Cordoba קורדובה
Capital of Muslim Spain and cradle of the golden age: city of Chasdai ibn Shaprut and birthplace of the Rambam.
In the tenth century Cordoba was probably Europe's largest city—libraries, baths, physicians, poets. The caliph Abd al-Rahman III made a Jew, Chasdai ibn Shaprut, his physician and diplomat, and Chasdai used his standing to patronise Jewish learning: he brought grammarians and poets to Spain, supported an academy, and famously corresponded with the king of distant Khazaria, said to be a Jew.
So begins the golden age of Spanish Jewry, when Torah, philosophy, medicine, secular poetry and state service could occupy a single life. Cordoba produced scholars and poets, and in 4898 Moshe ben Maimon—the Rambam—was born here.
The age was short. In 4908 the Almohads invaded demanding conversion to Islam, and the Rambam's family fled. A fourteenth-century synagogue still stands in the old quarter.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Rishonim
- the Epistle of Rav Sherira Gaon — the correspondence of Babylon with Spain; the independence of Córdoba
- Rambam, Iggeret Teiman — the letter of a native of Córdoba to the community of Yemen
- Sefer HaKabbalah (Rabbi Avraham ibn Daud) — the chronicle of the Spanish communities and of the golden age
Basis: tradition.