The half of all its loveliness;
From place to place I wandered wide,
With amorous sight unsatisfied,
Until I reached all cities’ queen,
Tolaitola,[16] the fairest seen.’
And among the fairest of the sights in these fair cities were the crowded colleges in which Jew andArab learned often side by side, and from which Jewish Arabic professors turned out students by the score, wise in literature and in philosophy and in medicine, as well as in their own especial theological line. It is said on good authority, that at this period, nearly a thousand years before the era of Board schools, there was not a Jew in Spain who could not read the Bible in Hebrew and in Arabic.
3. The First Nagid of Spain.—One day in the year 948 there was a sudden stir and commotion in the famous college of Cordova. A knotty point had come on for discussion, and puzzled silence had ensued in place of ready answers, when, from an unnoticed corner, a very shabby-looking stranger quietly got up and solved the difficulty. All eyes were turned on the ragged scholar, and the president rose impetuously from his high seat, and in tones of earnest admiration exclaimed to the astonished assembly, ‘Yon slave in sackcloth is my master, he must be yours.’ It was a hasty decision to come to, but it was fully justified by the facts of the story. The stranger in the mean garments was in truth an escaped slave, or, to speak quite accurately, a captive redeemed. In the lately closed schools of Babylon he had been one of the most learned of the Rabbis. He had had thrilling adventures since those quiet days at Sora, which place he had left, accompanied by three other scholars, for the purpose of collecting contributions for the maintenance of the schools in Babylon. His wife and his young son had travelled with Rabbi Moses ben Hanoch, and all of them had fallen into the hands of pirates, and had been carried on board a privateeringvessel engaged in the slave trade. In dread of worse than captivity, the wife had thrown herself overboard during the voyage,the three companions had been sold at ports at which they touched,[17] and Rabbi Moses and his son were exposed for sale in the slave market in Cordova. It was considered, in those days, a paramount duty of every congregation to redeem captive brethren, and a kind-hearted Jew, seeing two co-religionists in such evil plight, had at once bought them at the current price, which was not high, for their attainments were not known, and were therefore not counted in, and had set them free. Then father and son, sad and yet grateful, had wandered through the stately streets of Cordova, and some instinct had led them to the doors of the synagogue and the schools, with the result we have seen. ‘Moses clad in sackcloth,’ as he was called, became quite a celebrated character in Cordova. The reigning kaliph, Abderahman III., was a very enlightened ruler, and took a scholarly, as well as a kind-hearted, interest in the learned Rabbi. Abderahman had, too, a Jewish minister named Hasdai ben Isaac, whom he greatly valued; and it is quite possible, since the whole Jewish nation is often judged by single specimens, that the kaliph’s experience of the upright Hasdai influenced his general policy towards the Jews in his dominions. Moses ben Hanoch lived long as president of the schools, and his son, Hanoch ben Moses, succeeded him. Hanoch ben Moses’ powers and privileges were considerably extended,and he was given the title of Nagid, or prince, of the Jewish community in Spain. It became an office somewhat more honorary and less official than, but yet very similar to, that held of old by the [a]רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא] Head of the captivity, in Babylon, and thus the dignity that had died out in the East was revived in name, at least, in the West.
4. Another Nagid: Troubles in Granada.—Another famous Nagid was Samuel ha-Levi ibn-Nagrela, who was born in Cordova nearly fifty years later (993). In 1013 the kaliphate of Cordova had suffered from a barbarian invasion, and many of the great people had moved into other cities of the Peninsula. The colleges at Granada grew famous, and Samuel ha-Levi, or Samuel ha-Nagid, as he is generally called, who was at their head from about 1025 till 1055, was not only a first-rate theologian and a tolerable poet, but a clever statesman and a very charming companion. Like Hasdai ben Isaac, Samuel ha-Nagid held the post of minister at the court of the kaliph, and like him again, he held it to the benefit of his sovereign and of his co-religionists. His son Joseph inherited his honours, but not all his fine qualities. He had not good manners, and he was imprudent. During his Nagidship there was a very serious riot in Granada (1066). The Jews were accused of converting their neighbours. This was a fault of which they were so very unlikely to be guilty, that one has to look deeper for the cause of the disturbance. One may find it perhaps in the fact that the populace spent their wrath not on the synagogues, but on the houses and warehouses of theJews. That looks as if plunder had more to do with the matter than religion. It is, however, quite possible that the Nagid Joseph, through want of tact, had managed to excite some ill feeling. If it were so, he paid the penalty. He was killed in the course of the riot. A great deal of property was destroyed and more stolen, and some fifteen hundred Jewish families had to leave Granada, and to find an asylum in the other provinces of Spain. This riot in Granada was the first interruption to the 350 years of pleasant and peaceful relations which had existed between the Mahomedans and the Jews. But the Granada riot was like the ‘little cloud’ that Elijah’s servant saw ‘rising up out of the sea,’ after the long drought. The cloud was at first, we read, no bigger than a man’s hand, yet very soon ‘the heavens were black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain.’
5. Revival of Catholicism in Spain.—Two causes helped to bring about the change that was impending on the Jews, and the first, sad to say, was the gradual return of Spain to Christianity. From the time of the Mahomedan conquest in 711, a small remnant of the Visigoths, who were Christians, had managed to keep their hold on some of the mountain passes in the north of Spain. From the very first this tiny settlement had never ceased trying to win back their country from the Moors. The little Christian remnant had grown bigger and stronger by degrees, and one by one, very slowly, but very surely, several Mahomedan states had been won from Islam, and separate crowns had been set on the heads of Catholic sovereigns.By 1060, Castile, Leon, Asturias, Arragon, Navarre, and Portugal were all independent kingdoms, separate from the Kaliphate in politics and in religion. In 1085 the important city of Toledo was added to the confederation under the presidency of Alfonso VI., and became the capital of his kingdom of Castile.
6. Effect on the Jews.—So long as the Mahomedan power was paramount in the Peninsula, the partial return to Catholicism made little difference in the position of the Jews. The Catholic kings did not like their Jewish subjects in the same way as did the Mahomedan kaliphs, but, in their newly established kingdoms, they found Jews too serviceable and too much respected to make it either safe or politic to ill-use them. Their own footing was hard to win and hard to keep. It needed constant fighting, and even then it was not too secure. Meanwhile, the whole business of life could not be carried on by soldiers. People had to be fed, to be taught, to be healed; and all these very necessary functions were most admirably filled by Jews. It would not have done for the kings to snub such useful subjects, and it was hardly possible at that stage to persecute them. One wants both hands free for earnest work of any sort. Catholicism was not yet strong enough in Spain to strike out a different line of action from Islam. It is even possible that the kings learnt some lessons from the kaliphs, and got to see, as they did, something of the value and of the virtues of Judaism. It is quite certain that at the close of the eleventh century, when crusades came into fashion, neither Alfonso (VI.) of Castile nor Peter of Arragon, who were both goodCatholics, would allow the cry of Hep, Hep,[18] to be raised in their dominions. And it is equally certain that this same king Alfonso put down with a strong hand an outburst at Toledo, in 1108, which threatened Jewish peace and Jewish property. The early kaliphs of Spain practised toleration as a principle; the early kings, perhaps, more as a habit; but the result to the Jews was the same. Whilst the Ommeyade dynasty yet maintained its supremacy in Spain the Jews still prospered, and Judaism was unmolested.