Aspects of Jewish Culture in the Middle Ages

ASPECTS OF JEWISH LIFE IN ISLAMIC SPAIN

ASPECTS OF JEWISH LIFE IN ISLAMIC SPAIN Norman A. Srillman My heart's in the East While ['m in the !urthermost West. How can [ taste what [ eat? And how can it please? -]udah ha-Levi The yearning for Zion was nothing at all unique in medieval Hebrew poetry, even among the highly urbane and assimilated ]ews of al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain. The all-powerful Samuel ha-Nagid Ibn Naghrela (d. 1056), vizier of the Zirid kings of Granada, expressed his longing for the Temple Mount and his desire to serve as a Levite before the illtar of the Lord. 1 Yet when ]udah ha-Levi, the poet .laureate of Andalusian ]ewry, began to take these verses seriously and suddenly in the twilight of his years totally rejected his society and its outlook on life, people were stunned. His nationalistic treatise The Kuzari, gloritying rabbinic ]udaism and rejecting philosophy, was a scandal. But it has always been the fate of Cassandras and ]eremiahs not to be heeded. Approximately thirty years after ]udah ha-Levi's renunciation ofthe joys ofSefarad, the Almohads, a Berber nationalist and fanatically sectarian movement which came out of the mountain 52 I ]ewish Life in Islamic Spain fastness of the Ante-Atlas in Morocco, put an end to the ]ewish presence in Muslim Spain. 2 A century after that the Inquisition began to make itself felt in Christian Spain, where Andalusian ]ewry had reestablished itself, although it would be two hundred years before the coup de grace. 1 should like, however, to direct my attention to the society upon which ]udah ha-Levi had so dramatically turned his back. It has become commonplace to refer to the "Golden Age of Spain," and so indeed it seemed to the nineteenth-century German ]ewish historians like Heinrich Graetz, Leopold Zunz, or Moritz Steinschneider , when they compared it with the European experience. Though our own view may be somewhat more subdued, nonetheless, the period comprising the tenth through twelfth centuries was unique and not without glory. Even if we were to decide that this epoch had been only a Silver Age, we could not deny its luster. HISTORICAL SKETCH The ]ewish presence in Spain is of great antiquity, perhaps going back as far as Punic times (cf. ]onah 1:3. "But ]onah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord").3 The oldest archaeological evidence dates from the Roman period. In. the sixth century we find the ]ews an important and formidable element in Visigothic Hispania. They were the very core of whatever remained of the middle classes and provided necessary mercantile services as negotiatores, including transmarini negotiatores. 4 Yet on the eve of the Muslim invasion in 711, we find the ]ews a bitterly disaffected element in the society because of the 53 I Norman A. Stillman on-again-off-again per$ecutions by the Visigothic and ecclesiastical authorities that culminated in the harsh , 693 decrees of the Sixteenth Council of Toledo in , which virtually barred them from carrying on trade , and a year later by the Seventeenth Council of Toledo which totally disenfranchised those who did not accept baptism. Their thorough disaffection was probably little mitigated by the fact that the subsequent mon arch , Witiza (702-710), did not attempt to imple 5 . ment the decrees fully Thus as in the case of the Byzantine East, we find the ]ews looking to the Muslim invaders as liberators sent by Divine Providence. 6 This parallel to Middle ‫י‬ Eastern ]ewry's reception of the Muslim armies iS however , superficial. There are some substantial quali tative differences. The 1berian ]ews apparently main tained close ties with their brethren across the narrow Straits of Gibraltar. 1ndeed they were accused at the Seventeenth Council of Toledo of conspiring with their North African coreligionists to hand over Spain to the Muslims. This charge may have had some truth to it in although it does ‫}י‬view of the ]ews' desperate Situation assume a great deal. 7 The widespread ewish collabora tion with the Muslim troops invadin Spain seems 8 . almost unique in the history of the 1slamic conquests The only comparable example in the Middle East is the report in al-Baladhur"i of an individual ]ew aiding the Arabs in the conqllest of Caesarea. 9 1n Spain, on the ariq and his lieutenant ‫ז‬ other hand, in city after city Mugh "ith organized the local ]ews into militia...