teacher and communal leader in Córdoba who died in 1126, and that Ibn Daud’s education evidently combined Greek wisdom, meaning the sciences and philosophy as taught by Muslim scholars, with traditional Jewish learning^[13].

After the Almohad conquest he fled to Castile and settled in Toledo, the city with which he was most deeply associated^[12]. Fontaine and Eran write that the move was presumably a result of the Almohad invasion of 1147, and that it was in Toledo that he wrote his two major works around 1160 or 1161^[13]. He is reported to have died a martyr’s death there about 1180. Fontaine and Eran note that the earliest reference to this comes from the Toledan philosopher Judah ben Solomon ha-Kohen in the first half of the thirteenth century^[13].

The book of tradition

Earlier chapters have drawn on Ibn Daud’s Sefer ha-Qabbalah, the Book of Tradition, for its accounts of Ḥasdai, Samuel ha-Nagid and the rise of the Spanish rabbinate. Here the question is what kind of book it was. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that it was written in 1160–61 as a polemic against Karaite teaching, the movement that rejected the authority of the rabbinic Oral Law. It sets out the chain by which the Law was handed down from Moses to the sages of the author’s own day, in order to show that Scripture fulfils itself only within the rabbinic tradition^[12]. A full third of the work is devoted to Spain, which reflects Ibn Daud’s emphasis on the independence of the Spanish centre from Babylonia, and the book ends with the destruction of the Andalusian communities by the Almohads and the founding of a new rabbinic centre in Toledo^[12].

The book was the first part of a larger historical work. Fontaine and Eran explain that it was followed by a history of Rome, which placed Spain in a broad Christian context and formed a polemic against Christianity, a history of the kings of Israel in the Second Temple period, based largely on the tenth-century Book of Josippon, and a commentary on prophecies of redemption in Zechariah^[13]. They describe its main theme as religious and political authority, and its purpose as consolation^[13].

Scholars disagree about how far the book carries a hidden message. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that Gerson Cohen convincingly argued that its account of Jewish history conveys a message of messianic redemption^[12]. Fontaine and Eran report that this thesis has been challenged by more recent scholars, and that others emphasise its political and polemical message of consolation instead^[13]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica also notes that modern scholarship no longer treats it as objective history, although it remains a significant source for the life and thought of twelfth-century Spain^[12]. It was first printed at Mantua in 1514 and was widely read by Jewish and Christian Hebraist readers^[12][13].

The exalted faith

Ibn Daud’s philosophical treatise, written in Arabic with a title meaning The Exalted Faith, is known through its Hebrew translation as ha-Emunah ha-Ramah. As Chapter 9 noted, Fontaine and Eran regard it as the first methodical effort to bring Aristotelian philosophy into Judaism^[13]. Its sources were the Muslim Aristotelians al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā, from whom Ibn Daud took his philosophical terminology and his syllogistic method^[13].

He was conscious of breaking with his predecessors. Fontaine and Eran note that in his introduction he mentions only two earlier Jewish philosophers, Saadia Gaon and Solomon ibn Gabirol, and dismisses both as inadequate for his purpose. Saadia’s rationalism belonged to the theology of the kalām, which was considered outdated by then. Ibn Gabirol’s Fountain of Life, which Chapter 8 described, was Neoplatonic and did not refer to Jewish sources at all^[13]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica adds that he subjected Ibn Gabirol’s Neoplatonism to severe criticism^[12].

The book was also an answer to Judah Halevi. Neither Fontaine and Eran nor the Encyclopaedia Judaica find Halevi named in it, but both see the work as a response to his critique of philosophy in the Kuzari^[13][12]. In Fontaine and Eran’s summary, whereas Halevi regarded philosophy as a threat to religion, for Ibn Daud it was indispensable to it, since the study of philosophy leads a person to accept the religious commandments, even those whose reason is obscure^[13]. The argument that Halevi had made in Toledo a generation earlier was thus answered in the same city.

The problem of free will, which Ibn Daud named as his reason for writing, is addressed only at the end of the book^[13]. Following Ibn Sīnā, he held that God cannot be the agent of evil. Evil in nature is due to matter, and is a privation, as darkness is the absence of light. In human beings it arises from matter and the lack of knowledge, from which a person can free himself through knowledge and through the Torah^[13]. Human choice, he argued, is neither necessary nor impossible but possible. Fontaine and Eran illustrate his distinction between two kinds of possibility with his own example. That the people of Spain do not know whether the king of Babylon died today makes the matter possible for them only because of their ignorance, whereas the possibilities that God created as genuinely open admit of either outcome^[13]. Here too he drew on Halevi, using a fourfold division of causes that he found in the Kuzari, in which the last category consists of causes due to choice^[13]. His critic and his source were the same man.

The treatise was soon overshadowed. Fontaine and Eran note that only a few decades later Maimonides wrote his Guide of the Perplexed, which has much in common with it, and that Ibn Daud’s book was soon superseded^[13]. They quote the historian Isaac Husik: “We feel tempted to say that if not for Ibn Daud there would have been no Maimonides”^[13]. Maimonides never mentions Ibn Daud, but the Encyclopaedia Judaica judges that the parallels in doctrine, exegesis and intended audience suggest that he knew the work^[12]. The Arabic original is lost. It was translated into Hebrew twice towards the end of the fourteenth century, first by Solomon ben Lavi, possibly at the instigation of Ḥasdai Crescas, and then by Samuel ibn Motot^[13][12]. Fontaine and Eran date the first translation to about 1370, with a question mark, while the Encyclopaedia Judaica dates it to about 1391–92^[13][12].

Avendauth

Ibn Daud may also have had a second career. Fontaine and Eran report that since 1954 scholars have discussed Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny’s suggestion that he was the same person as Avendauth, a twelfth-century translator from Arabic into Latin, called “Avendeuth philosophus israelita”, who worked with Dominicus Gundissalinus in Toledo^[13]. Recent studies of the Toledan translations, they write, have provided strong support for the identification, and portray Avendauth as the driving force behind the Latin translations of Ibn Sīnā^[13]. If the identification is correct, the same Toledan scholar defended Judaism in Hebrew and Arabic and helped to bring Arabic philosophy into Latin. Chapter 16 returns to Avendauth and Gundissalinus.

Maimonides in brief

Moses ben Maimon was born in Córdoba. The traditional date is 30 March 1135, but Maimonides’ own statement about his age when he completed his Commentary on the Mishnah has led Herbert Davidson and Joel Kraemer to place his birth in 1137 or 1138, the date that most recent scholarship accepts^[112]. The Stanford Encyclopedia gives 1138^[115], the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Córdoba 1135^[29].

He was about ten when Córdoba fell to the Almohads in 1148^[112]. His family left the city and moved from place to place in southern Spain for a decade or more, and in 1159 or 1160 settled in Fez^[112][115]. Whether they outwardly professed Islam there, as some Muslim authors state, remains disputed^[112]. After a journey to the Land of Israel they settled in Fustat in Egypt, where Maimonides wrote his Commentary on the Mishnah, his code of law, the Mishneh Torah, and his Guide of the Perplexed, and served as a physician to the Ayyubid court^[112][115]. These works and their reception are the subject of Nekud’s essay, and are not repeated here.

Two points connect him to this chapter. The first is the Almohad experience itself. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that despite the Almohads’ intolerance there is some reason to think that Maimonides was influenced by their thought, following the work of Sarah Stroumsa^[115]. Sarah Pessin’s companion entry on the influence of Islamic thought on Maimonides reports Stroumsa’s argument that many Almohad theological and legal principles influenced him, and that the radical conception of divine unity found in Almohad theology is one of the strands behind his negative theology^[116]. The persecutors of his youth may thus have shaped his thought. The second point is his debt to the scholars of al-Andalus. He was formed by the scientific and philosophical culture described in the previous chapters, and, as Chapters 13 and 14 noted, he revised Jābir ibn Aflaḥ’s astronomy and used the pharmacology of Ibn Biklārish^[104][108].

Ibn Rushd and the Almohad court

The third figure of this chapter was a Muslim who served the Almohads. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on Ibn Rushd states that he was born in Córdoba in 1126, into an influential Andalusian family known for its judicial power and its learning in the religious sciences. His grandfather and namesake was a famous judge and jurist of the Mālikī school, and so the philosopher is known as the grandson to distinguish him^[117]. He was 22 when the Almohads came to power in the western Maghreb and al-Andalus. Since his family had been close to the Almoravids, the entry explains, he needed to show his commitment to the new rulers and their creed, and some testimonies suggest that he adopted Ibn Tūmart’s doctrine at some point^[117].

He rose quickly. The entry records a meeting with the second Almohad ruler, Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf, who reigned from 1163 to 1184 and who officially asked Ibn Rushd to comment on the works of Aristotle and make them accessible^[117]. He later became chief physician to the caliph in Marrakesh. As Chapter 14 noted, he was a close friend of the physician Ibn Zuhr, who wrote his book on therapeutics at Ibn Rushd’s request^[111]. His relations with the Almohad creed were complex and changed over time, and towards the end of his career he fell from favour, for reasons that remain unclear, and was exiled to Lucena, the former Jewish city south-east of Córdoba^[117]. According to one account he died in 1198 while confined to a residence in Marrakesh^[117].

His work was vast. The Stanford Encyclopedia lists medicine, logic and every branch of philosophy, including natural philosophy, astronomy, metaphysics, psychology, politics and ethics, together with Islamic jurisprudence, theology and Arabic grammar^[117]. His commentaries on Aristotle covered nearly the whole Aristotelian corpus, and he also commented on Galen, Plato, Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Bājja^[117], and he explained his devotion to Aristotle with the claim that “no one who has come after him to this our time—and this is close to 1500 years later—has been able to add a word worthy of attention to what he said”^[117].

Truth does not oppose truth

Ibn Rushd also wrote on the place of philosophy within religion. The Stanford Encyclopedia explains that his Decisive Treatise argues forcefully that philosophy should have a prominent place in religious reflection, and specifically in Islamic law, without establishing any hierarchy between philosophy and true religion^[117]. In its most famous passage, as the Stanford Encyclopedia quotes it, he writes “For truth does not oppose truth, but rather agrees with and bears witness to it”^[117]. The entry identifies the implicit target as al-Ghazālī’s condemnation of metaphysics. To forbid philosophy to those capable of it, Ibn Rushd argued, was an injustice both to God and to the scholars themselves^[117].

The argument was close to Ibn Daud’s. Both men wrote in the third quarter of the twelfth century, one in Toledo and the other at the Almohad court, against critics who regarded philosophy as a danger to faith, al-Ghazālī in Ibn Rushd’s case and, implicitly, Judah Halevi in Ibn Daud’s^[117][13]. Neither is known to have read the other. The parallel shows how far Jewish and Muslim thinkers of al-Andalus shared the same questions as well as the same Greek sources.

The commentator in Hebrew

Ibn Rushd’s influence among Jews was greater than among Muslims in the centuries after his death. The Stanford Encyclopedia states that his philosophy quickly found a second home in Judaism, where it became so prominent as even to supplant Aristotle as the paramount authority in philosophy and science^[117]. The first and critical event was Maimonides’ acquisition of his commentaries, perhaps around 1190. His praise of them precipitated a four-century fascination with Ibn Rushd among Jewish philosophers^[117].

Translation followed. From 1230 onward, the entry explains, a series of translations from Arabic into Hebrew made his texts available to Jewish authors who increasingly wrote in Hebrew, and by 1340 virtually all of his commentaries existed in Hebrew, even though very little of Aristotle himself had been translated^[117]. Jewish scholars then wrote commentaries on his commentaries, of which the leading example is the series by Gersonides in the 1320s^[117]. The entry adds that some of Ibn Rushd’s lost works survive only in medieval Hebrew or Latin translations^[117], and that Renaissance Latin translators drew on the earlier Hebrew versions^[117].

The two Córdobans never met, as far as is known, but their lives ran in parallel. Both were born in Córdoba within about a dozen years of each other, and both were jurists and physicians as well as philosophers. One served the Almohads and the other fled them. Within a century of their deaths, Jewish scholars in Provence and Spain were reading both in Hebrew.

The Maimonidean controversy

The philosophy that Ibn Daud, Maimonides and Ibn Rushd represented provoked resistance. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on the Maimonidean controversy describes it as a vast complex of disputed cultural, religious and social problems, which concerned the relation of reason and philosophy to faith and tradition, what a Jew might study, the interpretation of biblical anthropomorphism, the resurrection of the body and the form of the Mishneh Torah^[118]. In the Middle Ages, it explains, the controversy had four climaxes: during Maimonides’ last years, after the Mishneh Torah appeared in 1180; around 1230–35, centred in Provence; in 1288–90 in the Near East; and around 1300–06, centred in Christian Spain and Provence^[118].

Spain was involved from the start. The article records that Meir ben Todros ha-Levi Abulafia of Toledo, in many respects a sincere admirer of Maimonides, was shocked by what he took to be Maimonides’ denial of bodily resurrection and wrote an angry letter to the scholars of Lunel^[118]. In 1232 opponents of philosophy in Provence, including Jonah ben Abraham Gerondi, a relative of Naḥmanides, persuaded the rabbis of northern France to ban the study of philosophy, including Maimonides’ Guide and the philosophical first book of his code^[118]. The last medieval climax ended with a limited ban on philosophy in Barcelona in 1305^[118].

The arguments of the opponents were consistent. The Encyclopaedia Judaica summarises them under three heads. Theologically, philosophers were accused of denying miracles, treating prophecy as a natural phenomenon, undermining the authority of the Torah and rejecting traditional eschatology. Exegetically, they were charged with indiscriminate allegory and with denying the historicity of biblical persons and events. In practice, they were suspected of laxity in observing the commandments^[118].

One of the sharpest voices came from Spain. In the controversy of the 1230s the grammarian and exegete David Kimḥi travelled through Provence to rally support for Maimonides, and was surprised to receive a bitter reply from Judah ibn Alfakhar, a physician and courtier, apparently the al-Fakhār whom Chapter 14 described as a nasi at the Toledan court^[106]. Ibn Alfakhar attacked Maimonides’ attempt to put “the Torah and Greek wisdom together, to make out of them one whole”^[118]. The encyclopaedia observes that here a physician and courtier in Spain rejected the synthesis of a physician and courtier in Egypt^[118]. The letters of both sides were preserved together in a collection known as the Letters of Zealotry^[118].

The article warns against reducing the controversy to two camps. Many rationalists were strictly observant, and many conservative authorities had philosophical educations themselves and objected only to the premature exposure of the young to philosophy and to extreme allegorisation, especially in synagogue sermons^[118]. In the final stage, it notes, Maimonides himself was no longer the subject of controversy, and even the conservative party accepted his positions^[118]. The debate between Halevi and Ibn Daud continued, in other words, for another century and a half.

After the Almohads

Almohad rule in al-Andalus lasted less than a century. After Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 the Almohads withdrew to the Maghreb, where their empire broke apart, and Marrakesh fell to the Marinids in 1269^[27]. Laskier attributes the decline to the regime’s refusal to share power, the waning of its puritanical zeal and its intolerance towards Muslim opponents and the Jewish minority, which alienated diverse parts of the population^[27]. Ashtor notes that in the mid-thirteenth century Castile conquered much of Andalusia, leaving only the Nasrid kingdom of Granada in Muslim hands, a kingdom that employed Jewish counsellors and court physicians until its surrender in 1492^[2].

The Jewish culture of al-Andalus did not return with the Christian conquerors. Lucena, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, was conquered by Castile in 1240^[4], but by then the centre of Jewish learning had moved to Toledo, Barcelona and the cities of Provence. The next chapter turns to Toledo, where Jewish scholars who had brought Arabic learning from the south helped Latin clerics to translate it for Europe.

16. Toledo and the Translators

In 1085 Alfonso VI of León and Castile took Toledo, once the capital of the Visigothic kingdom and later a fortress of Umayyad Córdoba^[119]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that the position of the Jews of the city did not change when it passed into Christian hands^[38]. Within two generations Toledo had become the place where Latin Europe came looking for the sciences of the Arabic-speaking world. Scholars from Italy and from beyond the Pyrenees travelled there to learn Arabic or to find someone who could read it for them^[120][121]. They went home, or stayed, with Latin versions of Ptolemy, Euclid, Aristotle, Ibn Sīnā and al-Fārābī, and of Jewish authors such as Isaac Israeli and Solomon ibn Gabirol.

This chapter tells the story of that movement in the twelfth century and of the part that Jews of Toledo played in it. It is a story that has often been told too simply. There was no college of translators with a building and a roll of members, and the evidence for who did what is thinner than the confident older accounts suggest. But the outlines are clear, and they show a city in which Arabic, Romance, Hebrew and Latin were all in daily use, and in which the knowledge of al-Andalus passed through Jewish and Christian hands on its way north.

The thirteenth-century sequel belongs to Alfonso X, and Chapter 17 is devoted to it. The buildings of Christian Toledo, with their brick and plaster work in the Andalusi manner, belong to another series on this site and are mentioned here only in passing.

Toledo after 1085

Before the conquest Toledo had been the capital of a taifa kingdom ruled by the Berber dynasty of Ibn Dhī al-Nūn, which the Encyclopaedia Judaica calls the Ibn Danun dynasty. The encyclopaedia estimates the Jewish population of the city in the eleventh century at about 4,000, divided into separate congregations largely by place of origin, such as the Cordobans and the Barcelonese, together with a group said to be of Khazar descent. Toledo was also the centre of the Karaites in Spain^[38]. Jews worked in textile manufacture, tanning and dyeing, in military service and in commerce, and Jewish villagers near the city were known for their agriculture and their vineyards^[38].

The city was already a place of learning before 1085. The astronomer al-Zarqālī, whose work was discussed in Chapter 13, lived there for a time in the middle of the eleventh century, and the biblical commentator Judah ibn Balʿam was born and educated there^[38]. MacTutor notes that the large astronomical group which produced the Toledan Tables included both Muslim and Jewish scholars^[103].

The capitulation terms of 1085 allowed the Muslims to keep their mosques and to surrender only the fortified places. There is no record of the terms that applied to the Jews, the encyclopaedia notes, but the fortress in their quarter stayed in their possession^[38]. Throughout the reign of Alfonso VI, Joseph Ferrizuel, known in Latin documents as Cidellus, served at the royal court and worked on behalf of his fellow Jews. He appeared in Chapter 14 as a physician to the king^[38]. From this point, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the Toledan community grew until it was the most prominent in Castile and one of the most important in Spain^[38].

The peace did not last unbroken. When Alfonso VI died in 1109, the townspeople rose against the Jews. His successor reached a compromise with the citizens and issued laws that discriminated against the Jews, among them a rule that lawsuits between Jews and Christians should come before a Christian judge^[38]. In 1118, the encyclopaedia adds, he revived the Visigothic law of the fourth Council of Toledo of 633, which barred “those of Jewish origin” from public office^[38].

Yet Toledo continued to draw Jewish scholars and courtiers. The encyclopaedia lists among its residents in this period Isaac ibn Ezra, who apparently left in 1119, and Moses ibn Ezra. It also names Joseph ibn Kamaniel, a wealthy physician who was sent on a diplomatic mission to the king of Portugal, and the families of Shoshan, Al-Fakhar, Halevi, Abulafia, Zadok and Ferrizuel^[38]. The Ferrizuel family claimed descent from the House of David, took the title of nasi, and formed what the encyclopaedia calls a kind of oligarchy within the community^[38].

A City That Still Wrote Arabic

The conquest of 1085 changed the ruler of Toledo, but not the language of its people. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that the Jews of Toledo between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries wrote their documents partly in Arabic, usually in Hebrew characters^[38]. These deeds show Jews buying and selling land, lending and borrowing, and entering partnerships with Christians in property and trade. Their signatories bore titles such as al-ḥakīm and al-vazīr, and the encyclopaedia concludes that until the close of the twelfth century the community’s way of life resembled that of a Jewish community under Muslim rule^[38]. Only in the course of the thirteenth century did the Arabic titles lose their prestige, and Arabic was abandoned in deeds by the beginning of the fourteenth^[38].

The Christian population was also, in part, Arabic-speaking. In 1101 Alfonso VI granted the Arabized Christians of the city, the Mozarabs, a privilege that limited their fines to a fifth of those paid by others, except in cases of the murder or robbery of a Jew or a Muslim^[38]. The Portal digital de Historia de la traducción en España, a project of Pompeu Fabra University, makes the same point about language in its account of the Toledan translators. It argues that the large Jewish community of Toledo after the Christian conquest, and the continued use of Arabic in the city until the fourteenth century, together created favourable conditions for translation on a large scale^[121].

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in Dag Nikolaus Hasse’s survey of the influence of Arabic philosophy on the Latin West, lists several forces behind the movement. They were the personal interests of individual translators, the demand of the French schools for scientific texts, the availability of Arabic manuscripts in cities newly conquered by Christians, the patronage of the archbishop of Toledo, and the interest of the clergy in promoting Latin learning in a Christian society that spoke Arabic^[122]. Toledo combined all of these.

The Myth of a School

The phrase “school of translators of Toledo” has a long history, and it has never quite gone away. The Portal digital de Historia de la traducción en España is careful about it. The term, it explains, now refers to the translation work carried out in the Iberian Peninsula in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, centred on Toledo but not confined to it. It is far from the idea, once current, of a sort of «colegio de traductores» limited in time and almost confined to Toledo^[121]. Today, the portal says, the name covers the whole of the translating practice of those two centuries, which also flourished in other active centres in the peninsula, in Italy and in Sicily^[121].

The portal divides the work into two periods. The twelfth century was marked by the influence of the Church and of its language, Latin. The thirteenth was dominated by Alfonso X the Wise, who gave the work a more national and lay direction, with translation mainly into the Romance vernacular^[121]. In the first period the texts were chiefly works of science and philosophy, Greek works with Arabic commentary or Arabic reworkings of them, rather than literature. Their subjects ranged across alchemy, astronomy, geometry, philosophy, mathematics and medicine^[121].

Patronage came from the cathedral. The New Catholic Encyclopedia describes the city as a lively centre of scientific study and translation under Raymond of Sauvetât, archbishop of Toledo from 1126 to 1151^[123]. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography speaks of a flourishing school of translators under the patronage of archbishops such as Raymond^[124]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica places Avendauth, whose identity is discussed below, mainly under Raymond’s patronage^[125]. Yet the one dedication whose reading has been settled, as the next section shows, is addressed to his successor, Archbishop John^[125].

The portal also warns against sorting the translators by nation or faith. In the twelfth century, it observes, the Italian Plato of Tivoli and the Englishman Adelard of Bath were closer to each other intellectually than were two Iberians, the Jewish scholar Abraham bar Ḥiyya in Barcelona and the cleric Dominicus Gundissalinus of the diocese of Segovia^[121]. What determined each man’s role, the portal argues, was his place in society. The learned Jew acted as the intermediary, orally, from Arabic into Romance, and the Christian Latinist did the work of rendering the new science and philosophy into Latin^[121].

The First Generation

The portal names the members of the first generation of Latin translators in the peninsula. Besides Gundissalinus and Plato of Tivoli, they included Abraham bar Ḥiyya, also called Abraham Savasorda, Abraham ibn Ezra, Adelard of Bath, Hermann of Carinthia, Hugo of Santalla, Petrus Alfonsi (born Moses Sefardi), Robert of Chester and Rudolf of Bruges^[121]. Three of these were Jews or men born Jewish, and two of them, bar Ḥiyya and Ibn Ezra, have chapters of their own in this series.

The list shows how scattered the first generation was. Bar Ḥiyya worked in Barcelona, as Chapter 13 described, and it was Plato of Tivoli who put his Treatise on Measurement into Latin as the Liber embadorum^[96]. Hasse notes that the translation of philosophical texts proper only gathered full pace in Toledo in the second half of the twelfth century^[122].

What the first generation translated was varied. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that among the works rendered into Latin in Spain in the first half of the twelfth century was Abū Maʿshar’s Great Introduction, valued by its readers for the Aristotelian natural philosophy it contained^[122].

Adelard of Bath and the Wider Stage

The career of Adelard of Bath shows that Toledo was not the only route by which Arabic learning reached Latin Europe. MacTutor gives his dates as 1075 to 1160 and notes that few details of his life are certain^[126]. He studied at Tours and taught at Laon, then travelled to Salerno, Sicily, Cilicia, Syria and Palestine, and he is recorded at Bath in 1130^[126].

Whether he ever reached Spain is unknown. MacTutor states that there is no record of a visit, though many scholars have concluded that he must have gone there to obtain the Spanish-Arabic texts that he translated. An alternative view holds that he learned Arabic in Sicily, where several scholars who had lived in Spain were then living^[126].

His translations were among the most influential of the age. MacTutor credits him with Latin versions of Euclid’s Elements from Arabic sources, which were for centuries the chief geometry textbooks in the West, and notes that there seem to have been three distinct versions under his name^[126]. He also translated al-Khwārizmī’s astronomical tables, which MacTutor calls the first Latin astronomical tables of the Arabic type, and he wrote on the abacus and the astrolabe^[126]. A date in the tables corresponds to 26 January 1126, which has been taken as the approximate date of the translation, though a later copy mentions an eclipse of 1133^[126].

Adelard matters to this chapter because his career shows that Toledo was one route among several. Arabic learning could be found in Sicily as well as Spain, and scholars went wherever Arabic books and Arabic readers could be found.

Avendauth and Gundissalinus

The most important partnership in Toledan translation joined a Jewish philosopher and a Christian archdeacon. The archdeacon was Dominicus Gundissalinus, in Spanish Domingo Gundisalvo. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography notes that his date of birth is unknown, though 1110 has been suggested, and that some evidence shows him still alive in 1190^[124]. The New Catholic Encyclopedia records that he appears in Toledan charters of 1178 and 1181, and that he signed a charter as a member of the chapter of Segovia in 1190^[127]. The portal adds that he was archdeacon of Cuéllar, in the diocese of Segovia, and is documented in chapter records between 1162 and 1178^[128]. He may have studied in France around 1140^[127].

The Jewish partner is named in the manuscripts as Avendauth, or in other spellings Avendeuth and Avendeath. In the preface to the translation of Ibn Sīnā’s De anima he is called “Avendehut Israelita philosophus”, or simply “Avendeuth Israelita”^[125]. For a long time scholars believed he was a convert, and identified him with a translator called John of Spain. Abraham Solomon Halkin’s entry in the Encyclopaedia Judaica explains how that error arose^[125].

Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny examined the manuscripts of the De anima and its dedicatory preface. She found that Amable Jourdain, the first bibliographer to notice the work, had wrongly given the translator the first name John, and that this mistake had prepared the ground for the supposed conversion and the conjectures that followed^[125]. The correct reading of the dedication is reverendissimo Toletanae episcopo Johanni, a dedication to John, archbishop of Toledo from 1151 to 1166, and not to his predecessor Raymond as had been thought^[125]. The name John does not appear in any of the prefaces that name the translator^[125].

Halkin concluded that Avendauth was probably a loyal Jew throughout his life, and that he was probably the philosopher and historian Abraham ibn Daud, whom Chapter 15 introduced^[125]. Resianne Fontaine and Amira Eran, in the Stanford Encyclopedia, report that recent studies of the Toledan translations have given strong support to d’Alverny’s identification^[13]. They note that Gundissalinus and Ibn Daud also wrote books of their own, often drawing on the works they had translated together and using parallel arguments to defend views that frequently conflicted^[13]. Both men knew the works of Ibn Gabirol and Ibn Sīnā well^[13].

The dates do not fit perfectly. The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry gives Avendauth’s active years in Toledo as 1135 to 1153, mainly under Raymond’s patronage^[125], yet the same entry dates the De anima dedication to the time of Raymond’s successor, John. The portal, for its part, treats Johannes Avendehut Hispanus as a single person, active as an oral intermediary from Arabic into Romance and also the author of treatises on astronomy, arithmetic and medicine^[121]. The identification with Ibn Daud is now widely favoured, but the record remains tangled.

A Two-Stage Method

How did a Jewish philosopher and a Latin archdeacon work together? The New Catholic Encyclopedia describes the method recorded in the preface to the De anima. Avendauth, it says, “translated verbatim the Arabic text into Castilian, leaving Gundisalvi to translate the Romanic into Latin”^[127]. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography describes the same practice more generally. Many Toledan translations, it explains, were made by two scholars, one who knew Arabic and one who knew Latin, with a vernacular language as their common ground^[124]. It adds that only in the manuscripts of the De anima is Gundissalinus’s name explicitly linked with a co-translator, Ibn Daud^[124].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on Toledo describes the general pattern in the same terms. During the twelfth century, it says, Jews and converts were among those who translated works of mathematics, astronomy and other subjects from Arabic “into the spoken vernacular and from that language into Latin”^[38].

The method suggests a scene. Two men sit with an Arabic manuscript. One reads it aloud, sentence by sentence, in the Romance speech of Castile. The other writes the sentence in Latin, perhaps asking questions about a word or a technical term. Neither language on its own would have been enough, and the work depended on trust between men of different faiths.

Some scholars doubt whether Gundissalinus knew any Arabic at all. Halkin thought it doubtful that he knew the original language of the works he rendered into Latin, and suggested that Ibn Daud may have been the intermediary between the Arabic and the Latin versions^[125]. The portal likewise remarks that Gundissalinus usually translated in a team with Avendehut, which suggests that his Arabic was not especially deep^[128]. It adds that as a translator he often departed from the original, cutting or adding passages as he thought fit, yet his versions enjoyed great prestige and survive in dozens of manuscripts^[128].

The Stanford Encyclopedia goes further, and gives the Jewish partner an active role in choosing what was translated. Hasse writes that Gundissalinus worked with Avendauth on the De anima, which Avendauth himself had recommended for translation, and that Gundissalinus’s other translations may also go back to such recommendations^[122]. His conclusion is direct. “The translation movement was also influenced by the philosophical preferences of Jewish scholars”^[122].

What Gundissalinus Translated

The New Catholic Encyclopedia lists four translations that manuscript evidence ascribes firmly to Gundissalinus. They are Ibn Sīnā’s De anima, made with Avendauth, Ibn Sīnā’s Metaphysica, al-Ghazālī’s summary of philosophy, covering logic, metaphysics and physics, made with “Magister Johannes”, and Ibn Gabirol’s Fons vitae, made with “Johannes”^[127]. Further works have been attributed to him with less certainty. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography names parts of Ibn Sīnā’s physics and logic, several works of al-Fārābī, al-Kindī’s De intellectu, and the Book of Definitions of the Jewish physician and philosopher Isaac Israeli^[124].

Gundissalinus was also an author. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography credits him with five philosophical works that drew heavily on his translations as well as on Latin sources. It calls him the first to give the Latin West an introduction to Arabic and Jewish Neoplatonism, and the first to combine it with the Christian Neoplatonism of Boethius and Augustine^[124]. His treatise on the soul, the same dictionary notes, was essentially a presentation of Ibn Sīnā’s psychology together with ideas from Ibn Gabirol^[124]. The New Catholic Encyclopedia judges that he was not an original thinker, but that it would be unfair to call him a mere compiler, since he tried earnestly to adapt Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Gabirol for Latin Christian readers^[127].

His On the Division of Philosophy proved especially influential. It took over al-Fārābī’s classification of the sciences and arranged them in three groups, the preparatory sciences of language, logic, and the philosophical sciences proper, divided into theoretical and practical^[124]. Its scheme went beyond the traditional seven liberal arts. It included medicine as a branch of physics, and placed the science of optics, the science of weights and the science of devices among the mathematical sciences^[124]. Robert Kilwardby used it directly in his own classification, and its influence can be traced in Michael Scot and Vincent of Beauvais^[124].

The Latin Avicebron

One of the works that Gundissalinus helped to translate was by a Jew of al-Andalus, though few Latin readers knew it. Chapter 8 described Solomon ibn Gabirol’s philosophical dialogue, written in Arabic in the eleventh century. Sarah Pessin, in the Stanford Encyclopedia, records that the Fons vitae was translated into Latin in the twelfth century by the team of Dominicus Gundissalinus and John of Spain, and that the original Arabic is lost except for fragments quoted by later Jewish authors^[69]. A shortened Hebrew version was made in the thirteenth century by Shem Tov ibn Falaquera^[69].

The Latin text circulated under the name Avicebron, and as Chapter 8 explained, Latin readers long mistook its author for a Christian or a Muslim^[69]. Its central idea, that even soul and intellect consist of matter and form, entered scholastic debate under that name^[69]. Chapter 8 told how Solomon Munk recognised Avicebron as Ibn Gabirol in the nineteenth century.

There is an irony in the Toledan setting. Fontaine and Eran note that Ibn Daud’s own philosophical treatise attacks Ibn Gabirol and the Fons vitae from its first page^[13]. If Ibn Daud and Avendauth were the same man, then a Jewish critic of Ibn Gabirol may have helped to bring Ibn Gabirol to Latin readers, though the manuscripts name only “Johannes” as Gundissalinus’s partner for this book^[127].

Gerard of Cremona

The most prolific of all the Toledan translators was an Italian. Gerard of Cremona was born in Cremona in 1114, according to MacTutor, or about 1114, according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, and died in 1187^[120][123]. The two sources disagree on where he died. MacTutor gives Toledo, while the New Catholic Encyclopedia gives Cremona^[120][123].

MacTutor explains that after his education in Italy, Gerard went to Toledo to learn Arabic so that he could read Ptolemy’s Almagest, which did not then exist in Latin^[120]. The date of his arrival is uncertain. MacTutor says he was certainly there by 1144, while the New Catholic Encyclopedia says he was already in Spain by 1134^[120][123]. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography, in its entry on Gundissalinus, assumes that Gerard’s translating activity probably did not begin before 1140^[124].

He stayed for most of the rest of his life. MacTutor writes that he does not seem to have gathered a school around him, but probably had helpers who assisted with copying, checking manuscripts and other tasks^[120]. Over about forty years, it says, he translated around eighty works from Arabic into Latin^[120]. The New Catholic Encyclopedia gives a slightly lower figure. It says that old catalogues credit him with more than seventy works, though some of them belong to a thirteenth-century namesake, Gerard of Sabbioneta^[123]. The portal stresses that so many translations must have required several collaborators^[121].

The New Catholic Encyclopedia makes a distinction between Gerard and Gundissalinus. Unlike Gundissalinus, it says, Gerard was a translator only^[123]. He also gave public lectures, MacTutor notes, and gained a high reputation for learning^[120].

A Programme of Reading

Was there a plan behind Gerard’s output, or did he simply translate what he could find? Charles Burnett of the Warburg Institute addressed this question in a study published in Science in Context in 2001. His abstract reassesses why Toledo became prominent in Arabic–Latin translation in the second half of the twelfth century. It suggests that the two principal translators, Gerard and Gundissalinus, concentrated on different areas of knowledge, and that Gerard appears to have followed a clear programme in his choice of works^[129]. This, Burnett writes, is revealed especially in the Vita and the “commemoration of his books” drawn up by his students after his death, which he edits from all the manuscripts^[129].

Hasse, in the Stanford Encyclopedia, connects the programme to a single book. He thinks it likely that al-Fārābī’s Enumeration of the Sciences, translated twice, once by Gerard and once by Gundissalinus, served as a model for a coherent programme of translation^[122]. As evidence he notes that later Toledan translators, such as Alfred of Shareshill, Michael Scot and Hermann the German, filled in gaps in al-Fārābī’s list of disciplines that the earlier translators had not covered^[122].

If this is right, the Toledan translators were reading the Arabic map of knowledge and working through it, discipline by discipline. The classification that Gundissalinus adapted in his own book was also, in effect, a reading list for Latin Europe.

The Sciences That Gerard Carried

The list of Gerard’s translations is long. The New Catholic Encyclopedia names some of the most important. They include Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, with the paraphrase of Themistius, his Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption and the first three books of the Meteorology^[123]. They also include the pseudo-Aristotelian Book of Causes, a compilation from Proclus, the Canon of Medicine of Ibn Sīnā and part of his philosophical encyclopaedia, Ptolemy’s Almagest, and what the encyclopaedia calls the best complete translation of Euclid’s Elements^[123]. Works of al-Kindī and al-Fārābī on the intellect complete the list^[123].

MacTutor adds a number of mathematical works. Gerard is recorded as the translator of works by the Banū Mūsā brothers, the astronomical tables of al-Jayyānī, al-Nayrīzī’s commentary on Euclid, and works by Thābit ibn Qurra, Abū Kāmil and Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf^[120]. The Almagest itself presents a puzzle. The surviving translation carries the date 1175, when Gerard was about sixty-one. MacTutor finds it hard to believe that he waited so long to finish the task that had brought him to Spain, and suggests that the dated text may be a revision or a later copy^[120].

Several of the works discussed earlier in this series reached Latin through him. MacTutor records two versions of Latin copies of the Toledan Tables of al-Zarqālī and his colleagues, translated by Gerard^[103]. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers notes that the astronomical treatise of Jābir ibn Aflaḥ of Seville, which corrected Ptolemy, reached a wide European readership thanks to Hebrew translations and to Gerard’s Latin one^[104]. Hamarneh credits Gerard, among others, with the Latin translations that made the surgery of al-Zahrāwī, the great surgeon of Córdoba, highly regarded in the West^[107].

One of Gerard’s choices survives in school mathematics. MacTutor notes that he rendered the Arabic word for the sine as sinus in Latin, the origin of the English word^[120]. Had he made a different choice, the trigonometric function would have another name.

His importance for later centuries is summed up in a passage that MacTutor quotes from the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. “The tremendous upsurge of interest in Arabic and Greek science and philosophy in medieval universities from the start of the thirteenth century owes its stimulation in greater part to the work of Gerard of Cremona”^[120]. The New Catholic Encyclopedia makes a similar judgement. Through these translations, it says, the West came to know a new Aristotle and the best of the Greek medicine, astronomy and mathematics that the Muslim world had long known and developed^[123].

Jewish Intermediaries

The Jewish part in Toledan translation is easy to overstate and easy to overlook. In the twelfth century most of the translators whose names appear on Latin texts were Christian clerics, and few of their Jewish collaborators are named. Avendauth is the great exception, and his identity was obscured for centuries by a misreading of a single Latin word.

What can be said with confidence comes from three directions. First, the Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on Toledo states plainly that Jews and converts were among the translators of mathematical and astronomical works from Arabic into the vernacular and then into Latin^[38]. Second, the portal describes the learned Jew as the oral intermediary from Arabic into Romance, in a division of labour shaped by social position rather than by nationality^[121]. Third, Hasse’s account in the Stanford Encyclopedia suggests that Jewish scholars influenced not only how texts were translated but which ones were chosen^[122].

The Jewish community of Toledo had good reasons to be the natural partner. It still wrote Arabic, as its deeds show, and it read Hebrew, the language of its own scholarship^[38]. Its learned members were heirs to the Andalusi tradition described in earlier chapters, from the astronomers of al-Zarqālī’s circle to the philosophers who had read Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Gabirol. Ibn Daud himself moved to Toledo, Fontaine and Eran suggest, presumably as a result of the Almohad invasion^[13].

The same skills served Jewish readers. As Chapter 15 noted, within a century of their deaths the works of Ibn Rushd and Maimonides were being read in Hebrew by Jewish scholars in Provence and Spain. Toledo was one point on a wider map, in which Arabic learning travelled into Latin and Hebrew at the same time, often through the same few bilingual families.

After Gerard

Gerard’s death in 1187 did not end the work. The portal names several translators who were active in the early thirteenth century, half a century before Alfonso X, including Alfred of Shareshill, Hermann the German, Mark of Toledo and Michael Scot. Most of them, it notes, were foreigners who came to Spain in search of new learning^[121].

Hasse traces the next phase to Sicily and southern Italy, where translators linked to the Hohenstaufen and papal courts produced Latin versions of Ibn Rushd. The most productive among them were Michael Scot and William of Luna^[122]. Latin translations of Ibn Rushd reached the new universities about thirty years after his death in 1198, according to Hasse. In 1255 the statutes of the Paris arts faculty made all the known works of Aristotle compulsory reading for students^[122]. Much of that Aristotle had passed through Toledo, and some of it through Jewish hands.

The scale of the transfer is striking. Hasse notes that a recent list counts 131 Arabic philosophical texts translated into Latin^[122]. He judges that the arrival of Arabic philosophy transformed almost every philosophical discipline in Latin Europe, and that its influence was especially strong in natural philosophy, psychology and metaphysics^[122].

In Toledo, the next chapter of the story was written at the court of Alfonso X. The portal describes the translators of the years between 1252 and 1284 as a group directly tied to the king, with clearer outlines than their predecessors. Jewish translators played a larger part, and most of their names are known^[121]. That is the subject of Chapter 17.

What Toledo Means

It is tempting to see twelfth-century Toledo as a symbol of harmony between three faiths. UNESCO’s description of the historic city speaks of a place where Christian, Jewish and Muslim cultures coexisted in the Middle Ages^[119]. That is true as far as it goes. The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry shows the other side of the same years, with the riot of 1109, the discriminatory laws that followed it, and the revival in 1118 of the Visigothic exclusion of Jews from office^[38]. During the reign of Alfonso VIII, when the Almohads again threatened the city, Christian soldiers mistreated the Jews even though Jews had fought in its defence^[38].

The translations themselves were the product of neither pure tolerance nor simple exploitation. They were made by people who needed one another. Latin clerics needed readers of Arabic, and Jewish scholars needed patrons and a place in a Christian kingdom. Archbishops wanted the learning that Arabic books contained. The result was a body of Latin texts that shaped European science and philosophy for centuries, and in which the names of the Jewish collaborators, with rare exceptions, were lost.

The chapters that follow move from the twelfth century into the thirteenth, from Latin to Castilian, and from the archbishop’s patronage to the king’s.

17. Alfonso X and His Jewish Collaborators

Alfonso X of Castile and León reigned from 1252 until 1284, and he is remembered above all as a patron of learning^[130]. The historian of astronomy Julio Samsó describes a king who made a great effort to recover Arabic and especially Andalusi astronomical materials by having them translated into Spanish, and who thereby became “a pioneer in the use of the vernacular as a scientific language”^[130]. A blog of the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Seville puts the scale of the enterprise at some thirty treatises of a more or less scientific character, some translated and some newly composed^[131].

The twelfth-century translators of Toledo, the subject of Chapter 16, had worked mainly for Latin readers and mainly under the patronage of archbishops. Alfonso’s programme was different in three ways. It was directed by the king himself, it was written first in Castilian rather than Latin, and a remarkable share of its most demanding work was done by Jews. Five of his known collaborators were Jewish, and two of them, Yehuda ben Moshe ha-Kohen and Isaac ibn Sid, were responsible for the work by which the reign is best known in the history of science, the Alfonsine Tables^[130].

This chapter follows those two men and their colleagues. It treats their work strictly as astronomy, that is, as the observation of the heavens and the computation of the positions of the sun, moon and planets. Much of what Alfonso commissioned also served purposes that modern science does not recognise, and those parts of the corpus are left aside here. What remains is a body of instruments, tables and treatises on their construction that carried Andalusi astronomy into Christian Europe and kept it in use until the age of Copernicus.

A Castilian programme

The intellectual world that Alfonso inherited was shaped by his father’s conquests. Ferdinand III of Castile took Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248, and Alfonso himself extended the frontier until only the kingdom of Granada remained in Muslim hands^[2]. Samsó suggests that many of the Arabic books translated at Alfonso’s court had come into Christian possession through those conquests, from libraries in Córdoba and Seville^[130]. The translations were based on Arabic works that had not been translated into Latin before, and some of them preserve Andalusi astronomical writings that would otherwise be lost^[130].

Among the works known only through Alfonso’s translations are two books on the construction of equatoria, by Ibn al-Samḥ, who died in 1035, and by al-Zarqālī, who died in 1100. There is also ʿAlī ibn Khalaf’s book on the use of a plate valid for all latitudes, written at Toledo in the eleventh century, and al-Zarqālī’s treatise on the construction of the armillary sphere^[130]. Al-Zarqālī, whose work in Toledo was discussed in Chapter 13, thus reached the Castilian court not only through his famous tables but through his writings on instruments as well^[102].

The choice of Castilian mattered. In the twelfth century a Jewish or Mozarab intermediary had often rendered an Arabic text into the spoken Romance of Toledo, and a Latin cleric had then turned that oral version into Latin, as described in Chapter 16^[121]. At Alfonso’s court the Romance version was no longer a stage on the way to Latin. It was the finished product. Samsó adds that later, probably during the years from 1256 to 1275 when Alfonso was pursuing his claim to be emperor of Germany, some of the works were translated again into Latin^[130]. The Latin versions answered imperial ambitions, but the scientific prose of the reign was born in Castilian.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica summarises the Jewish share in figures. Of the twelve translators engaged in the Alfonsine programme, it says, five were Jews, and they translated 40 per cent of all the works^[38]. The figure depends on how a collaborator is counted, and the attributions in the manuscripts are not always clear. But no modern scholar doubts that the Jewish contribution was large, or that the most original technical work came from Jewish hands.

The king’s collaborators

Samsó’s list of Alfonso’s collaborators gives a picture of a mixed and international team. There was one Muslim convert to Christianity, Bernardo el Arábigo. There were eight Christians, four of them Spaniards, namely Fernando de Toledo, Garci Pérez, Guillén Arremón d’Aspa and Juan d’Aspa, and four Italians, John of Cremona, John of Messina, Petrus de Regio and Egidius Tebaldi of Parma. The Italians seem to have worked mainly on the retranslations into Latin^[130].

To these Samsó adds a very important group of five Jews, namely Yehuda ben Moshe, Isaac ibn Sid called Rabiçag, Abraham Alfaquín, Samuel ha-Leví and a certain Moshe. Of these, Yehuda and Rabiçag take pride of place because of the number and importance of the works they wrote, and they were the authors of the Alfonsine Tables. Only Yehuda was a translator in the strict sense, while Rabiçag wrote original works and built scientific instruments^[130]. Alfonso also tried, without success, to recruit a Muslim scientist, Muḥammad al-Riqūṭī, whom he probably met on a visit to Murcia in 1271^[130].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on the Castilian kings names Isaac ibn Sid, there called Don Çag, and Judah ben Moses ha-Kohen among the Jewish translators and scientists who worked under Alfonso, and it counts the Alfonsine Tables among the important scientific achievements of the reign^[132]. Abraham Alfaquín appears in the Jewish Encyclopedia as the Don Abraham who translated al-Zarqālī’s Toledan Tables into Spanish at the king’s request in about 1277^[133]. Samuel ha-Leví of Toledo appears in the prologue of one of the great astronomical compilations as one of its editors^[134].

These men did not form a college or a school with a fixed membership. They worked on particular commissions over a span of more than thirty years, sometimes alone and sometimes in pairs, with the king setting the programme and, according to the prologues, sometimes revising the language himself. The names in the prologues are the best evidence of who did what, and they make it clear that Jewish scholars were present at every stage, from translation to editing to original composition.

Yehuda ben Moshe ha-Kohen

The translation history portal of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra describes Yehuda ben Moshe ha-Kohen as a physician, astronomer and translator into Castilian, and one of the most distinguished Jewish collaborators of Alfonso X^[134]. He appears in the documents under several names, among them Yhuda Mosca el Menor and Yhudá el Coheneso, which once raised doubts about whether they referred to a single person. The portal regards it as now clear that they do, and that this one man translated from Arabic and knew Latin, Hebrew and Castilian^[134]. His activity is attested as early as 1225 and was concentrated between 1243 and 1276^[134]. The Seville blog adds that he had already worked for Ferdinand III before he served Ferdinand’s son^[131].

His first known commission came from Alfonso while the future king was still a prince. In 1243, according to the portal, a treatise on stones attributed to an Andalusi author called Abolays came into the hands of the infante Alfonso, who ordered it translated. Yehuda finished the translation, known as the Lapidario, in 1250^[134]. The work belongs to the natural lore of its time rather than to science, and its interest here is mainly biographical. It shows that the partnership between the prince and the Jewish physician was already established a decade before Alfonso came to the throne.

The most important of Yehuda’s translations for the history of astronomy was his work on the great compilation later called the Libros del saber de astronomía. According to the prologue, as summarised by the portal, the collection was translated by Yehuda ben Moshe ha-Kohen and Guillén de Aspa, and its editors, called ayuntadores, were John of Messina, John of Cremona, Yehuda himself and another Jew, Samuel ha-Leví of Toledo. The prologue records the date of the translation, 1256, and the date of the revision twenty years later, 1276^[134]. The portal calls the compilation the most important medieval collection of scientific treatises in a Romance language^[134].

The portal ends its entry with the fact that matters most for this chapter. Yehuda, it says, was one of the compilers of the Alfonsine Tables, together with Isaac ben Sid, called Rabi Çag^[134]. The physician who had begun with a book of stone lore ended as one of the two authors of the most influential astronomical tables of the European Middle Ages.

Isaac ibn Sid, called Rabiçag

Less is known about Isaac ibn Sid’s life than about his work. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers says that he flourished at Toledo around 1250, that he is believed to have played an important part in the observations and other research sponsored by Alfonso, and that some of his observations are mentioned by Isaac Israeli, another Jewish astronomer of Toledo who worked nearly a century later. Otherwise, Tzvi Langermann writes, nothing is known about him^[135].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica adds a few details. Israeli called him ḥazzan, so he was probably the cantor of a Toledo synagogue. He may be the person called Aben Çayd or Rabbi Zag, and Alfonso refers to him in official documents as “our learned Rabbi Çag”^[136]. The encyclopaedia credits him with instructions for the use of astronomical instruments, partly his own and partly drawn from other sources, and notes that records in his own hand of his observations of lunar eclipses survive^[136].

Samsó’s account gives Rabiçag a distinctive place in the Alfonsine corpus. The king wanted a treatise on the construction of each instrument and another on its use. Where a suitable Arabic source existed, he had it translated. Where none could be found, an original treatise was written, usually by Rabiçag^[130]. Because texts on how to build instruments were harder to find in Arabic than texts on how to use them, most of the original Alfonsine works concern construction, and most of those are his^[130]. The Seville blog calls him the most prolific scientific collaborator of the king, with numerous works, most of them his own, on the construction of astronomical instruments and clocks^[131].

Rabiçag was therefore something rarer than a translator. He was an instrument-maker and a technical author, writing in Castilian for readers who wanted to build a working device from a written description. That required a command of geometry, of the astronomical models the instrument embodied and of the practical craft of cutting, graduating and assembling metal and wood. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that he was known as a translator from Arabic into Spanish of other astronomical works^[133], but it was as a maker and explainer of instruments that his contemporaries valued him.

The Libros del saber de astronomía

The Libros del saber de astronomía, the books of astronomical knowledge, are the core of the Alfonsine corpus. Samsó describes the first book, the Ochava espera or eighth sphere, as a treatise on the constellations partly based on the Arabic astronomer al-Ṣūfī, with a description of the forty-eight Ptolemaic constellations^[130]. The rest of the collection consists of treatises on astronomical instruments, most of them analogue calculators, among them the celestial sphere, the spherical and plane astrolabe, the saphea and the plate for all latitudes^[130].

These instruments were designed to give graphical solutions to problems of spherical astronomy, such as the time of the rising of a star, the altitude of the sun at a given hour or the length of daylight at a given latitude. Other instruments in the collection, among them a quadrant of the type called vetus, sundials and water clocks, served to measure time^[130]. The collection also contained the two treatises on equatoria, instruments for finding the approximate longitudes of the planets by means of Ptolemaic planetary models drawn to scale, so that a problem in computation could be solved by a graphical construction^[130].

Samsó notes that the Alfonsine collection also included a translation of Ibn al-Haytham’s treatise on the configuration of the universe, a work of theoretical cosmology that he describes as corresponding to a type of interest not common in the corpus^[130]. Ibn al-Haytham, the great optical scientist of eleventh-century Cairo, had tried to give the mathematical models of Ptolemy a physical form, as solid spheres nesting one within another. Its presence shows that the Alfonsine circle knew, and wished to make available in Castilian, the most serious physical reasoning about the heavens that the Arabic tradition had produced.

The original royal manuscript of the Libros del saber survives, and a facsimile was published in two volumes in 1999^[130]. The complete nineteenth-century edition by Manuel Rico y Sinobas, in five volumes published at Madrid between 1863 and 1867, includes the Castilian canons of the Alfonsine Tables, though Samsó judges it of poor quality^[130]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on Isaac ibn Sid points out that his works are contained in that edition^[136].

Instruments as calculators

It is easy to underestimate the instruments described in the Libros del saber, because modern readers think of astronomical instruments mainly as devices for observation. Many of the Alfonsine instruments were something else. They were calculators. An astrolabe, for example, is a flat model of the heavens produced by a geometrical projection of the celestial sphere onto a plane. With it, a user who knows the date and has measured the altitude of the sun or of a star can read off the time, the position of other stars and the points of the horizon at which they rise and set. The instrument stores, in brass, the results of a great deal of spherical trigonometry.

The plate for all latitudes, the lámina universal of ʿAlī ibn Khalaf, solved a practical difficulty of the ordinary astrolabe. A standard astrolabe needed a separate plate for each latitude at which it was used. A universal plate, by a different projection, could serve at any latitude^[130]. The saphea, associated with al-Zarqālī, did the same with its own construction^[102]. These were sophisticated devices, and Alfonso’s insistence on having a treatise on both the making and the use of each one shows that he intended the corpus to be a working manual, not a display of learning.

The equatorium carried the same idea into planetary astronomy. Ptolemy’s models for the motions of the planets combined circles carrying other circles, with centres displaced from the earth. Calculating a planet’s position from these models by arithmetic alone required tables and patient work. An equatorium let the user set the model up physically, with discs and pointers arranged to scale, and read the result from a graduated rim. Samsó describes such instruments as providing approximate calculations of planetary longitudes using Ptolemaic models drawn to scale^[130]. The Alfonsine treatises preserve two Andalusi designs, by Ibn al-Samḥ and by al-Zarqālī, that would otherwise be lost^[130].

Isaac ibn Sid’s treatises on construction belong to this tradition. MacTutor notes that the large group of astronomers who produced the Toledan Tables in the eleventh century already included both Muslim and Jewish scholars^[103]. Two centuries later a Jewish cantor of Toledo was writing, in Castilian, the instructions by which the instruments of that tradition could be built again.

The Alfonsine Tables

Samsó calls the Alfonsine Tables Alfonso’s most important astronomical work^[130]. Astronomical tables of this kind, known in Arabic as a zīj, were not simply lists of observations. They were a set of numerical tables, with instructions called canons, from which an astronomer could compute the positions of the sun, moon and planets for any date, and predict conjunctions and eclipses. The Seville blog describes the Alfonsine Tables as containing information on the positions of the planets and on conjunctions between them, including the sun and the moon, all referred to the latitude of Toledo^[131].

The king’s reason for commissioning new tables was, according to the same account, to improve on the accuracy of the Toledan Tables associated with al-Zarqālī^[131]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica puts the same point in terms of a practical problem. Alfonso commissioned the tables, it says, because discrepancies were often being found between astronomical computations and observations in his day^[136]. Two centuries after al-Zarqālī the predicted positions of the planets had drifted from the observed ones, as all such predictions eventually do, and the only remedy was new observation and new parameters.

The date of the tables is not quite settled. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 1252 to 1256^[136], and the Jewish Encyclopedia says that they were compiled about 1252, the Latin editions giving 1251^[133]. The Castilian canons themselves, however, say that the work was done at Toledo between 1262 and 1272 by the two Jewish collaborators^[131]. Samsó, following the prologue of the canons, places the writing between 1263 and 1272^[130]. The later dates rest on the text of the canons themselves, while the earlier ones coincide with the opening years of a reign that began in 1252^[130].

The Jewish Encyclopedia records a story that once had wide currency. Alexander von Humboldt, in his Cosmos, supposed that the tables had been compiled at a congress of Christian, Jewish and Muslim astronomers specially assembled by the king. The encyclopaedia reports that Moritz Steinschneider had shown this to be a myth and had traced it to the much later chronicler Abraham Zacut^[133]. The picture that emerges from the canons is more modest and more convincing, of two Jewish astronomers working at Toledo under royal orders over about a decade.

Observations at Toledo

The prologue to the Castilian canons, as Samsó summarises it, makes several claims. It names Yehuda ben Moshe and Rabiçag as the authors. It says that the text was written between 1263 and 1272, two hundred years after the observations of al-Zarqālī. It states that the king had ordered the construction of the instruments needed to make observations at Toledo, and that the two astronomers, following royal orders, observed the sun, planetary conjunctions and eclipses of the sun and moon^[130].

Samsó is cautious about how much of this can be checked. Only a few of these observations can now be verified, namely three lunar eclipses, one in 1265 and two in 1266, and a solar eclipse in 1263. These are known from a report transmitted by Isaac Israeli of Toledo in about 1310^[130]. The Jewish Encyclopedia similarly records that observations of Isaac ibn Sid from the years 1263 to 1266 were seen by Isaac Israeli^[133]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s mention of surviving records of lunar eclipses in Ibn Sid’s hand points to the same body of work^[136].

Eclipses were the most valuable observations an astronomer of the period could make. The moment of a lunar eclipse is the same for every observer who can see it, so comparing the observed time with the time predicted by the tables tests the tables’ lunar and solar parameters directly. A series of eclipses observed at a known place, Toledo, gave Ibn Sid and Yehuda the material with which to check, and if necessary correct, the tables they had inherited.

Samsó also notes a complication. The few numerical parameters mentioned in the Castilian canons, or elsewhere in the Spanish works of the reign, derive from the Toledan Tables or from the Maghribi astronomer Ibn Isḥāq, who flourished between about 1193 and 1222. New parameters, which might be the product of the Alfonsine observations, appear only in the Latin tables^[130]. The question of how the Castilian work of the 1260s relates to the Latin tables that later circulated throughout Europe is therefore not a footnote. It is the central problem in the history of the Alfonsine Tables.

Two versions and a debate

The problem, as Samsó explains it, is that there are two different versions. On the one hand there is a Castilian text of a set of canons without the numerical tables they describe. On the other, in about 1320 a new set of Alfonsine Tables appeared, with numerical tables headed in Latin but without any canons that could be attributed to the circle of Alfonso^[130]. The Seville blog adds that no Castilian copy of the tables themselves has survived, and that the only witness to the original Spanish canons is a very late copy, Biblioteca Nacional manuscript 3306, dating from the beginning of the sixteenth century^[131].

The gap of about half a century, between about 1272 and about 1320, in which nothing is heard of the tables, has led historians to very different conclusions. Samsó records that one scholar, Emmanuel Poulle, denied any relation between the Latin tables and the work of Alfonso X. Others, among them John North, Bernard Goldstein, José Chabás, José Luis Mancha and Samsó himself, have argued that the Latin tables contain material clearly related to the undisputed Spanish works of the reign^[130].

Even those who accept the connection disagree about where the decisive work was done. Samsó’s own view is that Yehuda and Rabiçag wrote the Castilian canons under the influence of al-Zarqālī and the Toledan Tables, and later began a new set of tables in the tradition of al-Battānī, written this time in Latin in keeping with the king’s imperial aims. Chabás and Goldstein, by contrast, believe that the revision was made in Paris, on the basis of Alfonsine materials represented mainly by the Castilian canons^[130].

Samsó’s conclusion is a fair summary of where the debate stands. Whatever the truth about the textual history, he writes, the Alfonsine Tables are the result of the work of Alfonso’s collaborators, and they mark “the starting point of an original European astronomy that was still strongly influenced by an Arabic tradition”^[130]. The authors whose names stand at the head of the canons were two Jews of Toledo.

From Toledo to Paris and Salamanca

Whatever happened between 1272 and 1320, the Latin tables that appeared in Paris in the 1320s were a lasting success. Samsó notes that many authors in different parts of Europe, beginning with the Parisian group of John of Saxony, John of Murs and John of Lignères, wrote new canons explaining how to use the numerical tables. The tables became the standard in late medieval and early Renaissance Europe until 1551, when Erasmus Reinhold published the Prutenic Tables^[130].

The tables travelled widely and were adapted. The Seville blog notes that the Latin versions spread quickly through Europe, adjusted to the latitudes of various cities, and remained the basis of astronomical calculation from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries^[131]. They were first printed at Venice in 1483 by Erhard Ratdolt, who had printed Euclid’s Elements the year before, and they were reprinted at Venice in 1492, 1518 and 1524 and at Paris in 1545 and 1553^[131]. Georg Peurbach and his pupil Regiomontanus revised them in the fifteenth century, and they were finally replaced by Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables, built on the observations made by Tycho Brahe on the island of Hven^[131].

Their influence reached the founders of modern astronomy. Samsó records that Nicolaus Copernicus used parameters derived from the Alfonsine Tables in his Commentariolus. The Alfonsine value for the tropical year, 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and almost 16 seconds, was the mean tropical year used in his De revolutionibus, and it became the basis of the Gregorian reform of the calendar^[130]. A number first set down in Castilian Toledo thus passed, through Paris and through Copernicus, into the calendar still in civil use today.

The tables also returned to Jewish hands. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes, with some surprise, that the tables proper were first translated from Latin into Hebrew only in 1460, by Moses ben Abraham of Nîmes at Avignon, though there were several Hebrew manuscripts of commentaries and explanations of their use^[133]. In Iberia itself the Alfonsine tradition was continued in the fifteenth century at Salamanca, where, as Chapter 21 shows, the Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacut built his own tables on the Alfonsine foundation and recorded his debt to the tables and calendar of Alfonso X^[137]. The same encyclopaedia records yet another set of tables, compiled in about 1367 for Pedro IV of Aragon by Jacob ben Isaac Carsono, which were translated into Hebrew and still exist in manuscript at Parma and Rome^[133].

The king and the Jews

The patron of Yehuda and Ibn Sid was not a consistent friend of the Jews. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s account of the Castilian kings sets the scientific achievements of the reign beside its legal and political record^[132]. The great law code known as the Siete Partidas, prepared under Alfonso around 1263 but applied only gradually, especially after 1348, defined royal policy towards the Jews with great precision^[2].

The Partidas granted the Jews religious liberty, on condition that they did not attack the Christian faith, and forbade anyone to disturb them on the Sabbath, even for legal reasons. Converts were not to be taunted with their origins, and force was not to be used to make Jews accept Christianity. At the same time the code barred Jews from positions of authority over Christians, strictly limited the number and size of synagogues, and required them to wear a distinguishing badge^[2]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica adds that it authorised judicial prosecution of Jews on charges of ritual murder^[132].

Jewish financiers also served the crown. Don Isaac ibn Zadok, known as Don Çag de la Maleha, helped to restore Alfonso’s finances. In return for 80,000 gold maravedis for the years 1276 and 1277 he and his associates were allowed to collect taxes owed for the previous twenty years^[2]. Such contracts could be lucrative, but the king often went back on his word, and Don Çag, like other Jewish courtiers before and after him, fell from favour and lost his life^[2].

The last years of the reign were harsh. In 1279 Alfonso imprisoned all the Jewish tax farmers, and in January 1281 he ordered the arrest of the Jews while they were at prayer on the Sabbath, demanding a ransom of 4,380,000 gold maravedis for their release^[132]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s entry on Toledo describes the episode during the revolt of the crown prince Sancho in 1280 and 1281. The Jews were held in their synagogues until the community paid a special tax, notables stayed in prison for months, and some were executed. Among the prisoners was the poet Todros ben Judah ha-Levi^[38]. The king who had made Castilian a language of astronomy was also capable of turning on the community whose scholars had helped him to do it.

Isaac Israeli and the Foundation of the World

The tradition of Jewish astronomy at Toledo did not end with Alfonso’s death in 1284. Isaac ben Joseph Israeli, who worked in Toledo in the first half of the fourteenth century, wrote in 1310 the Yesod Olam, “The Foundation of the World”, which the Encyclopaedia Judaica describes as the most important contribution to Hebrew literature in its field^[138]. The book dealt with the geometrical problems of the earth in the Ptolemaic system as revised by al-Biṭrūjī, with the seasons and with related questions, and it included astronomical tables^[138].

Israeli matters to this chapter for two reasons. It is through him that the observations of Isaac ibn Sid are known, for it was Israeli who reported the eclipses observed at Toledo in the 1260s^[130][135]. And his book shows the Alfonsine material passing back from Castilian into Hebrew, as a resource for Jewish readers who wanted a systematic account of astronomy in their own scholarly language.

The Yesod Olam had a long life. It was printed at Berlin in 1777 and again, more completely, between 1846 and 1848, and it attracted commentaries from later scholars, among them Elijah Mizraḥi^[138]. Israeli’s son Joseph wrote an abridged version in Arabic, which survives in a Hebrew translation^[138]. In a single family, then, the astronomy of Toledo moved through Castilian, Hebrew and Arabic within a generation.

What Alfonso left

The Alfonsine programme was the last great collective enterprise of the kind that had begun in Toledo in the twelfth century, and in one respect it surpassed what came before. It produced not only translations but original work, much of it by Jews, and it placed that work in a vernacular that ordinary educated readers could use. The Seville blog judges that it is above all for his scientific patronage that Alfonso X is remembered, eight centuries after his birth^[131].

For the Jewish history of Iberia the reign has a double meaning. On the one hand it shows Jewish scholars at the very centre of the intellectual life of the Christian court, valued for their command of Arabic science and trusted with the king’s most ambitious projects. On the other it shows how precarious that position remained. The same reign produced the Alfonsine Tables, the restrictions of the Siete Partidas and the mass arrest of 1281^[132][2].

The next chapter turns from the court to the communities, the aljamas of Castile, Aragon, Catalonia and Navarre, in which most Jews of the Christian kingdoms lived out their lives. It was there, rather than at the royal observatory, that the Jewish culture of medieval Spain took its characteristic later form, in law, in mysticism, in synagogue building and in the illuminated book.

18. The Aljamas of the Christian Kingdoms

By the middle of the thirteenth century most of the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula lived under Christian kings. The Encyclopaedia Judaica observes that the focal point of Spanish Jewry had already shifted in the twelfth century from the Muslim south to the Christian north, where the Jewish population had grown considerably^[2]. The Almohad persecutions described in Chapter 15 hastened the movement, and the great Christian conquests of the 1230s and 1240s completed it. When Ferdinand III took Córdoba and Seville and James I of Aragon took Majorca and Valencia, the old Andalusi communities passed into Christian hands^[2].

The Jews of the Christian kingdoms organised themselves in communities called aljamas, a word taken from Arabic. Each aljama was, in the words of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, an independent political entity paying its taxes directly to the royal treasury, with full administrative and judicial autonomy under the very general supervision of a royal official^[2]. This chapter describes that world, from the charters that settled Jews in conquered towns to the councils that governed them. It then turns to some of the figures who gave the Jewish culture of Christian Spain its character between the mid-thirteenth and mid-fourteenth centuries, namely Moses ben Naḥman of Girona, Solomon ibn Adret of Barcelona, Asher ben Jehiel and his son Jacob in Toledo, Moses de León in Castile and Samuel ha-Levi Abulafia, the royal treasurer who built the synagogue now called El Tránsito.

It ends with the illuminated Hebrew books of Catalonia and Castile, which are among the finest objects to survive from medieval Sefarad. Across the whole period runs a single tension. The Jews of the Christian kingdoms were protected because they were useful to the crown, and they were exposed because they depended on it.

Jews of the crown

The legal foundation of Jewish life in the Christian kingdoms was a simple principle. Whether they lived on land belonging to nobles, to monastic orders or to anyone else, the Encyclopaedia Judaica explains, the Jews belonged to the king, who protected them and to whom they owed loyalty. For a time this was taken literally, and the compensation due for the killing of a Jew was paid directly to the king^[2]. The Jews were serfs of the king and the property of the royal treasury alone, but in times of stability this meant no more than an obligation to pay taxes^[2].

That status had two faces. It gave the Jews a powerful protector against local lords and town councils, and it gave the king a strong interest in their prosperity. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that in 1294 revenue from the Jews made up 22 per cent of the total revenue of Castile, and that the state was very reluctant to give up so valuable a source of income^[2]. But dependence on the crown also made the Jews vulnerable whenever royal favour failed or royal power weakened, and it set them against the townsmen, who resented a community living within their walls but outside their jurisdiction. The Jewish quarter, the encyclopaedia remarks, often seemed to be a town within a town^[2].

The aljama dealt with the outside world through its own officers. Under the direction of their muqaddamin, or adelantados, the communities established their own courts of law, while keeping a right of appeal to the royal court. In Castile the king also appointed an official known as the rab de la corte to supervise the affairs of the Jewish communities, though as a rule he did not interfere with their internal organisation^[2]. In suits with Christians, Jews had to take a special oath and were forbidden to engage in judicial duels^[2].

Charters of settlement

The kings of the Reconquest needed people to hold and work the land they had won, and they treated Jews as valuable settlers. The Encyclopaedia Judaica traces the pattern from the conquest of Tudela by Alfonso I of Aragon in 1115. There, Jews and Muslims alike were granted religious freedom, but while the Muslims were ordered to leave the town itself, the Jews were allowed to remain in their own quarter within the walls^[2]. The entry on Tudela adds that the treaty with the Jews let those who had fled during the siege return, guaranteed their houses and property, and required them to pay to the Christian governor the taxes they had formerly paid under Muslim rule^[139].

The same terms were extended to the Jews of Saragossa, taken in 1118, and this precedent was followed in almost every town along the path of the Christian advance^[2]. When Tortosa fell to Ramon Berenguer IV in 1148, he gave important possessions to its Jews and promised further freedoms to any who settled there. At Lérida in 1149 the Jews were again asked to stay and were preferred to the Muslims^[2]. Occasionally a Christian king gave them the citadel of a conquered town, where they could secure both their internal autonomy and their external safety^[2].

James I of Aragon, who reigned from 1213 to 1276, took the policy furthest. He invited Jews to settle in his new lands and promised them a share of the conquered territory on the sole condition that they lived on it^[2]. By an edict issued at Valencia on 6 March 1239, he confirmed the authority of the Jewish court in suits between Jews, except in cases of murder, required witnesses of both religions in cases between Christians and Jews, and took the Jews and their property under his protection. Any Jew who had been arrested was to be released between midday on Friday and Monday morning. The charter served as a model for others throughout Aragon^[2]. On 11 June 1247 James promised safe conduct and citizenship to any Jew who came by land or sea to settle in Majorca, Catalonia or Valencia^[2].

The internal powers granted to the communities could be remarkable. By a privilege of 22 April 1229, James authorised the community of Calatayud to appoint a rabbi and four directors to manage its affairs, and to arrest and even sentence to death any wrongdoers in its midst. The community did not have to account for such sentences, though it paid the king 1,000 solidos for each, and in practice the death penalty was pronounced only against informers^[2]. The power reflects how seriously the aljamas took the danger of a member who betrayed the community to the authorities.

Courtiers and tax farmers

Above the ordinary members of the communities stood a small class of Jewish courtiers. The Encyclopaedia Judaica traces the tradition to Alfonso VI of Castile and his physician and financier Joseph Ferrizuel, called Cidellus, who appeared in Chapters 14 and 16. Alfonso, it suggests, began a custom that lasted as long as Spanish Jewry itself, of Jewish courtiers who remained faithful to their religion while exercising considerable authority over the inhabitants of the kingdom^[2].

In Barcelona, Toledo and Saragossa these courtiers became an aristocracy in their own right. They farmed taxes and undertook diplomatic missions, and the communities themselves often regarded them with suspicion, since they sometimes tried to evade communal authority^[2]. In Castile they rose to the highest offices. The encyclopaedia explains their usefulness from the king’s point of view. As Jews they could not aim at political power, nor ally themselves with the nobility or the clergy, so they depended entirely on royal favour^[2]. The nobles imitated the kings in employing Jewish experts, and whole dynasties of courtiers emerged^[2].

The cost of this arrangement fell on the communities. The financial success of the courtiers tempted the kings to impose enormous taxes on the Jews, who were impoverished by their efforts to pay^[2]. The career of Don Çag de la Maleha, the financier of Alfonso X described in the previous chapter, showed the risk. Having fallen from royal favour, he lost his life^[2]. The Church, the Cortes and the nobility looked on the Jewish courtiers with hostility and pressed the kings to dismiss them. In Castile the institution nevertheless grew stronger rather than weaker^[2]. In Aragon, by contrast, the Jewish courtiers lost their influence towards the end of the thirteenth century and left the political arena^[2].

Governing the aljama

The internal history of the aljamas was a long struggle between the powerful families and the rest of the community. From the early thirteenth century, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, the first signs of a democratic reaction appeared, with poorer members demanding a voice in the communal councils alongside the rich^[2]. In Aragon the oligarchy generally kept control of the council, helped by judges who were not always scholars and had to consult the rabbis before giving judgment. Around the end of the thirteenth century the judges began to be elected each year, and later the membership of the council began to rotate, though its members were nearly always drawn from the leading families^[2].

Barcelona provides the best documented example. From 1327 the community succeeded in abolishing all communal offices acquired by royal favour. Authority was vested in a Council of Thirty, elected by the notables, which could issue ordinances and apportion taxes. Its members served three-year terms and close relatives could not sit together^[2]. On 2 April 1386 Pedro IV approved a new constitution which divided the community into three classes, almost certainly by their tax contribution. Each class nominated a secretary and elected ten members of the council, and the influence of the great families was thereby confined to the class to which they belonged^[2].

The communities also policed the conduct of their members. An institution almost unique to Spain was that of the berurei averah, notables charged with watching over the religious life of the community^[2]. The aljamas also exercised authority over informers, punishing them with the loss of a limb or with death, with the king’s approval. Because such sentences were often carried out at once, to some they seemed dangerous or arbitrary, and in 1388 Ḥasdai Crescas was appointed judge over all informers in the kingdom of Aragon^[2]. The power was not to last. In 1380 the Castilian Cortes, after the secret execution of the tax farmer Joseph Picho as an informer on the orders of a rabbinical court, forbade the Jewish communities to exercise criminal jurisdiction^[2].

Navarre and Portugal

The pattern of the aljama was repeated, with local variations, in the smaller kingdoms. Tudela, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, was the most important Jewish community of medieval Navarre, a kingdom that remained independent until 1512, and probably its most ancient. It was the birthplace of Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Ezra, and of the philosopher Shem Tov ibn Falaquera^[139]. Its Jews traded in wool, produced textiles and worked as craftsmen, among them gold- and silversmiths, and it was from this prosperous community that Benjamin of Tudela set out on his travels in the 1160s^[139]. The community later suffered in the riots of 1328 and in the economic decline of the fourteenth century^[139]. Its archives preserve documents written in Hebrew and sometimes in Judaeo-Navarrese, the Navarrese dialect written in Hebrew characters^[139].

Portugal developed the most centralised form of Jewish self-government in the peninsula. Under Afonso III, who reigned from 1248 to 1279, the crown recognised the Jewish community as a distinct legal body headed by a royally appointed chief rabbi, the arraby mor. He named seven judges for seven regional centres, among them Santarém, Oporto and Évora, and heard appeals from their courts on an annual circuit^[140]. This power was balanced by the right of local communities to choose their own rabbis, though the crown paid and confirmed them^[140]. King Dinis, who reigned from 1279 to 1325, retained the arraby mor Don Judah as his treasurer^[140].

Toledo, Burgos and Saragossa

The largest aljamas were small cities in their own right. Toledo, the old capital of Castile, had a Jewish quarter in the western part of the town that grew from its first recorded district at San Martín as far as San Tomé and later San Román^[38]. Its main street, now the Calle del Ángel, was once called the Calle de la Judería, and one of the town gates, today the Cambrón, was formerly the Gate of the Jews^[38]. Towards the close of the fifteenth century the sources mention ten synagogues and five houses of study^[38]. Two of the synagogues still stand. One, founded by Joseph ibn Shoshan in 1203, became the church of Santa María la Blanca in 1411. The other is the synagogue of Samuel ha-Levi, discussed below, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that both were built in a pronounced Mudéjar style, evidently by Muslim craftsmen^[38].

Burgos, in the north of Castile, was the other great Castilian centre of learning. During the thirteenth century, the Encyclopaedia Judaica explains, its community became the largest Jewish centre in northern Castile and, with Toledo, the most flourishing seat of Jewish culture in the kingdom^[141]. Several members of the Abulafia family of scholars and poets came from Burgos, and the large number of Hebrew manuscripts written there shows its importance. Later generations referred again and again to the precision of Burgos manuscripts, and the city also holds a major place in the history of Hebrew book illumination^[141]. Many of the scholars later found in Toledo began their careers in Burgos^[141].

Saragossa, the capital of Aragon, shows the physical shape of a great aljama. The old Jewish quarter contained the fortress of the Jews, the slaughterhouse, the Great Synagogue and the hospital, and as the community grew a new quarter, the Barrio Nuevo, was laid out to the south by the end of the thirteenth century^[142]. The community’s buildings included at least six synagogues, among them the Great and the Small Synagogues and one known as the Engravers’ Synagogue, but the only Jewish building to survive is the Jewish baths in the Coso^[142]. The representatives of the community used to meet in the Aljafería, the old palace of the Muslim kings of Saragossa, to elect their leaders and officials^[142].

Barcelona, 1263

The hostility of the thirteenth-century Church towards Judaism took a new form in the Crown of Aragon. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes a Christian reaction from the early thirteenth century led by the Dominican Raymond de Peñaforte, confessor to James I, who sought to limit Jewish influence by capping interest rates, restricting the Jewish oath and restating the ban on Jews holding public office^[2]. Following the example of France, Aragon began a large-scale campaign to convert the Jews by exposing what it called the Jewish error^[2].

The most famous episode of that campaign was the disputation held at Barcelona in July 1263. A convert from Judaism, the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani, proposed to James I a formal public disputation on the fundamentals of faith between himself and Rabbi Moses ben Naḥman of Girona, known as Naḥmanides^[143]. Naḥmanides, born in Girona in 1194, was the leading rabbinic authority of Catalonia, a talmudist, biblical commentator, kabbalist, poet and physician^[144]. The disputation had the support of the Church authorities and of the heads of the Dominican and Franciscan orders, and the king presided over several sessions in person^[143].

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the four sessions took place on 20, 27, 30 and 31 July 1263, though another calculation gives 20, 23, 26 and 27 July^[143]. Naḥmanides was the only representative of the Jewish side. He was guaranteed freedom of speech, and he used it with remarkable frankness^[143]. Two accounts survive, one in Hebrew by Naḥmanides himself and a shorter one in Latin, and both agree that the initiative and the agenda came from the Christian side^[143].

Christiani tried to prove from the Talmud, and especially from its non-legal passages, that the Messiah had already come, that he was both human and divine and had died for the sins of mankind, and that the commandments of Judaism had therefore lost their force^[143]. Naḥmanides replied that the literal meaning of the passages did not admit this reading, and that the homiletic passages of the Talmud were not binding on Jews^[143]. He went further. He observed that Rome had declined after it adopted Christianity, “and now the servants of Muhammad have a greater realm than they”^[143]. He also pointed out that the world since the time of Jesus had been full of violence and injustice^[143].

Reading the disputation

The disputation was never formally concluded. The Latin record claims that it ended because Naḥmanides fled the city. In fact, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, he stayed in Barcelona for more than a week to attend the synagogue on the following Sabbath, when the king himself came in state and gave an address, an event without medieval precedent. Naḥmanides was allowed to reply, and the next day he went home with a gift of 300 solidos from the king^[143]. The encyclopaedia’s entry on Naḥmanides himself describes the outcome as a victory for him and gives the king’s gift as 300 dinars^[144].

Modern historians have been more cautious about who won. Robert Chazan’s study of the disputation, as its publisher summarises it, describes the spectacle in Barcelona as “colorful, impressive, surely somewhat frightening to the Jews, and ultimately indecisive”^[145]. Both sides claimed victory, and their documented claims have produced substantial disagreement among historians over the tone and outcome of the event^[145]. Chazan reconstructs the disputation from the conflicting Christian and Jewish sources and pays particular attention to what each side did afterwards^[145].

The scholars also disagree about Naḥmanides’ argument that the aggadah was not binding. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that Yitzhak Baer, H. H. Ben-Sasson and Martin Cohen regarded the claim as purely tactical, while Cecil Roth and Chazan took a more moderate view, and others, among them Hyam Maccoby, held that it was fully consistent with an established Jewish tradition^[143].

The aftermath was harsh. The Dominican Raymond Martini developed more systematic Christian readings of the aggadah, completing his Pugio Fidei in 1280, and the work was used for generations against Judaism^[143]. The Jews were made to attend conversionist sermons and to erase from the Talmud passages considered offensive to Christianity^[143]. In 1265 the Dominicans brought Naḥmanides to trial for blasphemy on the basis of his written account. The king delayed the case, but Naḥmanides left Spain, and in 1267 he reached the Land of Israel^[144]. In a letter to his son he described a ruined Jerusalem in which he found few Jews, “only two brothers, dyers who bought their dye from the governor”^[144]. He reorganised the community there before moving to Acre^[144].

Solomon ibn Adret and the responsa

The leading pupil of Naḥmanides became the greatest legal authority of the next generation. Solomon ben Abraham ibn Adret, known by the acronym Rashba, was born in about 1235 to a well-to-do Barcelona family and lived there all his life^[146]. He studied with Jonah Gerondi and with Naḥmanides, worked for a time in finance, with the king of Aragon among his debtors, and then served as rabbi of Barcelona for more than forty years^[146]. Before he was forty, the Encyclopaedia Judaica says, he was recognised as the leading figure in Spanish Jewry^[146].

His authority rested on the responsum, the written answer to a legal question. Questions reached him from Germany, France, Bohemia, Sicily, Crete, Morocco, Algiers, Palestine and Portugal, and communities gathered his replies into collections for their guidance^[146]. He wrote thousands of responsa, of which some 3,500 have been printed, and they are a primary source for the history of the Jews of his time and in part for general history^[146]. Many concern the structure of the Jewish community and its institutions, and Adret, who knew Roman law and local Spanish legal practice, did much to give the aljama its legal foundations^[146]. He defended communal rights and opposed recourse to non-Jewish courts^[146].

The kings themselves used his judgment. Pedro III of Aragon referred to him a number of complicated cases between Jews of different communities^[146]. When the community of Rome wished to translate Maimonides’ commentary on the Mishnah into Hebrew, Adret obtained the manuscripts and found the translators^[146]. His responsa, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, were later a major source of the Shulḥan Arukh^[146].

The ban of 1305

Adret also stood at the centre of the last great phase of the Maimonidean controversy, whose earlier stages were described in Chapter 15^[118]. In southern France, opponents of the rationalist reading of Scripture asked him to support a ban on the study of philosophy. Adret had considerable knowledge of philosophy and was well read in the scientific literature of his day, though he opposed spreading these subjects among the masses^[146]. To an opponent of the ban he wrote that “we know these lofty sciences and we are aware of their nature”^[146].

Extremists wanted to forbid such studies until the age of thirty. Adret’s ban, proclaimed at Barcelona in 1305, took a middle course. It permitted the study of physics and metaphysics from the age of twenty-five, placed no restriction at all on the study of astronomy and medicine, and allowed the reading of Maimonides’ works^[146]. The general entry on Spain in the Encyclopaedia Judaica describes a double ban, on those who studied Greek philosophy before twenty-five and on those too ready to explain biblical narratives as allegory, with exceptions for medicine, astronomy and Maimonides^[2]. The exemption of the sciences is worth noting. Even at the height of the reaction against philosophy, the leading rabbi of Aragon treated astronomy and medicine as legitimate learning that needed no protection from the young.

The ban was resisted in southern France, partly because the French crown would not accept a rabbinic ban from Spain^[146]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s general account sees in it a sign of the Aragonese community’s growing tendency to withdraw into itself^[2].

Asher ben Jehiel and the Turim

In 1303 a refugee from Germany arrived in the peninsula who would change the course of Spanish rabbinic study. Asher ben Jehiel, born in about 1250, had been the leading pupil of Meir of Rothenburg and, after his master’s imprisonment, the acknowledged leader of German Jewry^[147]. Fearing the same fate, he left Germany in 1303, was welcomed in Barcelona by Adret, and in 1305 became rabbi of Toledo^[147]. He supported Adret’s ban on philosophy and, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, opposed customs that had crept in from the Christian environment, such as granting the whole estate to the eldest son^[147].

Asher brought with him the methods of the Franco-German tosafists, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica sees his arrival as the moment when the Franco-German and Spanish traditions met, preserving the unity of Jewish law^[2]. His son Jacob, who came with him to Toledo and lived there in great poverty, avoiding rabbinic office, wrote the work that made the meeting permanent^[148]. Jacob explained that he had set out to write it because “reasoning had become faulty, controversy had increased, opinions had multiplied”^[148].

The result was the Arbaʿah Turim, the Four Rows, a code arranged in four sections covering daily and festival observance, ritual law, marriage and family law, and civil law^[148]. Its arrangement, simple style and wealth of content made it, in the encyclopaedia’s words, a basic work in Hebrew law, opening a new era in codification^[148]. The first complete edition was printed at Piove di Sacco in 1475^[148]. When Joseph Karo composed the Shulḥan Arukh in the sixteenth century, he followed the arrangement of the Turim.

Moses de León and the Zohar

The same decades saw the rise of a movement of a very different kind. Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mystical speculation that had first appeared in Provence, was transplanted at the beginning of the thirteenth century to Girona, and through the works of Naḥmanides it spread widely in Spain^[2]. This essay treats it as a literary and religious movement whose history can be traced in documents, without taking a position on its claims.

Its central book is the Zohar, the Book of Splendour. In its literary form, the Encyclopaedia Judaica explains, it is a collection of several books or sections, most of them presented as the sayings of the second-century sage Simeon bar Yoḥai and his companions, and written largely in Aramaic^[149]. Gershom Scholem, writing in the same encyclopaedia, identified the author of the bulk of the work as Moses ben Shem Tov de León, a Castilian kabbalist born in about 1240 who died in 1305^[150]. According to Scholem, Moses composed pseudepigraphic writings in the guise of ancient texts towards the close of the 1270s, and these, completed before 1286, form the main substance of the Zohar^[150].

Moses de León’s life can be followed in some detail. A copy of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed was made for him in 1264, which shows an early interest in philosophy^[150]. He lived for some years at Guadalajara, where he circulated the first parts of the Zohar, and later settled at Ávila^[150]. The earliest known quotations from the work appear in books written in 1281 and 1283 at Guadalajara by Isaac ibn Sahula, and parts of the main body circulated from the late 1280s^[149]. In 1305 Moses met the kabbalist Isaac of Acre at Valladolid and invited him to Ávila to see what he described as the ancient original manuscript, but Moses died at Arévalo on the way home, and his widow denied that such a manuscript had ever existed^[150].

The question of authorship is not closed. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey of later scholarship records that Yehuda Liebes reopened the question and challenged Scholem’s view of a single author, concluding that the Zohar was the product of a circle of mystics, and that Daniel Abrams has argued that kabbalists and scholars alike projected their assumptions about a single Book of the Zohar back onto the history of disparate texts composed in late thirteenth-century Spain^[149]. On any reading, the Zohar is a product of late thirteenth-century Castile, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that it was enthusiastically received as soon as it appeared, at a moment when philosophy seemed to be in retreat^[2].

Samuel ha-Levi Abulafia and El Tránsito

The fourteenth century brought plague and civil war. The Black Death, which reached Spain in 1348, did not provoke in Castile the persecutions that swept central Europe, but in Aragon it did, and in Saragossa, the Encyclopaedia Judaica reports, only fifty Jews survived^[2]. In 1354 the leaders of the shattered Aragonese communities met at Barcelona to agree on common measures, and a delegation to Pope Clement VI at Avignon obtained a bull condemning the accusation that Jews had spread the plague^[2].

In Castile, Pedro I, called the Cruel, who reigned from 1350 to 1369, brought Jewish courtiers back into his service^[2]. The most powerful was Samuel ben Meir ha-Levi Abulafia, born in about 1320. He served first as steward to the king’s tutor, Juan Alfonso de Albuquerque, and then as treasurer and adviser to Pedro, and many royal documents bear his signature in Hebrew with a seal showing a castle^[152]. He reformed the royal finances, replaced unreliable tax farmers, often with his own relatives or other Jews, and was sent on a diplomatic mission to Portugal in 1358^[152].

His monument is the synagogue he built in Toledo. The Encyclopaedia Judaica dates it to 1357 and calls it the best illustration of the status of Castilian Jewry and of his own position^[152]. The heritage catalogue of Castilla-La Mancha dates the building between 1336 and 1357^[151], while Spain’s Ministry of Culture gives 1356 to 1362^[153]. The prayer hall, according to the regional catalogue, measures about 23 metres long, 9.5 metres wide and 17 metres high, with a timber roof and an upper frieze of polychrome plaster bearing heraldic, plant, geometric and epigraphic motifs^[151]. The Ministry of Culture calls it the best preserved monument of the Judaeo-Spanish past and the most notable Jewish building in the Crown of Castile^[153]. Its plasterwork in the Andalusi manner belongs to the history of Mudéjar art, which another series on this site examines.

Samuel’s fortune did not last. In 1360 Pedro suddenly ordered his arrest. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s biographical entry, he was taken to Seville and tortured to death, and his wealth and that of his relatives was confiscated^[152]. The encyclopaedia’s general survey says only that he died in prison^[2]. His house in Toledo still stands and is now the El Greco museum^[152]. During the civil war between Pedro and his half-brother Henry of Trastámara, the Jews sided with the king, who was even called the king of the Jews, and they paid heavily for it when Henry won^[2]. When Henry took Burgos, he demanded a million gold maravedis from its Jews, who were forced to sell the crowns and ornaments of their Torah scrolls to raise it^[141]. The synagogue survived as a building. After the expulsion of 1492 it was given to the Order of Calatrava and became a church, later named after a painting of the Death of the Virgin, El Tránsito^[151]. It was declared a national monument in 1877 and has housed the Museo Sefardí since 1964^[153].

Illuminated Hebrew books

The wealth and confidence of the aljamas found expression in the making of books. Two manuscripts in British libraries may stand for many. The first is the Golden Haggadah, now British Library Add MS 27210, a manuscript of the Passover service dated by the library to between 1320 and 1330^[154]. The library’s catalogue describes fourteen full-page miniatures in colours and gold, each page divided into four compartments with a separate picture in each, illustrating Genesis and the earlier part of Exodus^[154]. The digitised copy on the University of Pennsylvania’s OPenn platform gives its place of origin as Catalonia, probably Barcelona, and explains that it is called the Golden Haggadah because of the diapered gold-leaf background of its miniatures^[155].

The later history of the Golden Haggadah follows the exile. The manuscript passed to Italy, where it bears the signatures of Christian censors of 1599, 1613 and 1626, and in 1602 Joab Gallico of Asti gave it as a wedding present to his son-in-law^[155]. In 1865 it was bought with the library of the bibliophile Giuseppe Almanzi by the British Museum^[155].

The second is the Kennicott Bible, now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford as MS. Kennicott 1^[156]. It was written at A Coruña in Galicia and completed on 24 July 1476 by the scribe Moses ibn Zabara, who had been commissioned by Don Solomon de Braga to write it for his son Isaac^[157]. The scribe recorded the date in a long colophon at the end of the biblical text, as the third day of Av in the year 5236 from the Creation^[157]. Its 922 pages contain the complete Hebrew Bible together with David Kimḥi’s grammatical work, the Sefer Mikhlol, all in square Sephardi script with full Masoretic notes, and 238 of them are illuminated with gold and silver^[157]. The illuminator was Joseph ibn Ḥayyim, and the decoration includes nine carpet pages and parashah headings with zoomorphic figures in many colours^[157].

The Kennicott Bible was made only sixteen years before the expulsion, at a time when, as its modern publisher notes, the Jews of Castile were already being harassed by the Inquisition^[157]. It shows a community still investing in the most careful and beautiful transmission of its texts. In June 1770 Benjamin Kennicott, librarian of the Radcliffe Library at Oxford, told its trustees that the manuscript was for sale. They bought it the following April, and it remained with the Radcliffe until 1872, when it passed to the Bodleian^[157].

A world at its height

The century from the conquest of Seville to the death of Pedro I was in many ways the height of Jewish life in the Christian kingdoms. The communities were large and well organised, the great rabbis of Barcelona and Toledo were consulted from Germany to Palestine, Jewish courtiers served the kings of Castile, and Jewish scribes and artists produced books of the first quality. The legal works of the period, from Adret’s responsa to Jacob ben Asher’s Turim, shaped Jewish law far beyond Spain, and the Zohar became one of the central books of Jewish religious literature.

The foundations of this world were nevertheless narrower than its achievements suggested. Its security depended on royal protection, and its courtiers on royal favour. The disputation of 1263, the fall of Don Çag de la Maleha, the plague massacres of 1348 in Aragon and the destruction of the civil war all showed how quickly protection could fail. In 1378 a preacher in Seville began a campaign that would bring the whole structure close to collapse^[2]. That is the subject of the next chapter.

19. The Riots of 1391

In the summer of 1391 a wave of violence swept through the Jewish communities of Castile and Aragon. It began in Seville in June and reached Valencia, Majorca, Barcelona and Girona by August. Thousands were killed, whole communities ceased to exist, and many more Jews accepted baptism to save their lives than died refusing it. The historian Ryan Szpiech puts the scale of the event plainly. “The riots of 1391 represent the moment of the largest forced mass conversion in Iberian history”^[158]. The year, he adds, has come to serve as a historiographical fault-line dividing the converso society of the fifteenth century from all that came before^[158].

This chapter traces the course of the riots, from the sermons that prepared them to the royal enquiries that followed. It draws heavily on one remarkable document, a letter written in October 1391 by Ḥasdai Crescas, the leading rabbi of Aragon, who lost his only son in Barcelona. It then turns to Crescas as a philosopher. In the years after the catastrophe he wrote the most searching medieval Hebrew critique of Aristotelian physics, and his arguments about the infinite and the void have a place in the history of science as well as in the history of Jewish thought.

The archdeacon of Écija

The violence had a single, identifiable instigator. Ferrant Martínez, archdeacon of Écija in the diocese of Seville, was in the words of the Encyclopaedia Judaica one of the leading anti-Jewish agitators in Castile during the last quarter of the fourteenth century^[159]. Preaching in public in Seville, he demanded that the city’s twenty-three synagogues be destroyed and the Jews confined to their own quarter^[159]. As vicar-general of the archbishop he claimed jurisdiction over the Jews of the city and its surroundings, and he demanded their expulsion from Écija and other rural districts^[159].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s entry on Seville wonders how the city could have had so many synagogues. Martínez himself counted twenty-three and boasted of destroying them, and the entry suggests that he may have included the houses of study in the number^[59]. Whatever the exact count, the community was very large. Crescas later described it as containing some six or seven thousand householders^[160].

Écija itself had a community of some standing. Its tax in 1293 amounted to 5,000 maravedis, and in 1332 its wealthiest member, Don Yuçaf de Écija, a courtier of Alfonso XI, endowed a yeshiva there with stipends for its students^[161]. When the archdeacon’s campaign reached its height, that community’s synagogue was destroyed on his orders. Five years later, asked by the archbishop of Toledo to account for the destruction, the vicar of Écija replied that the mob had razed it^[161].

Appeals that went unheeded

The Jews of Seville did not wait passively. In 1378 the community appealed to Henry II, who wrote to the archdeacon ordering him to desist, and the letter was ignored^[159]. In 1382 they turned to his successor, John I, whose edict of 1383 had no more effect^[159]. In 1388 the community resolved to summon Martínez before the supreme court of the crown. He argued in his defence that his actions benefited Church and crown and that he had acted with the consent of the archbishop, and through the intervention of Queen Leonor little came of the trial^[159]. The archbishop of Seville did remove him from office, but the decision proved fruitless^[159].

Two deaths in 1390 removed the last restraints. King John I died, leaving the crown to his son Henry III, then eleven years old, and the archbishop of Seville died in the same year^[158]. Martínez was reinstated and became, in the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s phrase, virtual ruler of the diocese, declaring that even the monarchy would not oppose attacks on the Jews^[2]. Immediately after his reinstatement he ordered that all synagogues within his jurisdiction be destroyed. Henry III demanded that he rebuild them and resign from office, but the demand went unheeded^[159].

Seville, June 1391

The riots broke out in Seville at the beginning of June 1391. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives the date as the first of Tammuz 5151, which it equates with 4 June^[2]. Crescas, writing four months later, gives the same Hebrew date, the first day of what he called the bitter and disastrous month of Tammuz^[160].

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the gates of the Jewish quarter were set on fire and many died. Apostasy was common, women and children were sold as slaves to Muslims, synagogues were turned into churches, and the Jewish quarter filled with Christian settlers^[2]. The entry on Seville adds that soldiers and sailors moving by boat from place to place spread the disorder and taught others from their own experience^[59]. The community was almost totally destroyed. Some of its members died as martyrs, a minority escaped, and others converted^[59].

The material consequences were lasting. The churches acquired land, charitable trusts, shops, workshops and houses that had belonged to Jews and to the community. Henry III granted houses that had been communal property to his chief steward and to his chief justice, and he gave the synagogues to the city^[59]. The old synagogue that Alfonso X had given to the Jews in 1252, itself a former mosque, became the church of Santa María la Blanca^[59]. The remaining Jews of Seville never fully recovered, and in 1437 only 75 houses in the Santa Cruz quarter and 56 near Santa María la Blanca were let to them^[59].

Córdoba, Toledo and Castile

From Seville the violence spread across Andalusia and into the heart of Castile. Crescas wrote that the fire spread and consumed the community of Córdoba, where many converted and the community was left in ruins^[160]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records attacks in Madrid, Cuenca and Burgos as well as Córdoba, with the monarchy making no effort to protect the Jews, and so many people involved that it proved impossible to arrest the leaders^[2].

Toledo was attacked on the seventeenth of Tammuz, a fast day that commemorates the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem^[160]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s entry on Toledo gives the date as 20 June, while noting that Christian sources place the riot on 5 August^[38]. Among the dead were the grandchildren of Asher ben Jehiel, the German rabbi whose arrival in Toledo was described in the previous chapter, together with his disciples and many distinguished members of the community^[38]. Crescas wrote that the rabbis of Toledo publicly sanctified the name of God, and that many others converted because they could not defend themselves^[160]. Almost all the synagogues of Toledo were destroyed or burned, and its houses of study were reduced to ruins^[38].

In Burgos the story was slightly different. Many Jews there found refuge in the houses of Christian merchants, and only a small number were killed. Some were baptised and later lived in a special quarter for converts^[141]. The most famous of these was the rabbi of Burgos, Solomon ha-Levi, who took the name Pablo de Santa María, and whose career belongs to the next chapter^[141]. Crescas estimated that apart from the great cities some seventy towns in the surrounding regions had suffered^[160].

Valencia

In July the riots crossed into the Crown of Aragon. The community of Valencia, one of the largest in the peninsula, was attacked on 9 July 1391 by rioters who had come from Castile and by soldiers stationed in the port, who were waiting to sail for Sicily with the infante Martín^[162]. Some 250 Jews died, and the rest converted or found refuge in the houses of the townspeople^[162]. Crescas, writing in Hebrew dates, placed the attack on the seventh of Av and gave the same figure of about 250 dead^[160].

Among those who converted were leading members of the community, including the royal physician Omar Tahuel, who was one of its officers. The great talmudist Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet escaped, though some documents suggest that he too was forcibly baptised before he fled^[162]. A week after the attack, on 16 July, the king ordered that Jews hidden in Christian houses should not be forced to convert but taken to a place of safety, and he forbade the conversion of synagogues into churches^[162]. None of the synagogues of Valencia survived^[162].

Majorca

The Jews of Majorca had time to prepare. When news of the riots reached the island, the leaders of the community appealed to the royal governor, Francisco Sa Garriga, and it was agreed to cordon off the Jewish quarter and allow no weapons inside^[163]. Jews from the villages moved into the fortified quarters of the towns^[163]. It was not enough. In Palma the riots broke out on 10 July, when youths carrying crucifixes entered the Jewish quarter. The mob broke down the gates and killed scores of Jews^[163]. The authorities attempted to restore order, but on 2 August the riots broke out again, and the communities of Inca, Sóller, Sineu and Alcudia were destroyed^[163].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s general survey gives more than 300 killed on the island^[2], and Crescas gives about three hundred dead, with some eight hundred escaping to the royal fortress and the rest converting^[160]. A list of 111 heads of families who were baptised still survives, recording the names of the godfathers they took, several of them named after the governor himself^[163]. Despite the governor’s ban on leaving the island, many fled to North Africa. Among them was the scholar Simeon ben Ẓemaḥ Duran, who settled in Algiers and held rabbinical office there^[163].

Barcelona

Barcelona was the oldest and most distinguished community of Catalonia, and its destruction was the most complete. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s entry on the city, the city authorities and even the artisans tried to protect the Jews, but without success^[164]. The violence was begun by a band of Castilians who had taken part in the massacres in Seville and Valencia and had arrived by boat. News of the attack on Majorca set off an assault on the Jewish quarter on Saturday 5 August, in which about a hundred Jews were killed and about as many took refuge in the New Castle^[164]. The authorities arrested the Castilians and sentenced ten of them to the gallows^[164].

On the following Monday, the entry continues, the common people of the city, mostly dock workers and fishermen, broke open the prison and stormed the castle, while serfs from the countryside burned the court records and seized the fortress of the royal vicar, where Jews had taken refuge, offering them death or conversion^[164]. Altogether about four hundred Jews were killed, and the rest were converted^[164]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s general survey gives the same figure of more than four hundred^[2], while Crescas gives about two hundred and fifty^[160]. The figures differ, but every source agrees that the community was destroyed.

Crescas’s own account adds the reversal of the authorities’ efforts. The governor, he wrote, had sought to save the Jews with all his power, but an uprising of the poorer classes against the leading citizens turned on the Jews sheltering in the fortress^[160]. Many killed themselves, and some threw themselves from the tower^[160]. The rest converted, and only a few escaped to towns belonging to the nobles. His conclusion was bleak. “Because of our many sins, no one in Barcelona today is called by the name Israel”^[160].

Girona and the rest of Aragon

Girona was attacked on 10 August^[2]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Girona records that the majority of its Jews chose death rather than baptism, and only a few converted, mostly merchants and craftsmen. Some found refuge in the citadel, and others escaped to Perpignan^[165]. Crescas wrote that in Girona, where Torah and humility had been found together, the rabbis publicly sanctified God’s name, and that most of the community found refuge in the houses of Christian townspeople before moving to the fortress^[160]. The community there had been reconstituted by 1392^[165].

Show the interactive mapLoads Google Maps

Elsewhere the destruction followed a now familiar pattern. The Jews of Tortosa were forcibly converted^[2], and in Lleida many died and the rest converted^[160]. Crescas wrote that in the whole kingdom of Valencia no Jew remained except in a single place called Morvedre, and that in Catalonia Jews survived only in towns belonging to nobles and governors^[160]. In Aragon proper, where the king and queen were present, there was neither breach nor outcry^[160].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey suggests that the poorer classes in Aragon tried to relieve their misery by burning their debts to the Jews and seizing their goods, but that the motive of the attacks was primarily religious, since they ended once conversion had been achieved^[2]. That combination of economic resentment and religious coercion is the central problem in interpreting the riots, and historians continue to weigh the two.

The letter of Ḥasdai Crescas

Much of what is known of the riots in the Crown of Aragon comes from a single Hebrew letter. Ḥasdai Crescas, born in Barcelona in about 1340, had studied there with Nissim Gerondi and become a leading authority on Jewish law^[167]. In 1389 he moved to Saragossa, the seat of the royal court, as its rabbi, and in 1390 the crown made him judge of all the Jews of the kingdom of Aragon^[167]. During the riots he worked with King John I and Queen Violante to protect the communities, with only partial success^[167].

His letter to the Jews of Avignon is dated the twentieth of Marḥeshvan 5152, which corresponds to 19 October 1391^[160]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica suggests it was probably meant to inform the Jewish intercessors who were meeting the pope at Avignon^[167]. It is short and formal, and it moves from city to city in the order of the disaster. Its language is full of biblical allusion. The ruined centres of learning become Jerusalem, and the writer’s son becomes Isaac^[167]. At the centre of the letter is a single personal sentence. “Among them was my only son, a bridegroom, an unblemished lamb whom I offered as a burnt offering”^[160].

The letter ends with an account of the survivors in Aragon, saved, Crescas says, by strenuous efforts and the great expenditure of their wealth, so that nothing remained to them but their bodies^[160]. It is a document of grief, but also of public leadership, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s account of Crescas’s next years shows him turning at once to reconstruction^[167].

The royal response

The kings of Castile and Aragon did not encourage the riots, but they did little to stop them. In the judgement of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, John I of Aragon did nothing to prevent the outbreaks and intervened only once the worst was over^[2]. His main concern was to preserve royal resources. On 22 September 1391 he ordered an enquiry into the assets of the ruined communities and of Jews who had died, especially those without heirs, and he impounded what could be found^[2]. The same order was applied in Valencia, where a list of the property of the dead was drawn up for transfer to the king^[162].

Punishment was limited. In Barcelona, John condemned twenty-six rioters to death at the end of the year and acquitted the rest^[164]. In Valencia, a pardon was granted in November, because the city elders said the town was emptying as its inhabitants fled^[162]. When a fresh outbreak threatened early in 1392, the king suppressed it quickly^[2]. The fullest modern study of the Aragonese response is Benjamin Gampel’s Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391–1392, published by Cambridge University Press^[166].

In Castile the situation was worse, because the young king could not act. Martínez was eventually imprisoned on the orders of Henry III in 1395, but he was soon released, and after his death he was revered by the people as a saint^[159].

The mapmakers of Majorca

The destruction of the Majorcan community also scattered a remarkable group of practical scientists. From the late 1340s until the end of the century, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, a school of Jewish astronomers and cartographers developed on the island^[163]. Its best known member was the cartographer whom older scholarship called Abraham Cresques. The Encyclopaedia Judaica points out that his name was in fact Cresques Abraham, since in the Catalan-speaking lands Jews customarily bore their father’s name as their second name^[168]. He made maps and compasses for Pedro IV of Aragon and his son John, who gave him the title of master of world maps and compasses, magister mapamundorum et buxolarum^[168].

In 1381 the infante John sent one of his world maps as a gift to Charles VI of France, and in the same year Cresques and his son Judah were taken under royal protection and exempted from wearing the Jewish badge^[168]. The celebrated Catalan Atlas, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, is thought to be his work^[168]. The library’s description of the manuscript, catalogued as Espagnol 30, dates it to about 1375 and attributes it, with a question mark, to Cresques^[169]. It consists of six double sheets of parchment mounted on wooden boards, and it was already in the library of the French king Charles V when that collection was inventoried in November 1380^[169]. That date sits awkwardly with the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s report of a gift to Charles VI in 1381, and the two may refer to different maps.

Mireille Pastoureau, writing for the Bibliothèque nationale de France, explains that the date of 1375 can be deduced from the perpetual calendar placed at the head of the maps^[170]. She describes the atlas as at once a nautical chart, with a compass rose and rhumb lines, and an illustrated picture of the inhabited regions of the globe with their historical, geographical and commercial features and their political divisions^[170]. Its compass rose, she notes, is the first to be drawn on a nautical chart^[170]. Laid end to end, the sheets form a rectangle 64 centimetres high and 3 metres wide^[170].

Cresques died in 1387. His son Judah continued to make maps for John I and Martin of Aragon^[168]. In 1391 Judah was converted to Christianity and took the name Jaime Ribes. By 1399 he was described in documents as a master of sea charts, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica identifies him with the famous cartographer Mestre Jacome de Mallorca, who worked for Henry the Navigator in Portugal in the 1420s^[168]. The career of Judah Cresques thus links the Jewish science of fourteenth-century Majorca with the Portuguese voyages of the fifteenth century, a connection that reappears with Abraham Zacut in Chapter 21. Another Majorcan astronomer, Isaac Nifoci, who had been chosen as a companion of the king of Aragon in 1359, also accepted baptism in 1391, though he later made amends by emigrating to the Land of Israel^[163].

The converts of 1391

The converts of 1391 were not a single group. Some, like Pablo de Santa María in Burgos, embraced their new faith and became its advocates. Szpiech emphasises that Pablo’s conversion was, by all accounts, voluntary rather than forced, which made him unusual among the converts of his generation^[158]. Many more were baptised under duress and lived thereafter in an uneasy position between two communities.

The scholar and physician Profiat Duran is the best known example of the second kind. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, he was probably born in Perpignan and later moved to Catalonia, acquired an extensive knowledge of the sciences and of languages, and associated with Ḥasdai Crescas^[171]. A later tradition held that he had been forcibly converted in 1391 and returned to Judaism, but documents from the archives of Perpignan show that he lived there as a Christian, under the name Honoratus de Bonafide, for about twelve years afterwards, while continuing to write in Hebrew^[171]. His satirical letter Al Tehi ka-Avotekha, Be Not Like Your Fathers, was addressed to a friend who had been converted with him and had become a sincere Christian, and its ambiguity was such that some Christian readers at first took it for praise of Christianity^[171].

At Crescas’s initiative Duran also wrote Kelimmat ha-Goyim, a critique of Christian doctrine by historical and critical method, which examined the writings of the Church Fathers and corrected errors in Christian translations of Jewish texts^[171]. His grammatical work, Maʿaseh Efod, shows a knowledge of Semitic and Romance languages and of Greek, and it is distinguished by its original and logical approach to grammatical problems^[171].

Counting the cost

No exact figures exist for the number of the dead or the converted. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s biography of Crescas states that hundreds of Jewish communities in Valencia, Majorca and Catalonia were destroyed, that thousands of Jews were killed and that more than 100,000 converted to Christianity^[167]. These are estimates, but they convey the essential point. Death was the fate of a minority, while baptism was the fate of the many. Szpiech describes mob attacks that spread across much of Castile and Aragon over the following months, killing scores of Jews and forcing thousands of others to accept baptism^[158].

Conversion under threat of death was illegal in canon law, but the Church held that a baptism once performed could not be undone. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that in the eyes of the Church a converso was a true Christian, and thus forbidden to return to Judaism^[2]. This was the source of the problem that would dominate the next century. Tens of thousands of new Christians lived alongside the remaining Jews, often in the same towns and families, and some of them hoped to return to their old faith.

Ḥasdai Crescas and the Light of the Lord

Crescas spent the last two decades of his life rebuilding. Supported by the king and queen, he devoted himself to reconstructing the devastated communities of Aragon^[167]. He also arranged passage for thousands of conversos on ships bound for North Africa or the Land of Israel, where they could legally return to Judaism^[167]. In 1396 he drew up new regulations for the community of Saragossa, modified in 1399 by Queen Violante to give the lower classes a greater share in its government^[167].

He also wrote. His Refutation of the Christian Principles, composed in Catalan in 1397 and 1398, survives only in a Hebrew translation made by Joseph ben Shem Tov in 1451^[167]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes it as a non-rhetorical logical critique of ten Christian doctrines^[167]. His major work, Or Adonai, the Light of the Lord, was written in Hebrew and completed in 1410, shortly before his death in Saragossa^[167]. It was conceived as a polemic, the Encyclopaedia Judaica suggests, because Aristotelian arguments had been used by Jewish intellectuals to justify leaving Judaism^[167]. It was directed against Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, the central work of Jewish Aristotelianism^[167].

A critique of Aristotelian physics

The scientific interest of Or Adonai lies in its arguments against Aristotle’s physics. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Crescas, by Shalom Sadik, lists among his best known opinions the existence of the void, the existence of an infinity of worlds and the existence of time without motion^[172]. Each of these contradicted a central doctrine of Aristotelian natural philosophy as Maimonides had accepted it.

On the infinite, Crescas departed from Aristotle in several ways. Aristotle held that the infinite exists only potentially, as in the endless division of a line, and not as an actual body, and so denied infinite voids and extensions^[172]. Crescas argued that infinites need not be equal. Sadik’s example is a line infinite in both directions compared with a ray infinite in only one, and Crescas concluded that one could in such cases add something to an infinite and that one infinite could contain another^[172]. He also answered Aristotle’s geometrical objections by observing that even in an infinite magnitude any two actual points are only a finite distance apart^[172]. On matter, he distinguished matter in itself from body, the union of matter and dimension, and argued that a pure body without other qualities could exist^[172].

These arguments were philosophical rather than experimental, and they belong to a wider late medieval movement of criticism of Aristotle. Sadik notes that Or Adonai had a wider influence on European philosophy, especially through Pico della Mirandola and Spinoza^[172]. Crescas’s notion of God as the place of the world, together with his treatment of the infinite, helped Spinoza to formulate his view that extension is an attribute of God^[172].

Crescas’s ideas also bore directly on the crisis of his own time. Sadik observes that Crescas was the first Jewish philosopher and communal leader to confront the existence of a large converso population, and that his view of religious perfection as rooted in the love of God, rather than in the observance of commandments or in intellectual knowledge, offered conversos the prospect of religious perfection as Jews even while outwardly living as Christians^[172].

A community in ruins

The communities that had stood at the centre of the previous chapters never recovered their former strength. In Barcelona, John I tried in 1393 to restore the community, allotting it a new quarter, returning the old cemetery and granting tax exemptions, and Crescas was authorised to bring Jews from other places to settle there. Few were willing to come, and in 1401 Martin I, at the request of the burghers, forbade the re-establishment of a Jewish community in the city^[164]. The Jewish community of Barcelona, the Encyclopaedia Judaica observes, thus ceased to exist a hundred years before the expulsion^[164]. Valencia too proved unable to recover^[162].

Elsewhere there was some revival. A small community was re-established in Majorca, and in the countryside, where Jews were indispensable and less exposed to the jealousy of the burghers, communities reorganised more easily^[2]. In 1399 the aljama of Saragossa, where Crescas was rabbi, obtained a new statute from Queen Violante^[2]. But the Jewish world of Sefarad had changed. A great part of it had become Christian in name, and the next chapter follows the converts and the communities that remained through the missionary campaigns of the early fifteenth century.

20. Tortosa and the Age of the Conversos

The riots of 1391 left the Jewish communities of Castile and Aragon reduced, impoverished and surrounded by a new population of converts. The next quarter of a century brought a second blow, delivered this time not by mobs but by preachers, legislators and a pope. Between 1411 and 1416 the Dominican friar Vicente Ferrer preached through the towns of Castile and Aragon, the regency of Castile issued the harshest anti-Jewish laws in its history, and the Avignon pope Benedict XIII summoned the leading rabbis of Aragon to a disputation at Tortosa that lasted for some twenty months. A new wave of conversions followed.

This chapter follows those events and their aftermath. It considers the converts who led the campaign, among them Pablo de Santa María, once rabbi of Burgos, and his pupil Joshua Lorki, who became Jerónimo de Santa Fe. It turns then to the Jewish response, from Joseph Albo’s Book of Principles to the communal ordinances of Valladolid in 1432. It ends in Toledo in 1449, when a rebellion against royal taxation produced the first statute excluding converts and their descendants from public office.

Vicente Ferrer’s campaign

Vicente Ferrer, born in about 1350 and later canonised by the Catholic Church, was the most influential preacher of his age. Some historians have held him responsible for the riots of 1391, but the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he seems to have been on his way to Avignon at the time, and that in a Lenten sermon in Valencia after the disorders he condemned the rioters^[173]. He advocated conversion from conviction and more than once emphasised the Jewish origin of Jesus. Yet his appearances provoked mass demonstrations accompanied by anti-Jewish outbursts, especially in the first two decades of the fifteenth century^[173].

His influence extended to the highest level of policy. The Encyclopaedia Judaica credits him with shaping the approach to the Jews adopted by Benedict XIII, by Ferdinand I of Aragon, whose election as king he helped to secure, and by the queen mother Catalina, regent of Castile^[173]. He wanted the Jews removed from their old quarters, so that they could not influence the converts who still lived among them^[173]. Wherever he went the populace sometimes refused to sell Jews food and other necessities. The Jews of Aínsa left their town when they heard he was coming and returned only after he had gone^[173]. Ferdinand compelled Jews and Muslims to attend his sermons and fined those who stayed away^[173].

In 1408 he preached in Italy, where Bernardino da Siena heard him at Alessandria and was moved to imitate him^[173]. Ferrer preached in Catalan, and over six thousand of his sermons survive in Latin summaries^[173]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica concludes that he evidently tried to bring Jews to the font by every means short of physical force^[173]. In May 1414 Ferdinand wrote to him rejoicing over the conversion of 122 Jews in Guadalajara^[173].

The Valladolid ordinances of 1412

Ferrer’s preaching in Castile in 1411 and 1412 was followed by legislation. On 2 January 1412 the government of the regent issued new regulations at Valladolid, drawn up, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, with the collaboration of Ferrer and Pablo de Santa María^[173]. Jews were to live in separate quarters in towns and villages and to grow their hair and beards so that they could be distinguished from Christians. They could no longer be addressed by the honorific Don^[2].

The economic provisions were still more severe. Jews were forbidden to work as tax farmers or hold any public office, their physicians could not treat Christians and lending at interest was prohibited^[2]. In the words of the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey, all professions were closed to them and all commerce by which they might ameliorate their miserable existence forbidden^[2]. For a time even their internal autonomy and their freedom of movement were in question^[2].

The laws struck at the occupations that had sustained the communities since the Reconquest, and at the place of Jewish physicians in particular, a profession that the earlier chapters of this essay have followed from Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut onwards. They were applied unevenly, and within a decade most were abandoned, but they marked a new stage. For the first time, a Castilian government set out to make Jewish life economically impossible as a way of encouraging conversion.

Abner of Burgos and Pablo de Santa María

The campaign drew strength from a small number of learned converts who knew Jewish texts from the inside. The first was Abner of Burgos, a physician born in about 1270 who took the name Alfonso of Valladolid. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, he wrestled with doubts about Judaism for some twenty-five years and was baptised when he was about fifty^[174]. He then wrote a series of works in Hebrew directed at Jews, some of them later translated into Castilian under his supervision, and the encyclopaedia counts him among the first apostates to formulate an ideological justification for conversion^[174]. In 1334 he tried to persuade the elders of Toledo that they had made an error in fixing the date of Passover, a reminder that the Hebrew calendar was a matter of computation on which a learned critic could challenge a community^[174].

The second was Solomon ha-Levi of Burgos, born in about 1350 into a family of tax farmers and financiers^[175]. In his youth he moved in a circle of Jewish scholars that included Joseph Orabuena and Don Benveniste de la Cavallería, and he corresponded with Isaac ben Sheshet on questions of ritual law^[175]. The circumstances of his conversion are obscure. Christian tradition places his baptism on 21 July 1390, but a letter from his pupil Joshua Lorki suggests that it followed the outbreak of the riots of 1391^[175]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he was deeply influenced by Abner, whom he often quotes^[175].

After his baptism as Pablo de Santa María he studied theology in Paris until 1394 and was ordained priest. He then joined the court of Benedict XIII at Avignon^[175]. He became bishop of Cartagena in 1403, chancellor of Castile in 1407 and, from 1415 until his death in 1435, bishop of Burgos^[175]. His Additions to the biblical commentary of the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra, completed in 1429, were printed with Lyra’s work in many editions, and Szpiech notes that more than twenty-five manuscripts of the Additions survive^[158]. His Scrutinium Scripturarum of 1432 was a dialogue between a Jew named Saul and a Christian named Paul^[175]. His sons followed him into high office. One of them, Alonso de Cartagena, succeeded him as bishop of Burgos and defended the converts in his Defensorium unitatis christianae^[175].

Jerónimo de Santa Fe

The third convert was the instigator of Tortosa. Joshua Lorki, son of Joseph ibn Vives of Lorca, near Murcia, had studied in Alcañiz under Solomon ha-Levi and was deeply affected by his teacher’s conversion^[176]. He wrote to Pablo asking why he had converted and setting out his own reservations about the messianic claims of Christianity^[176]. He remained a Jew until 1412, when he was baptised under the influence of Vicente Ferrer and took the name Jerónimo de Santa Fe^[176].

Lorki was a physician. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that, probably while still a Jew, he wrote a book in Arabic on plants and herbs and their medicinal properties, which was later translated into Hebrew^[176]. After his baptism he became physician to Benedict XIII and proposed a disputation with the leading Jews of Alcañiz. The pope decided that it should be held at Tortosa and that the foremost Jews of Aragon should take part^[176]. The bibliographic database of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona describes him as an Aragonese converso who practised medicine at Alcañiz and was probably not a rabbi, and notes that some of his writings were composed at the express request of Benedict XIII^[177]. His two polemical treatises, against Jewish unbelief and on the supposed errors of the Talmud, were written around the time of the disputation and used in it^[176]. The Jews called him Megaddef, the Blasphemer, a name formed from the initials of Maestre Gerónimo de Santa Fe^[176].

The Disputation of Tortosa

In 1412 Benedict XIII, who was recognised as pope in Spain, ordered the communities of Aragon and Catalonia to send delegates to a discussion in his presence of the claims of Jerónimo^[178]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s general survey says that the disputation was summoned for 15 January 1413 and actually began the following month^[2]. The pope probably hoped for a great religious success at the moment when the divided Church was trying to reunite at the Council of Constance^[2].

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on the disputation, by Haim Beinart, it was the most important and the longest of the Christian–Jewish disputations of the Middle Ages. It lasted some twenty months, with sixty-nine sessions, and the pope presided and took an active part^[178]. Jewish sources mention about twenty participants on the Jewish side, some speaking and some advising or observing. The most prominent were Zerahiah ha-Levi of Saragossa, Astruc ha-Levi of Alcañiz, Joseph Albo and Mattathias ha-Yiẓhari^[178]. Several of them had been pupils of Ḥasdai Crescas^[167].

From the outset, Beinart writes, the disputation took the form not of a free discussion but of a missionary attack accompanied by psychological pressure, to the point of intimidation and threats^[178]. At the first session the pope announced, contrary to earlier promises, that the purpose was not a debate between equals but a demonstration of the truth of Christianity from the Talmud^[178]. Jerónimo accused the Jews who rejected his arguments of heresy against their own religion and threatened them with the Inquisition^[178].

The course of the debate

The first part of the disputation, until March 1414, concerned the Messiah and his nature, as at Barcelona in 1263^[178]. The Jews were required to answer the claims in Jerónimo’s treatise and to explain midrashic passages collected by Raymond Martini^[178]. Twelve questions were then put to them on Jesus, original sin and the causes of the exile, and Beinart judges that some of the most brilliant answers ever given in a medieval disputation were offered at this stage^[178].

The strain was nevertheless immense. The delegates were away from their homes for about a year and became impoverished, while in their absence the preaching of the friars brought many Jews to baptism^[178]. Most of the delegates sought to withdraw. Zerahiah ha-Levi, Mattathias ha-Yiẓhari and Astruc ha-Levi presented memoranda refuting the arguments drawn from aggadah and midrash, and Astruc even dared to point out the injustice of the conditions under which the debate was held^[178].

The second part, which opened in April 1414, dealt with what its initiators called the “errors, the heresy, the villainy, and the abuse against the Christian religion in the Talmud”^[178]. At first the Jews chose silence. When Jerónimo produced a list of passages to be removed from the Talmud, they replied that their own inability to answer did not show that the sages of the Talmud could not have done so^[178]. Jerónimo demanded that the delegates be brought to justice. All except Zerahiah ha-Levi and Joseph Albo said that they had not understood the meaning of his citations^[178].

The sources for Tortosa

Much of what is known about the disputation comes from a book written a century later. The principal Hebrew source, the Encyclopaedia Judaica explains, is the Shevet Yehudah of Solomon ibn Verga, and a neutral Christian account also survives^[178]. Ibn Verga’s own life spanned the end of Sefarad. After Ferdinand and Isabella took Málaga in 1487, he was sent by the Spanish communities to raise money to ransom the Jews taken captive there^[179]. At the expulsion of 1492 he settled in Lisbon, and from 1497, when the Jews of Portugal were forcibly baptised, he had to live as a converso. In 1506, when conversos were allowed to leave, he went to Italy^[179].

He wrote the Shevet Yehudah in the 1520s as a compilation of accounts of persecutions from the destruction of the Second Temple to his own day^[179]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he interspersed the historical narrative with disputations and debates, some authentic and some imaginary, through which he tried to explain the hatred directed against the Jews and to answer their enemies^[179]. His account of Tortosa therefore has to be read with care, as a literary reworking by an exile rather than a transcript, alongside the Christian records, among them the acts of the disputation that the Barcelona database lists among Jerónimo’s own works^[177].

The end of the disputation

The final Jewish memorandum, by Astruc ha-Levi, was presented on 12 November 1414. On the following day the pope issued a bull, the disputation was closed and the delegates returned home^[178]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s general survey dates the end to December 1414, a discrepancy that may reflect the difference between the last session and the departure of the delegates^[2].

Throughout the disputation Jews had come to Tortosa to be baptised^[178]. In several towns the inhabitants used harsh measures to force conversion, and many Jews broke down and accepted baptism^[178]. The community of Alcañiz, home of both Jerónimo and Astruc ha-Levi, was largely converted, and afterwards only fifteen families in and around the town remained Jewish^[180].

Legislation followed. Acting on a bull of Benedict XIII dated 11 May, Ferdinand I ordered on 23 July 1415 that the Jews surrender their copies of the Talmud for censorship^[2]. Jewish judges lost their authority in criminal cases, including those involving informers, synagogues could not be enlarged, Christians could no longer employ Jewish agents and Jews were confined to separate quarters^[2]. Many Aragonese communities were destroyed and conversions were numerous, especially among the upper classes^[2].

A respite

The pressure eased almost as quickly as it had come. Benedict XIII was removed from the papacy in 1416, and Ferdinand I died in the same year^[2]. The new kings, John II of Castile and Alfonso V of Aragon, had little taste for the religious fervour of their predecessors, and the new pope was disinclined to renew the campaign^[2]. Almost all the anti-Jewish measures were abrogated between 1419 and 1422, and copies of the Talmud and synagogue buildings were restored^[2].

But the communities that survived were much reduced. Valencia and Barcelona had disappeared, and in Majorca the remaining Jews were dispersed after a blood libel in 1432^[2]. Only the rural settlements of Aragon had escaped persecution^[2]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica estimates that at the time of the expulsion there were about 6,000 Jewish families in Aragon and about 30,000 in Castile, apart from the many conversos^[2]. The great urban communities of Seville, Toledo and Burgos had lost their influence through the conversion of so many of their leaders, and the weight of Jewish life now lay in small rural communities that rarely exceeded fifty families^[2].

Joseph Albo and the Book of Principles

The disputation provoked a body of Jewish reflection on the reasons for the disaster. The Encyclopaedia Judaica names three works written in its aftermath as attempts at soul-searching^[178]. The most important intellectually was the Sefer ha-Ikkarim, the Book of Principles, by Joseph Albo.

Albo was born in about 1380 and died in about 1440. According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, he lived for a time at Daroca, in the province of Saragossa, and later at Soria in Castile, and was a pupil of Ḥasdai Crescas^[181]. He was one of the leading Jewish spokesmen at Tortosa, and the experience convinced him of the need for a sound theological defence of Judaism^[181]. The Book of Principles was completed in 1425 and soon became one of the most popular works of Jewish theology. It was first printed at Soncino in 1485^[181].

The book sought to define exactly what Judaism required its adherents to believe. Albo reduced its foundations to three principles, namely the existence of God, divine revelation, and reward and punishment, and devoted a tractate to each^[181]. He followed sometimes Maimonides and sometimes Crescas, and borrowed much from his contemporary Simeon ben Ẓemaḥ Duran^[181]. Like Crescas, he placed the goal of human life not in intellectual perfection alone but also in religious and moral perfection^[181]. The New Catholic Encyclopedia notes that later Jewish writers, among them Isaac Abravanel, remarked on Albo’s apparent indifference to the belief in a coming Messiah^[181], an indifference that is easy to understand in a man who had spent months answering messianic arguments before a pope.

Reproach and lament

The other responses were harsher in tone. Shem Tov ibn Shem Tov’s Sefer ha-Emunot, the Book of Beliefs, blamed the cultivation of philosophy for the conversions^[178]. Solomon Alami, who had fled to Portugal in 1391, composed his Iggeret Musar, a letter of moral reproof, in 1415^[182]. Written in rhymed prose, it is divided into five sections corresponding to the five senses, and it has gone through eighteen editions^[182]. Alami asked why God sought to destroy the Jews in every generation and reached the conviction that “we ourselves have dug the pit into which we have fallen”^[182]. He blamed above all the upper classes, the courtiers and tax farmers, philosophers and rabbis, whose selfishness and luxury he held responsible for the catastrophe^[182].

Poetry continued, though its practitioners felt themselves the last of a line. Solomon ben Reuben Bonafed, born between 1370 and 1380, lived in various places in the kingdom of Aragon and was present at the Disputation of Tortosa, distressed by the conversions but anxious not to lose his ties with the new Christians^[183]. He wrote in biblical Hebrew and considered his vocation to be the continuation of the Andalusian tradition. He admired Judah Halevi, identified with Solomon ibn Gabirol, and believed that Hebrew poetry would disappear with him^[183]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he wrote some of the last muwashshaḥat of clear Andalusian tradition composed in the peninsula^[183]. The forms that Dunash ibn Labrat had brought to Córdoba in the tenth century thus survived, in modified shape, into the age of the conversos.

The Valladolid takkanot of 1432

In Castile the communities found new leadership. Abraham Benveniste of Soria, treasurer to John II, was appointed rab de la corte, chief rabbi of the kingdom, and used his position to reorganise Castilian Jewry^[2]. In 1432 he summoned representatives of the communities to Valladolid to adopt new regulations, known as takkanot^[2].

Their first concern was education, to be paid for by taxes on slaughter, wine, marriages and circumcisions. Every community of fifteen families was to support an elementary teacher, every community of forty families had to employ a rabbi, and every community of ten families had to maintain a place of prayer^[2]. The ordinances also regulated the election of judges, allowed appeals to the rab de la corte, forbade forced betrothals and marriages, and prohibited any Jew from obtaining an exemption from communal taxes by royal favour^[2]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica judges that the takkanot answered the needs of communities greatly reduced in numbers and wealth, though it is difficult to know how strictly they were applied^[2].

Conversos and Old Christians

By the middle of the fifteenth century the most pressing question was no longer the condition of the Jews but that of the converts. Some had converted voluntarily, but many more had been forced, and their integration into Old Christian society, in the words of the encyclopaedia Europe, 1450 to 1789, remained a much debated and uncertain issue from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century^[184]. Conversion opened offices in Church and state that had been closed to Jews, and the converts filled them. They served in the Castilian economy and administration as treasurers, merchants, financiers, secretaries and record keepers, and some married into the Old Christian nobility^[184].

Their success provoked resentment, especially in the towns, where wealthy conversos appeared in city and church councils and as tax collectors^[184]. Christians spoke of New and Old Christians, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey describes the distinction as a veritable racial one^[2]. It notes too that many conversos were Christians in name only, while others had accepted baptism as a way of breaking down social, economic and political barriers^[2]. Such suspicions were the ground on which the later Inquisition was built.

Toledo, 1449

The first open rupture came in Toledo. In 1449 Pedro Sarmiento, commander of the city’s fortress, led a revolt whose pretext was a heavy tax imposed in the king’s name by the royal favourite Álvaro de Luna^[185]. The rioters began by burning the house of Alonso Cota, a converso and one of the principal tax farmers. Sarmiento took over the city government, arrested the leading conversos and, after confessions extracted under torture, condemned them to the stake^[185].

Sarmiento then published a regulation, based on a supposed royal privilege, which declared that New Christians and their descendants could not hold public office^[185]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls it the first instance of racial discrimination practised against the conversos in Castile^[185]. Its general survey describes the statute as declaring all New Christians, whatever the fervour of their faith, infamous and unfit for any office or benefice in Toledo and its dependencies, and unable to serve as witnesses or notaries^[2]. Historians know it as the Sentencia-Estatuto. The encyclopaedia Europe, 1450 to 1789 describes such measures as pure-blood statutes, which stripped conversos of their municipal offices on the grounds of their Jewish ancestry^[184]. They were the forerunners of the later statutes of limpieza de sangre, purity of blood.

The king condemned the statute and dismissed Sarmiento, and Pope Nicholas V issued a bull denouncing it^[185]. In the same year Alonso de Cartagena, bishop of Burgos and son of Pablo de Santa María, wrote his Defensorium unitatis christianae, sharply criticising the division between Old and New Christians^[185]. Yet Sarmiento was pardoned in 1452 and later restored to court office^[185]. There were renewed battles between conversos and Old Christians in Toledo in 1467^[184].

Names for the converts

The converts and their descendants were known by several names. Contemporaries called them conversos, or New Christians to distinguish them from the more numerous Old Christians^[184]. A third name, marrano, has become common in modern writing, but it was an insult. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on the word, by Martin A. Cohen, calls it a term of opprobrium used to denigrate the New Christians of Spain and Portugal^[186]. Many derivations have been proposed, from Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, but Cohen considers most of them unlikely. The most probable origin, he writes, is the Spanish word for swine, already in use in the early Middle Ages, though Yakov Malkiel argued for a link with a late Arabic word for an outsider^[186]. Later Jewish tradition romanticised the term as a badge of honour, but it was less widely used in official documents than is often supposed^[186]. This essay uses converso, the term most often found in the sources.

The debate over the converts’ place in Christian society also took written form. On one side stood Alonso de Cartagena, who defended the right of the conversos to full integration as Christians with equal rights. On the other stood the Franciscan Alonso de Espina, whose Fortalitium Fidei proposed a detailed plan for hunting out heresy among the conversos, a scheme that the Encyclopaedia Judaica regards as a harbinger of the Spanish Inquisition^[187].

Towards the Inquisition

The events of 1449 showed how the problem of the conversos had changed. The campaign of Ferrer and Tortosa had aimed to bring Jews to baptism, but the statute of Toledo treated even sincere converts as a separate and suspect group defined by descent. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey suggests that the king and pope condemned it more from a desire to encourage conversion, which the statute rendered pointless, than from any sense of justice^[2].

The marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469, and the union of their kingdoms in 1479, brought to power rulers who regarded the conversos as a threat to the unity of the realm^[2]. Their answer was the Spanish Inquisition, and its consequences for both conversos and Jews are the subject of the next chapter.

21. 1492

On 31 March 1492, in the newly conquered city of Granada, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile signed an edict ordering every Jew in their kingdoms to accept baptism or leave by the end of July. The edict ended some fifteen centuries of Jewish life in the peninsula. It also marked the end of the story this essay has followed, from the court of Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut to the astronomers of Salamanca.

The expulsion was not an isolated decision. It was the last stage of a policy that began with the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 and the expulsion of the Jews from Andalusia in 1483, and its stated purpose, as the edict itself makes clear, concerned the conversos rather than the Jews. This chapter traces that policy, reads the edict closely, and follows the exiles to Portugal, where in 1497 the remaining Jews were forcibly baptised. It also follows the career of Abraham Zacut, whose astronomical tables, printed in Portugal in 1496, are the last great scientific work of Sefarad.

The Catholic Monarchs

The marriage of Isabella, heiress to the throne of Castile, and Ferdinand, heir to Aragon, in 1469 had, in the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s words, disastrous consequences for Spanish Jewry^[2]. The two kingdoms were united in 1479^[2]. At first the monarchs took little notice of the Jewish communities as such. They continued to employ Jewish officials, among them Abraham Seneor, chief rabbi of Castile and controller of taxes for the whole kingdom, and Isaac Abravanel, a tax farmer for part of Castile^[2]. But they regarded the conversos as a danger to the unity of the realm^[2].

The first measures were legal and spatial. In 1476 the right of criminal jurisdiction was taken from the Jewish communities^[2]. At the Cortes of Toledo in 1480, as the edict of 1492 itself later recalled, the monarchs ordered that Jews be separated from Christians in every city, town and village, and confined to Jewish quarters, in the hope that separation would remedy the influence they were believed to exert on the converts^[188]. The same year saw the appointment of the first inquisitors.

The Inquisition from 1478

In 1477 Ferdinand and Isabella asked Pope Sixtus IV to authorise an Inquisition in Castile, and on 1 November 1478 the pope gave them the right to appoint inquisitors throughout the kingdom^[187]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that the monarchs were motivated not only by religious fervour but also by the wish to solve a serious social problem and to ensure the full integration of the conversos into Christian society^[187]. Two Dominicans, Miguel de Morillo and Juan de San Martín, were appointed on 27 September 1480, and on 1 January 1481 they began work in Seville, because Andalusia was considered an important centre of Judaising^[187].

Many wealthy and prominent conversos of Seville were arrested. The records of the tribunal have not survived, but the chronicler Andrés Bernáldez reported that between 1481 and 1488 more than seven hundred conversos were burned at the stake and more than five thousand reconciled to the Church after various penances^[187]. In Aragon, where a papal Inquisition had existed since the thirteenth century, Sixtus IV at first resisted the extension of the new tribunal, but in October 1483 he agreed to extend it to Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia^[187].

Tomás de Torquemada

In 1483 Tomás de Torquemada, prior of the Dominican convent of Santa Cruz in Segovia and confessor to the queen, became inquisitor-general^[187]. The New Catholic Encyclopedia notes that he was himself of Jewish descent, and that he helped draft the first royal request for an Inquisition in 1478^[189]. Under his control the Inquisitions of Castile and Aragon were unified in August and October 1483, with five territorial tribunals and a supreme council under him^[189]. The ordinances he issued at Seville on 29 November 1484, as later supplemented, regulated inquisitorial procedure in Spain for three centuries^[189].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that the measures Torquemada introduced fixed the character of the institution from the start, and that he abolished the orders previously issued by the pope in favour of the conversos^[187]. The New Catholic Encyclopedia, a Catholic reference work, judges him exceptionally intolerant even for his times, and it records that he publicised an alleged ritual murder at La Guardia to encourage the expulsion of the Jews^[189].

The tribunals at work

The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives figures for the early tribunals. At Ciudad Real, between 1483 and 1485, at least a hundred conversos were condemned, fifty-two of them to the stake^[187]. At Guadalupe in 1485, fifty-two conversos were burned in a single year and the remains of forty-eight others exhumed and burned^[187]. In Toledo, which took over from Ciudad Real in 1485 and had jurisdiction over eighty-eight towns and villages, 3,327 people were sentenced at twenty autos-da-fé in 1486 alone^[187].

The Jews were drawn into the process. The authorities compelled the leaders of the Jewish communities to proclaim in the synagogues that any Jew who knew of a converso practising Judaism and failed to report it would be placed under a ban^[187]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s general survey estimates that in less than twelve years the Inquisition condemned at least 13,000 conversos for continuing to practise Judaism in secret, though these were only a fraction of the converso population^[2].

Resistance in Aragon

The new Inquisition met open resistance in the Crown of Aragon. When Torquemada appointed two inquisitors in Saragossa in 1484, the notables of Aragon regarded it as an attack on the liberties of the kingdom, whose laws forbade the appointment of foreign officials, and a delegation of the estates appealed in vain to the king^[187]. When the new inquisitor Juan de Çolivera tried to set up his tribunal in Teruel, its leaders shut the town gates against him, and he settled instead in the nearby village of Cella. There he conducted the interrogations with unprecedented cruelty, and between 1484 and 1486 more than thirty people were condemned to death while only seven were admitted as penitents^[187].

In Saragossa the conversos tried diplomacy and, when it failed, organised a plot that ended in the assassination of the inquisitor Pedro de Arbués in 1485^[187]. The investigation that followed revealed that the leading conspirators included some of the most prominent New Christians at court, members of the Sánchez, Santángel and Cavallería families^[187]. The killing strengthened the Inquisition rather than weakening it. In Saragossa, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, the penitents were few compared with those burned, and about six hundred conversos were sentenced there before 1492^[187].

Expulsion from Andalusia

In 1483 the Jews were expelled from Andalusia^[187]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey explains the step as a consequence of the inquisitors’ conviction that it was impossible to root out Judaising among the conversos while practising Jews lived among them^[2]. The edict of 1492 confirms this reading. The monarchs recalled that they had at first contented themselves with ordering the Jews to leave the cities, towns and villages of Andalusia, where they believed the greatest harm had been done, hoping that this would be enough^[188].

The community of Seville, which had survived 1391 in a diminished state, thus came to an end nine years before the general expulsion. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on the city records that at the time of the expulsion from Andalusia the Jewish quarter was enclosed by a wall with two gates^[59].

The fall of Granada

The war against the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, the last Muslim state in the peninsula, occupied Ferdinand and Isabella through the 1480s. Jewish financiers contributed to it, and Isaac Abravanel offered the monarchs extensive loans for the campaign^[190]. After the conquest of Málaga in 1487, Jewish leaders worked to ransom the Jews taken captive there. Abraham Seneor directed his efforts to the redemption of the captives^[191], and Solomon ibn Verga was sent by the communities to raise funds^[179].

Granada surrendered at the beginning of January 1492, and the monarchs entered it on 2 January^[2]. In the judgement of the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey, the conquest strengthened the drive towards the complete religious unity of the kingdom^[2]. Within three months the expulsion edict had been signed.

The edict of 31 March 1492

The edict survives in several copies, issued separately for Castile and Aragon and sent to individual cities and dioceses. The Aragonese version is preserved in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona, catalogued among the royal letters of Ferdinand II and dated at Granada on 31 March 1492. It is a single sheet measuring 436 by 306 millimetres, and on its back the archivist Pere Miquel Carbonell noted that it showed how the king had expelled the whole Jewish nation from his lands^[192]. A Castilian cédula of expulsion for the kingdom of Granada is held in the Archivo General de Simancas^[193].

The fullest Castilian text is the copy addressed to the city and bishopric of Burgos. An English translation by Edward Peters, based on the edition by Luis Suárez Fernández, is published by the Center for Online Judaic Studies^[188]. It opens with the full titles of the monarchs and an address to the prince, the nobility, the officials of Burgos and its diocese, the Jewish quarters of those places and all Jews of whatever age^[188]. It closes with the signatures of the king and queen and of the royal secretary Juan de Coloma^[188].

Reading the edict

The edict’s reasoning is set out at length. The monarchs explain that they had been informed of wicked Christians who Judaised and apostatised from the Catholic faith, and that the chief cause was their contact with Jews^[188]. The Inquisition, they note, had now been at work for twelve years and had found many guilty people^[188]. According to the inquisitors, the Jews instructed converts in the ceremonies of their law, held meetings to teach them, had their children circumcised, gave them prayer books, told them of fasts and festivals and brought them unleavened bread and ritually slaughtered meat^[188].

From this the edict draws its conclusion. The separation of 1480 and the expulsion from Andalusia had not been enough, and the only remedy was to banish the Jews from the kingdoms altogether^[188]. The monarchs justify collective punishment by analogy. When a grave crime is committed by members of a corporation, it is reasonable that the corporation be dissolved and all its members, lesser and greater, be punished^[188].

The operative clause orders all Jews, natives and newcomers alike, to depart with their families and servants “by the end of the month of July next of the present year” and never to return^[188]. Any Jew found in the kingdoms after that date would incur death and the confiscation of all property, without trial^[188]. Christians were forbidden to shelter Jews after the deadline on pain of losing their own possessions^[188]. Until then the Jews were placed under royal protection and allowed to sell their property, but they could not take gold, silver or coined money out of the kingdoms^[188].

What the edict does not say is equally significant. It offers no explicit choice of baptism. In practice, as the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, all Jews who were willing to accept Christianity were permitted to stay^[2]. The edict was signed on 31 March but, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey, it was not promulgated until between 29 April and 1 May^[2]. The Italian Jewish chronicler whose account is discussed below records that it was proclaimed in every city on 1 May^[194].

Abraham Seneor and Isaac Abravanel

Two Jewish courtiers stood closest to the monarchs. Abraham Seneor, born in about 1412, had been chief tax farmer of Castile under Henry IV and supported Isabella in her struggle for the throne^[191]. From 1476 he appears as rabbi and supreme judge of the Jews of Castile and assessor of Jewish taxes throughout the kingdom^[191]. In 1488 he became treasurer of the Hermandad, the royal police force, though because Jews could not hold that office his dealings were registered under the name of a Christian courtier^[191]. Contemporary Hebrew chroniclers criticised him as an unbeliever imposed on the Jews by royal patronage, but the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that he did much to protect the communities, and that in 1487 the Jews of Castile called him the exilarch over us in a letter to Rome^[191].

Isaac Abravanel, born in 1437, spent forty-five years in Portugal and had been a leading financier at the court of Afonso V of Portugal. Suspected of conspiracy after a failed rebellion of the nobles, he fled to Castile in 1483 and was condemned to death in his absence^[190]. In Castile he became a tax farmer for Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza and a royal financier^[190]. He was also a biblical commentator, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica suggests that his commentaries on Joshua, Judges and Samuel, written soon after his arrival in Castile, may be the earliest example of Renaissance influence in Hebrew literature composed outside Italy^[190].

The edict took Abravanel by surprise, and he was among those who tried in vain to have it revoked^[190]. The Italian chronicler describes an agreement that would have allowed the Jews to remain in return for a large payment, which he says was frustrated by the intervention of a prior of Santa Cruz^[194]. Its modern editor identifies the prior as Torquemada, and gives a famous speech attributed to him as legend rather than record^[194]. Abravanel gave up his claims to money he had lent the crown, and in return he was permitted on 31 May 1492 to take a thousand gold ducats and some valuables with him^[190]. He went to Naples. His later life in Italy is followed in Nekud’s long read on Isaac Abarbanel^[195].

Seneor chose differently. Under pressure from the monarchs he converted with his son-in-law Meir Melamed and their families, and at a public ceremony at Guadalupe on 15 June 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella stood as godparents^[191]. He took the name Fernando Núñez Coronel and was appointed a member of the royal council a few days later^[191]. The chronicler recalls that the rabbi Isaac of León had punned on Seneor’s name as Sone Or, hater of light^[194].

The summer of 1492

The fullest Jewish account of the departure was written in Hebrew by an Italian Jew in April or May 1495 and was translated in Jacob Marcus’s sourcebook, The Jew in the Medieval World, now available through the Internet Jewish History Sourcebook at Fordham University^[194]. The chronicler describes the great academies of Spain before the expulsion, headed by Isaac Aboab in Guadalajara, Isaac Vecudó in León and Jacob Ḥabib in Salamanca^[194].

He records that the exiles sold their houses, lands and cattle for very small prices, and that because they could not take gold and silver they had to exchange them for cloth, skins and other goods^[194]. Ships came from Genoa to carry them away, and the chronicler accuses some of their crews of robbing the passengers and handing them to pirates^[194]. Many sailed for Naples, where the king received them kindly, and others went to Fez, Tlemcen and other parts of North Africa, where many died outside the cities for want of food and shelter^[194]. Some who found no refuge in North Africa returned to Spain and converted^[194]. Others reached the Ottoman lands, where the sultan received them because they were artisans^[194].

The deadline fell close to the ninth of Av, the fast that commemorates the destruction of the Temple, and the chronicler says that the term ended on the day before it^[194]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey gives 31 July, the seventh of Av, as the day on which the last Jew left Spain^[2].

The last Hebrew books of Sefarad

The final decades before the expulsion were also the first age of Hebrew printing in the peninsula. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey of Hebrew incunabula lists presses at Guadalajara, Híjar, Montalbán and Zamora in Spain, and at Faro, Lisbon and Leiria in Portugal^[196]. At Guadalajara, Solomon ibn Alkabeẓ printed books from as early as September 1476^[196]. At Híjar in Aragon, Eliezer ben Abraham Alantansi, a scholar, businessman and physician from Murcia, set up a press with Solomon Zalmati of Játiva and printed Jacob ben Asher’s Arbaʿah Turim between 1485 and 1487, the Latter Prophets and editions of the Pentateuch^[197]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes the books of Alantansi’s press as outstanding for their technical perfection and beautiful ornamentation^[196].

The survival of these books is itself a part of the history of 1492. The encyclopaedia notes that the rarity of Hebrew incunabula is due in part to the Inquisition and the expulsions in Spain^[196]. Of thirty-six Hebrew incunabula that survive in copies printed on parchment, six came from Spain or Portugal^[196]. At Leiria, the printer Samuel d’Ortas and his sons dated one of their colophons 25 July 1492, a week before the last Jews were to leave Castile^[196]. It was at Leiria too that Zacut’s tables were printed four years later^[137].

The Jews of Castile on the eve of expulsion

By 1492 the Jewish population of Castile looked very different from that of the thirteenth century. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey describes a community whose centre of gravity had shifted to small rural settlements, rarely of more than fifty families, after the great urban communities had lost their leaders to conversion^[2]. The Jews were merchants, shopkeepers and craftsmen, with a number of physicians^[2]. The Italian chronicler adds that the exiles had houses, fields, vineyards and cattle, and that most of them were artisans^[194].

Learning had not disappeared. The chronicler’s list of academies at Guadalajara, León and Salamanca shows that the talmudic tradition of the Castilian yeshivot was still alive in the last generation^[194]. One of those scholars, Isaac Aboab, led thirty families to Oporto in 1492^[140]. Another, Jacob Ḥabib of Salamanca, later compiled the non-legal parts of the Talmud in his Ein Yaʿakov, as the modern editor of the chronicle notes^[194]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey observes that the courtier families had often received the same education as their Christian counterparts, a degree of cultural integration that helps to explain both the double life of many conversos and the ease with which others abandoned their Jewish heritage^[2].

How many left?

The number of exiles has been debated since the event itself, and the sources give very different figures. The Italian chronicler wrote that there was no agreement about the number, but that the most generally accepted estimate was 50,000 families, or 53,000 according to others^[194]. His modern editor converts this to about 250,000 people and notes that other estimates run from 100,000 to 800,000^[194]. The chronicler gives 120,000 as the number who went to Portugal^[194].

The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives lower figures. Its survey of Spain estimates that about 6,000 Jewish families remained in Aragon and about 30,000 in Castile at the time of the expulsion, and that around 100,000 people found temporary refuge in Portugal^[2]. Its article on Portugal gives some 150,000 as the number who fled there^[140]. The same encyclopaedia’s article on the Sephardim suggests that perhaps as many as 250,000 left for North Africa, Italy and especially Turkey^[198]. These figures cannot be reconciled exactly. They show, however, that the exiles numbered at least in the tens of thousands, and that Portugal received the largest single group. A considerable number of Jews, including Seneor and many leading families, chose baptism instead^[2].

Abraham Zacut and the Almanach perpetuum

Among the exiles was the astronomer Abraham Zacut. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, in an entry by Cirilo Flórez Miguel, describes him as “an important Jewish astronomer who contributed to observational astronomy, astronomical tables, and our historical knowledge of astronomy in Spain”^[137]. Born probably in Salamanca in 1452, he studied with Isaac Aboab and was a physician by profession^[137]. The Italian chronicler recalls that he was so expert in mathematics that the scholars of the Christian university of Salamanca referred doubtful questions to him^[194].

His major work, the Ḥibbur ha-Gadol, the Great Compilation, was written between 1473 and 1478 under the patronage of Gonzalo de Vivero, bishop of Salamanca^[199]. It is a set of astronomical tables with canons, or rules of use, calculated for the meridian of Salamanca with 1473 as the base year^[137]. The canons treat the positions and motions of the Sun and Moon and their eclipses, the longitudes and latitudes of the principal cities, the fixed stars, the motions of the planets and the lunar node, and the Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Persian calendars^[137]. More than fifty manuscripts of the tables are known^[137]. Flórez notes the influence of Jacob Poel, known as Bonet Bonjorn, on their structure, and references to the tables and calendar of Alfonso X^[137].

Zacut was also an observer. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers records his observation in 1474 of the Moon passing in front of Spica, the bright star of Virgo, and attributes to him observations of an occultation of Venus by the Moon in July 1476 and of a total solar eclipse in June 1478^[137]. In 1492 he went to Portugal, and he is documented in Lisbon on 9 June 1493, working for John II^[137].

In Portugal his tables reached print. The Latin translation by José Vizinho, the Almanach perpetuum, was first published at Leiria in 1496 and, in the words of Flórez, became essential for the development of Spanish and Portuguese navigation at the end of the fifteenth century^[137]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica credits Zacut with a copper astrolabe, more precise than the wooden instruments used before, and states that his tables allowed sailors to determine latitude and to calculate eclipses more accurately^[199]. It also states that Columbus used the tables on his voyages^[199]. That claim is reported here as the encyclopaedia’s, since the other sources consulted for this chapter do not confirm it. Zacut himself wrote with evident pride that his tables circulated “throughout all Christian and even Muslim lands”^[199].

When the Jews were expelled from Portugal, Zacut left for North Africa. He reached Tunis, where in 1504 he completed his Sefer Yuḥasin, a book of genealogies and history^[199]. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers records that he later moved to the Ottoman lands and died probably in 1515, though 1522 has also been suggested^[137]. The line of Jewish astronomy in Iberia that began with the tables of Toledo in the eleventh century thus ended in exile, but its last work was printed, translated and carried on the ships of the age of exploration.

Portugal, 1496 and 1497

The exiles who entered Portugal found only a brief refuge. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, John II admitted them in order to enrich his treasury. Wealthy families paid a hundred cruzados for permanent residence, and Isaac Aboab was allowed to settle at Oporto with thirty families^[140]. The majority paid eight cruzados a head for the right to stay up to eight months. When a lack of ships made it impossible for them to leave on time, the king declared them his slaves^[140]. Children were taken from their parents, and seven hundred were shipped to the island of São Tomé off the African coast in an attempt to settle it^[140]. The Italian chronicler gives the same figure of seven hundred children and says that all of them died^[194].

John’s successor, Manuel I, at first eased these conditions, but his marriage to a Spanish princess was made conditional on the removal of the Jews from Portugal^[140]. On 4 December 1496 he ordered that no Jew or Muslim should remain in the country after the following November^[140]. Reluctant to lose his Jewish subjects, he then resolved to keep them as Christians. On 19 March 1497 all Jewish children were forcibly baptised and held, so that their parents could not flee^[140]. Those still intent on leaving were ordered to gather at Lisbon. Some 20,000 assembled there, but instead of being allowed to sail they were baptised and declared citizens^[140]. The chief rabbi, Simon Maimi, died resisting conversion^[140].

The forced baptisms of 1497 created in Portugal a new class of New Christians, and from April 1499 they were forbidden to emigrate^[140]. Many of them continued to observe Judaism in secret. The Portuguese Inquisition, authorised by the pope only after a long struggle, held its first auto-da-fé in Lisbon in 1540^[140].

The last refuge

Navarre, the small kingdom in the Pyrenees, offered a temporary home to some of the Spanish exiles, but in 1498 its Jews too were expelled^[2]. With that, open Jewish life came to an end everywhere in the peninsula.

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The exiles reconstituted their communities wherever they settled, keeping their language and culture, and in North Africa they often joined the descendants of refugees from 1391^[2]. In the Ottoman Empire they found the most lasting welcome, and the city of Salonica became, within a generation, one of the great centres of the Sephardi world. That story is told in Nekud’s long read From Sefarad to Salonica^[200]. The final chapter of this essay considers what the Jews of medieval Iberia left behind them.

22. What Sefarad Left

The expulsion of 1492 ended Jewish communal life in Spain, and the forced baptisms of 1497 ended it in Portugal. It did not end the influence of what had been created there. The poems, codes, commentaries, philosophical treatises, astronomical tables and illuminated books of Sefarad were carried by the exiles to North Africa, Italy and the Ottoman Empire, and many of them had already entered the wider culture of Europe through translation and print. This closing chapter gathers those threads. It considers what survived in Jewish worship and law, what passed into Latin and European science, how the language and memory of Sefarad were kept by its descendants, and how the idea of a golden age with which this essay began looks after twenty-one chapters of evidence.

Poems in the prayer book

The most intimate survival is liturgical. The Hebrew poetry of al-Andalus was written for the court and the drinking party as well as for the synagogue, but it was the sacred poetry that travelled furthest. Solomon ibn Gabirol’s Keter Malkhut, the Kingly Crown, ends with a confession of sins, and for that reason, the Encyclopaedia Judaica explains, it was included in the prayer book for the Day of Atonement in some Jewish rites^[67]. A poem that sets the structure of the heavens within a meditation on the greatness of God is still recited by congregations on the most solemn day of the Jewish year.

Judah Halevi’s poetry had a similar afterlife. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that from the beginning of printing many of his liturgical poems were included in festival prayer books and in collections of penitential prayers and laments^[78]. The poet who in his own lifetime wrote for friends and patrons in Toledo and Córdoba thus became, through the printed prayer book, a voice heard in synagogues across the world. His poems of longing for Zion, discussed in Chapter 11, gave later generations a vocabulary for their own exile.

The tradition did not stop with the great names of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Chapter 20 described Solomon Bonafed, who in the fifteenth century regarded himself as the last Hebrew poet of Sefarad and yet wrote some of the last muwashshaḥat in the Andalusian manner^[183]. The forms created in Córdoba and Granada thus persisted, in changing shapes, almost to the expulsion, and through the prayer books of the Sephardi diaspora they persist still. Peter Cole’s anthology The Dream of the Poem, which covers Hebrew poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain between 950 and 1492, has brought much of this body of verse to English readers^[47].

Law and commentary

The legal literature of Sefarad shaped Jewish practice everywhere. Isaac Alfasi’s code and Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah were described in earlier chapters, and Chapter 18 followed the responsa of Solomon ibn Adret and the Turim of Jacob ben Asher. Adret’s responsa, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes, were a major source of the Shulḥan Arukh^[146], and the Turim, with its fourfold arrangement, opened a new era in the codification of Jewish law^[148]. The great sixteenth-century code of Joseph Karo, the Shulḥan Arukh, rested on these Iberian foundations, and through it the rulings of Barcelona and Toledo still guide Jewish practice.

Biblical commentary followed the same path. The commentaries of Abraham ibn Ezra, Naḥmanides and Isaac Abravanel were read wherever Jews studied Scripture. The last of them, the Encyclopaedia Judaica suggests, shows the first signs in Hebrew literature outside Italy of a humanist sense of history^[190]. The Zohar, composed in late thirteenth-century Castile, became one of the central texts of Jewish religious life after the expulsion, though, as Chapter 18 noted, its composition and authorship remain the subject of active scholarly debate^[149].

Philosophy in Latin and Hebrew

The philosophers of Sefarad had a double afterlife, one in Hebrew and one in Latin. In Hebrew their works were translated from Arabic, commented upon and argued over for centuries, from the Maimonidean controversies to the critiques of Ḥasdai Crescas and the theology of Joseph Albo. In Latin some of them were read without their Jewish authorship being known at all.

The most striking case is Solomon ibn Gabirol’s Fons Vitae. Written in Arabic in the eleventh century as a dialogue between master and pupil, it was translated into Latin in the twelfth century by Dominicus Gundissalinus and John of Spain^[69]. Its Latin readers knew its author as Avicebron and took him for a Muslim or a Christian. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that many Franciscan philosophers treated it as a work of Augustinian Christian thought and used it in their debates with the more Aristotelian Dominicans, such as Thomas Aquinas^[69]. Only in the middle of the nineteenth century did Solomon Munk identify Avicebron with the Jewish poet, by finding the thirteenth-century Hebrew summary of the Fons Vitae by Shem Tov ibn Falaquera, which names Gabirol as its author^[69].

Maimonides had a wider reach still. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy observes that the commentaries on his works influenced thinkers as diverse as Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz and Newton^[115]. The Arabic philosophical tradition that the Jews of al-Andalus had shared reached Latin Europe through the translations described in Chapter 16. Dag Nikolaus Hasse writes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that the Arabic-Latin translation movements led to the transformation of almost all philosophical disciplines in the medieval Latin world^[122]. Jewish scholars in Toledo and elsewhere were among the intermediaries of that movement. Later, Crescas’s critique of Aristotelian physics reached European philosophy through Pico della Mirandola and Spinoza^[172].

Tables, instruments and translation

The scientific legacy of Sefarad is easiest to trace in astronomy. The Toledan Tables associated with al-Zarqālī in the eleventh century were revised under Alfonso X in the thirteenth by a team in which Jewish astronomers were central, as Chapter 17 described. The resulting Alfonsine Tables, as the University of Seville’s mathematics blog explains, survived in Latin rather than in their Castilian original, spread across Europe in versions adapted to the latitudes of different cities, and remained in use until the seventeenth century^[131]. Their first printed edition appeared at Venice in 1483, and they were reprinted several times in the sixteenth century^[131].

Abraham Zacut’s tables represent the final stage of the same tradition. His Great Compilation drew on the Alfonsine tables and on the work of his Jewish predecessors, and its Latin version, the Almanach perpetuum, printed at Leiria in 1496, became, according to the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, an essential aid to Iberian navigators in the age of the first oceanic voyages^[137]. The mapmakers of Majorca, Cresques Abraham and his son Judah, whose work was described in Chapter 19, belong to the same practical science of the sea. Judah, baptised in 1391, worked in Portugal in the 1420s as Mestre Jacome de Mallorca^[168].

Medicine is the other great field. The Jewish physicians of Sefarad, from Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut to the court doctors of the fifteenth century, carried Arabic medical learning into Hebrew and, through Latin and the vernaculars, into the medical culture of the Christian kingdoms. Luis García-Ballester’s study of medicine in the multicultural society of the Spanish kingdoms remains a starting point for that history^[114].

In all these fields translation was the decisive act. The Jews of Sefarad were not the only translators of the Middle Ages, but they were unusually well placed to move between Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and the Romance languages. Charles Burnett’s study of the Toledo translations shows how systematic that programme was in the twelfth century^[129], and among the collaborators of Alfonso X a group of five Jewish scholars took, in Julio Samsó’s account, a leading part, with Yehudah ben Mosheh and Isaac ibn Sid credited as the authors of the Alfonsine Tables^[130].

Buildings, books and maps

Some of the legacy of Sefarad is material. In Toledo two medieval synagogues survive, the building now known as Santa María la Blanca and the synagogue of Samuel ha-Levi, both built, the Encyclopaedia Judaica observes, in a markedly Mudéjar style and evidently by Muslim builders^[38]. The second takes its present name, El Tránsito, from a painting of the death of the Virgin by Juan Correa de Vivar that hung there after the building had become a church^[151]. That a Jewish house of prayer survived the expulsion only because it was converted into a church is itself a small history of the period.

The illuminated Hebrew manuscripts described in Chapter 18 are scattered across the libraries of Europe. The Golden Haggadah, made in north-eastern Spain, probably at Barcelona, around 1320 to 1330, is in the British Library^[154]. The Kennicott Bible, written and illuminated at La Coruña in 1476 by the scribe Moses ibn Zabara and the artist Joseph ibn Ḥayyim^[157], is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where its pages can be viewed online^[156]. The Catalan Atlas of the Cresques workshop is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which has also made it available in digital form^[170]. These objects left Spain by many routes, some with the exiles, some through later sales and collectors, and their present homes trace the dispersion of the culture that produced them.

The printed books are a further witness. Chapter 21 described the Hebrew presses of Guadalajara, Híjar and Zamora in the last decades before the expulsion^[196]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica counts nine Hebrew presses in the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century, against twelve in Italy and one in Constantinople, and it attributes part of the rarity of these books today to the Inquisition and the expulsions^[196]. Every surviving copy of a Spanish Hebrew incunable is therefore a survivor in a double sense.

Memory, Ladino and the Red de Juderías

The exiles took with them not only books but a language. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on Ladino argues that there is no sufficient proof that a specifically Jewish form of Spanish existed before the expulsion, and that only after 1492 did Ladino begin to be a specifically Jewish language^[201]. Cut off from Spain while its language was still developing, the exiles preserved the Spanish and Hispanic dialects spoken before the age of Cervantes^[201]. In the Ottoman Empire these dialects mixed and developed into independent forms in Salonica and Istanbul, evident from the end of the seventeenth century^[201]. The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s article on the Sephardim notes that the language, also called Judezmo or Judaeo-Spanish, kept archaic sounds that standard Spanish has lost and took in loan words from Hebrew, Turkish and other languages^[198].

The exiles also kept a sense of origin. In Salonica, the same article explains, all the important Spanish towns and districts were represented by congregations that kept their own identity^[198]. A second branch of the diaspora formed later, as conversos left the peninsula for places where they could return to Judaism, and Amsterdam became the great centre of the Marrano diaspora, which developed into the Western Sephardi diaspora^[198]. Nekud’s long read From Sefarad to Salonica follows the eastern branch of this story^[200].

The inheritance reached into daily life. The same article observes that the exiles kept the songs and foods of Spain, so that a Jew in Bulgaria or Serbia would still eat pastel or pandeleón, and that children in the Balkans played a game with nuts called el castillo to the words of an old Spanish quatrain^[198]. Even Joseph Karo, writing the most authoritative code of rabbinic law, reached for Spanish words such as panadas, pala and limones when the Hebrew of the rabbis offered him no equivalent for a croquette, a baker’s peel or a lemon^[198]. The exiles also kept their Spanish personal and family names, and with them a sense of manners and conduct shaped by centuries among Spanish neighbours^[198].

In Spain itself, memory took a long time to become public. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that the edict of 1492 was not formally repealed until December 1968, when a new synagogue was inaugurated in Madrid and the Spanish government marked the event by revoking it^[2]. Today the Sinagoga del Tránsito in Toledo houses the Museo Sefardí, created in 1964, which Spain’s Ministry of Culture describes as the best preserved monument of the Judaeo-Spanish past^[153]. The Red de Juderías de España, an association of municipalities whose medieval quarters preserve the heritage of the Jewish communities that lived in them, links towns such as Toledo, Córdoba, Lucena, Tudela, Calatayud, Segovia, Ávila and Sevilla in routes for visitors^[202]. Many of those names have appeared in this essay, from Lucena’s academy to Tudela’s travellers.

The idea of a golden age reconsidered

The first chapter of this essay described how the idea of a Jewish golden age in Spain was shaped by nineteenth-century historians in central Europe, and how later scholars have qualified and contested it. Ismar Schorsch traced the myth of Sephardic supremacy to nineteenth-century Germany^[7]. Mark Cohen concluded that “The interfaith utopia was to a certain extent a myth”, because it passed over the legal inferiority of the Jews and the periodic outbursts of violence, though he also judged the Islamic record favourably against that of Ashkenazic northern Europe^[6]. María Rosa Menocal’s widely read account took a more celebratory view, presenting medieval Spain as a place where the three faiths lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance^[8]. The evidence of the intervening chapters supports neither the romantic picture of harmony nor its opposite.

On one side stands a record of real achievement. Jews in al-Andalus and Christian Spain wrote Hebrew poetry of a quality not equalled since the Bible, developed Hebrew grammar, composed philosophical works that were read in Arabic, Hebrew and Latin, served as physicians, diplomats and treasurers, and took part in the astronomical work of Toledo and Salamanca. Stroumsa’s study of philosophy in Islamic Spain shows how Muslims and Jews could share the same intellectual world^[9]. For a small elite of courtiers and scholars, the age was golden by almost any standard.

On the other side stands a record of insecurity. The massacre at Granada in 1066, the Almohad persecutions, the disputations of Barcelona and Tortosa, the riots of 1391 and the Inquisition all show how dependent the Jewish communities were on the protection of rulers and how quickly that protection could fail. Even the most brilliant courtiers, from Joseph ha-Nagid to Samuel ha-Levi Abulafia, could fall to their deaths. The legal framework of Islamic and Christian rule alike treated Jews as subordinate, and the intellectual flowering took place within that framework rather than outside it.

Perhaps the most useful conclusion is that both records belong to the same history. The creativity of Sefarad was made possible by the meeting of cultures in the peninsula, by Arabic learning, by Latin and Castilian patronage, and by the internal strength of the communities. Its fragility came from the same position between powers. To call it a golden age is to remember its achievements, and to reconsider the phrase is to remember the conditions under which they were won.

The Jews of Sefarad left behind them a body of literature, law, philosophy and science that is still read, a language still spoken by some of their descendants, and buildings still standing in the towns they once inhabited. Their history began, in the verse of Obadiah from which the name comes, with “the captivity of Jerusalem, that is in Sepharad”^[1]. It ended, in 1492, with exiles from it.

Timeline

This timeline gathers 64 dated events from the Visigothic councils to the forced baptisms in Portugal. Select an entry to read a short note and its source.

1. 589The third Council of Toledo

   The council ratifies King Reccared’s move from Arian to Catholic Christianity and orders that children of mixed Jewish and Christian marriages be baptised^[2].

2. 613Sisebut’s decree

   The Jews of the Visigothic kingdom are told to accept baptism or depart, and thousands go into exile^[2].

3. 694The seventeenth Council of Toledo

   King Egica accuses the Jews of treason, and the council declares them slaves and confiscates their property^[2].

4. 711The Muslim conquest

   Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād crosses the Straits of Gibraltar and overruns the Visigothic kingdom^[2].

5. 929The caliphate of Córdoba

   ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III makes Córdoba the seat of an independent caliphate, which lasts until 1031^[26].

6. c. 940sA palace city near Córdoba

   Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ rises in the middle of the tenth century as the seat of the Umayyad caliphs^[32].

7. late 940sDioscorides in Córdoba

   A Byzantine embassy brings a Greek manuscript of Dioscorides, and Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut joins the scholars who render it into Arabic^[16].

8. 953Ḥasdai the diplomat

   Negotiations with John of Gorze, envoy of Otto I, are conducted through Ḥasdai^[16].

9. c. 960Dunash in Córdoba

   Dunash ben Labrat, a pupil of Saadia, is teaching in Córdoba and bringing Arabic metres into Hebrew verse^[11].

10. 960Ḥayyuj arrives

    Judah Ḥayyuj, born in Fez, reaches Córdoba and later sets out the theory of the three-letter Hebrew root^[40].

11. c. 970Death of Ḥasdai

    The leading Jewish courtier of the caliphate dies, though the sources give several dates^[16][48].

12. 1013The fall of Córdoba

    Berber troops take the capital, and Samuel ibn Naghrela is among those who flee^[56].

13. c. 1021Ibn Gabirol born

    Solomon ibn Gabirol, poet and philosopher, known to the Latin West as Avicebron, is born^[67].

14. 1027Samuel becomes nagid

    The Jews confer upon Samuel the title nagid of Spanish Jewry^[56].

15. 1038 to 1056A Jewish commander

    Samuel leads the army of Granada through almost continuous campaigns against Seville^[56].

16. 1045The Improvement of the Moral Qualities

    Ibn Gabirol is thought to have written his ethical treatise in this year^[67].

17. 1066Massacre at Granada

    Joseph ha-Nagid is killed in a revolt in which much of the Jewish community of the city perishes^[28].

18. 1085Toledo taken

    Alfonso VI captures the old Visigothic capital, where Jewish life continues under Christian rule^[38].

19. 1088Alfasi in Lucena

    Isaac Alfasi flees Fez for Spain and settles at Lucena, where he teaches until his death^[65].

20. 1090The Almoravids in Granada

    Granada falls to the Almoravids, its Jewish community is destroyed and the Ibn Ezra family disperses^[55].

21. 1140Ibn Ezra’s wanderings

    Abraham ibn Ezra is in Rome, early in the travels that take him across Italy, France and England^[20].

22. 1140 to 1141Halevi’s journey

    Judah Halevi spends some eight months in Egypt before sailing for the Land of Israel^[84].

23. 1145The Book of Areas

    Plato of Tivoli renders Abraham bar Ḥiyya’s geometry into Latin as Liber embadorum^[96].

24. 1147The Almohads

    The Almohads bring down the Almoravid state and make Marrakesh their capital^[27].

25. 1148Córdoba under the Almohads

    The new rulers take Córdoba and soon hold the whole of Andalusia^[3].

26. c. 1160Ibn Daud in Toledo

    Abraham ibn Daud writes his chronicle of tradition and his philosophical treatise in Toledo^[13].

27. 1161The Duties of the Heart in Hebrew

    Judah ibn Tibbon translates Baḥya ibn Paquda’s ethical classic^[74].

28. 1180The Mishneh Torah

    Maimonides completes his code of Jewish law^[21].

29. 1187Death of Gerard of Cremona

    The Italian translator of Arabic mathematics and astronomy dies in Toledo^[120].

30. 1190The Guide of the Perplexed

    Maimonides completes his philosophical masterpiece in Egypt, though one scholar dates it to 1185^[21].

31. 1198Death of Ibn Rushd

    The Córdoban philosopher dies in Marrakesh^[117].

32. 1204Death of Maimonides

    Public mourning is ordained throughout the Jewish world^[21].

33. 1212Las Navas de Tolosa

    A coalition of Christian kingdoms defeats the Almohads^[27].

34. 1232The ban on philosophy

    Opponents of Maimonides persuade the rabbis of northern France to forbid the study of his philosophical works^[118].

35. 1236 and 1248Córdoba and Seville

    Ferdinand III of Castile takes the two great cities of al-Andalus^[2].

36. 1252Alfonso X

    The Learned King begins a reign of patronage that lasts until 1284^[130].

37. 1263The Barcelona disputation

    Naḥmanides debates the convert Pablo Christiani before James I of Aragon in four sessions in July^[143].

38. 1263 to 1272The Alfonsine Tables

    The canons of the new tables are written, and their prologue names Yehudah ben Mosheh and Isaac ibn Sid as the authors^[130].

39. 1267Naḥmanides in the Land of Israel

    Having left Spain after the disputation, Naḥmanides reaches the Land of Israel^[144].

40. before 1286The Zohar

    Moses de León completes the writings that form the main substance of the Zohar, according to Scholem^[150].

41. 1305The ban of Barcelona

    A limited ban on the study of philosophy ends the last medieval climax of the Maimonidean controversy^[118].

42. 1305Asher ben Jehiel in Toledo

    The German scholar, welcomed in Barcelona by Adret, becomes rabbi of Toledo^[147].

43. 1320 to 1330The Golden Haggadah

    A Passover service with miniatures on gold-leaf grounds is made in Catalonia^[154].

44. 1348The Black Death

    Plague reaches Spain and is followed in Aragon by attacks on Jewish communities^[2].

45. 1357Samuel ha-Levi’s synagogue

    The treasurer of Peter I builds the Toledo synagogue now known as El Tránsito^[152].

46. c. 1375The Catalan Atlas

    The Majorcan workshop associated with Cresques Abraham produces its world map, dated by its perpetual calendar^[170].

47. 1391The riots begin

    Violence breaks out in Seville and spreads through Castile and Aragon^[2].

48. 1391Barcelona

    The Jewish quarter is attacked on 5 August after news of the assault on Majorca^[164].

49. 1410The Light of the Lord

    Ḥasdai Crescas completes his critique of Aristotelian physics shortly before his death^[167].

50. 1412The Valladolid ordinances

    Laws directed against the Jews of Castile are drawn up with the help of Vicente Ferrer and Pablo de Santa María^[173].

51. 1413 to 1414The disputation of Tortosa

    Summoned by the antipope Benedict XIII, delegates of the Aragonese communities answer the claims of Jerónimo de Santa Fe^[178].

52. 1432The Valladolid takkanot

    Representatives of the Castilian communities meet at Valladolid and adopt new communal regulations^[2].

53. 1449The Toledo statute

    Rebels in Toledo declare all New Christians unfit for public office^[2].

54. 1469Ferdinand and Isabella

    The heirs of Castile and Aragon marry^[2].

55. 1476The Kennicott Bible

    Moses ibn Zabara completes the illuminated Bible at A Coruña on 24 July^[157].

56. 1478The Inquisition authorised

    Pope Sixtus IV allows the monarchs to appoint inquisitors throughout Castile^[187].

57. 1481The first tribunal

    Inquisitors begin work in Seville on 1 January^[187].

58. 1483The Alfonsine Tables in print

    Erhard Ratdolt prints the tables at Venice^[131].

59. 1485The Book of Principles in print

    Joseph Albo’s work is first printed at Soncino^[181].

60. 1492Granada

    The last Muslim kingdom surrenders and the monarchs enter the city on 2 January^[2].

61. 1492The edict of expulsion

    Signed on 31 March, the edict gives the Jews of Castile and Aragon until the end of July to leave^[188].

62. 1496The Almanach perpetuum

    Abraham Zacut’s tables appear in Latin at Leiria^[137].

63. 1496Expulsion from Portugal

    On 4 December Manuel I orders that no Jew or Muslim remain in the kingdom^[140].

64. 1497Forced baptism in Portugal

    On 19 March Jewish children are seized and baptised, creating a new class of New Christians^[140].

Glossary of terms

The following 53 terms recur in the chapters above. Each definition gives the sense in which the word is used in this essay.

adelantados

The elected leaders of a Castilian Jewish community, also known by the Arabic-derived title muqaddamin, who directed its courts and affairs^[2].

al-Andalus

The Arabic name for the parts of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule, whose shared Greco-Arabic culture shaped Jewish learning^[2].

aljama

The organised Jewish community of a Christian Spanish town, a self-governing corporation that kept its Arabic name after the Christian conquest^[2].

Almohads

A Berber reform movement from Morocco whose rulers took al-Andalus from the middle of the twelfth century and persecuted Jews and Christians^[27].

Almoravids

The Berber dynasty from North Africa that conquered Morocco in the eleventh century and then took over the taifa kingdoms of al-Andalus^[82].

astrolabe

An instrument for measuring the altitude of the Sun and stars and solving problems of time and position, refined in al-Andalus by al-Zarqālī among others^[103].

auto-da-fé

The public ceremony at which the sentences of the Inquisition were read and carried out^[187].

Book of the Kuzari

Judah Halevi’s defence of Judaism, written in Arabic as a dialogue between a Khazar king and a rabbi^[84].

call

The Catalan name for the Jewish quarter of a town, as in Barcelona and Girona^[164].

converso

A Jew who had converted to Christianity, or a descendant of such converts, especially after 1391^[184].

Cortes

The representative assembly of a Spanish kingdom, such as the Cortes of Toledo of 1480 which ordered the separation of Jews from Christians^[188].

dhimmī

A protected non-Muslim, Jewish or Christian, living under Islamic law with recognised but subordinate status^[6].

disputation

A formal public debate between Christian and Jewish scholars on matters of faith, staged at Barcelona in 1263 and Tortosa in 1413 to 1414^[143].

edict of expulsion

The decree of Ferdinand and Isabella of 31 March 1492 ordering all Jews to leave their kingdoms^[188].

falsafa

The Arabic term for philosophy in the Greek tradition, as opposed to theology^[76].

Fons Vitae

The Latin title of Solomon ibn Gabirol’s Arabic dialogue on matter and form, translated into Latin in the twelfth century^[69].

gaon

The title of the heads of the great Babylonian academies, who corresponded with the scholars of Lucena and Barcelona until Spanish Jewry came to rely on its own teachers^[2].

Genizah

A storeroom for worn-out texts; the Cairo Genizah has preserved letters and manuscripts of Spanish Jews^[40].

Guide of the Perplexed

Maimonides’ philosophical treatise, written in Arabic and completed about 1190^[21].

Haggadah

The book of the Passover home service, of which several illuminated copies were made in fourteenth-century Catalonia^[155].

incunable

A book printed before 1501; Hebrew incunabula were produced at several presses in Spain and Portugal^[196].

Inquisition

The ecclesiastical tribunal for heresy, established in Castile by papal bull in 1478 to investigate conversos suspected of Judaising^[187].

Judaeo-Arabic

Arabic written by Jews, usually in Hebrew characters, the language of most Jewish philosophy and science in al-Andalus^[73].

Judaising

Keeping Jewish practices or beliefs while professing Christianity, the main charge brought against conversos by the Inquisition^[187].

judería

The Castilian name for the Jewish quarter of a town, now preserved in the name of the Red de Juderías de España^[202].

Kabbalah

The Jewish esoteric tradition that flourished in medieval Provence and Spain, treated in this essay as a historical and literary movement^[150].

kalām

Islamic dialectical theology, whose methods Maimonides criticised sharply even while sharing some of its emphasis on the unity of God^[116].

Karaites

Jews who rejected the authority of rabbinic tradition, against whom Abraham ibn Daud wrote his chronicle^[12].

kinot

Laments recited on the ninth of Av, a genre to which Judah Halevi contributed^[78].

Ladino

The Spanish language of the Sephardi diaspora, also called Judezmo or Judaeo-Spanish^[201].

limpieza de sangre

Purity of blood, the doctrine that excluded people of Jewish or Muslim descent from offices and honours^[187].

maḥzor

A prayer book for the festivals, into which many Andalusian liturgical poems were taken^[78].

Marrano

A Spanish term for a converso suspected of secretly keeping Judaism, most probably derived from the word for swine^[186].

Mishneh Torah

Maimonides’ comprehensive code of Jewish law, compiled in 1180^[21].

Mudéjar

A Muslim living under Christian rule, and the architectural style associated with Mudéjar builders, seen in the Toledo synagogues^[38].

muwashshaḥ

The strophic girdle poem created by the Arabs of al-Andalus and adopted by Hebrew poets^[50].

nagid

The title of the leader of a Jewish community, held in Spain by Samuel ibn Naghrela from 1027^[56].

New Christians

The official term for converts from Judaism and their descendants, used especially in Portugal after 1497^[140].

piyyut

Hebrew liturgical poetry written for the synagogue service^[50].

qasida

The classical Arabic ode, whose long form Hebrew poets imitated^[50].

rab de la corte

The official appointed by the Castilian crown to supervise the Jewish communities of the kingdom^[2].

Reconquista

The Christian conquest of the Muslim territories of the peninsula, completed with the fall of Granada in 1492^[198].

responsa

Written answers by a rabbinic authority to questions of law, such as those of Solomon ibn Adret^[146].

saphea

A universal astrolabe plate devised by al-Zarqālī that could be used at any latitude^[103].

Sefarad

The Hebrew name for the Iberian Peninsula, taken from a place named in the book of Obadiah^[1].

seliḥot

Penitential prayers, of which Judah Halevi wrote some of the finest in the Hebrew language^[78].

Sephardim

The Jews of Spain and Portugal and their descendants in the diaspora after 1492^[198].

Siete Partidas

The law code prepared under Alfonso X about 1263, which defined the legal position of the Jews in Castile^[2].

taifa

One of the small kingdoms into which al-Andalus broke up after the fall of the caliphate, such as Saragossa under the Banu Hud^[72].

takkanot

Communal ordinances issued by the leaders of a Jewish community, such as those adopted at Valladolid in 1432^[2].

Turim

Jacob ben Asher’s fourfold code of Jewish law, on which the Shulḥan Arukh was later built^[148].

yeshivah

A rabbinic academy, such as that of Lucena, led by Isaac ibn Ghayyat, Isaac Alfasi and Joseph ibn Migash^[4].

Zohar

The principal work of medieval Kabbalah, composed in Aramaic in Castile in the late thirteenth century^[149].

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Select bibliography

• Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 volumes (Jewish Publication Society, 1961–1966)
• Ross Brann, The Compunctious Poet. Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991)
• Charles Burnett, “The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo in the Twelfth Century”, Science in Context 14 (2001)
• Robert Chazan, Barcelona and Beyond. The Disputation of 1263 and Its Aftermath (University of California Press, 1992)
• Mark R. Cohen, “The ‘Golden Age’ of Jewish-Muslim Relations. Myth and Reality”, in Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora (eds), A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations (Princeton University Press, 2013)
• Peter Cole (trans. and ed.), The Dream of the Poem. Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492 (Princeton University Press, 2007)
• Benjamin R. Gampel, Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391–1392 (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
• Luis García-Ballester, Medicine in a Multicultural Society. Christian, Jewish and Muslim Practitioners in the Spanish Kingdoms, 1222–1610 (Routledge, 2001)
• Hyam Maccoby (ed. and trans.), Judaism on Trial. Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1982)
• María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World. How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown, 2002)
• María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells (eds), The Literature of Al-Andalus (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
• David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence. Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1996; new edition 2015)
• Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier. The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia (Cornell University Press, 2006)
• Raymond P. Scheindlin, Wine, Women, and Death. Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life (Jewish Publication Society, 1986)
• Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy in Nineteenth-Century Germany”, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1989), reprinted in Yael Halevi-Wise (ed.), Sephardism (Stanford University Press, 2012)
• Shlomo Sela, Abraham Ibn Ezra and the Rise of Medieval Hebrew Science (Brill, 2003)
• Sarah Stroumsa, Andalus and Sefarad. On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain (Princeton University Press, 2019)
• Ryan Szpiech, “A Father’s Bequest. Augustinian Typology and Personal Testimony in the Conversion Narrative of Solomon Halevi/Pablo de Santa María”, in Jonathan Decter and Arturo Prats (eds), The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Brill, 2012)
• Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds), Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edn, 22 volumes (Macmillan Reference USA, 2007)
• Thomas Hockey et al. (eds), The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (Springer, 2007)