The Granada massacre: the end of a vizier and the first slaughter in Muslim Spain

Shmuel haNagid governed Granada under its Berber rulers for thirty years, led its armies and wrote poetry and works of law—an unheard-of combination. After his death in 1056 his son Joseph became vizier.

The father had been careful; the son was not. Contemporaries write of conspicuous luxury and of offices handed to his own men. A party formed against him, and its chief voice was the faqih Abu Ishaq of Elvira, who wrote a qasida with a plain call: the covenant of dhimma does not bid us raise them—an "ape" has been set over the faithful; kill.

On 30 December 1066 a mob broke into the palace, killed Joseph and crucified his body on the gate; then they turned on the Jewish quarter. The figures in the sources—up to four thousand dead—carry the usual exaggeration of chronicles, but the massacre was severe and scattered the community.

Its significance lies in the sobriety it brought. Muslim Spain gave Jews more than any country of the Christian world of that age, and that is true; but the position rested on a contract in which they were the lesser party, and whenever a Jew rose too high the contract could be presented like a bill. Eighty years later came the Almohads, and no longer as a single riot.