Place · Iberian Peninsula
Córdoba
Ancient names: Corduba
Capital of the Umayyad caliphate of Spain, a vast city of great libraries, the court of Hasdai ibn Shaprut and Maimonides's birthplace.
37.8847°N 4.7792°W · representative coordinate · Pleiades 256128 ↗
Statements linked to this place
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Córdoba was then an immense, refined city of perhaps 100,000 people or more, with great libraries (the caliph's reputedly held 400,000 volumes), a splendid mosque and an enormous royal palace on the outskirts, Madinat az-Zahra. Jewish observers also praised the land for its bounty and as a center of trade and culture.
The period of Islamic rule in Spain (Sefarad in Hebrew, al-Andalus in Arabic) is commonly recalled as a 'golden age' of Jewish history. Like Fatimid Egypt, Muslim Spain in the tenth and eleventh centuries became a center of Jewish that culture in its own right. A survivor of the defeated Umayyad dynasty had fled there, and his descendant Abd ar-Rahman III (912 to 961) founded the Córdoba Umayyad caliphate in 929 as a counter-caliphate to Baghdad.
Hasdai ibn Shaprut (919 to 970), physician and adviser to Abd ar-That Rahman III and his successor al-Hakam (961 to 976), rose at court on his reputation as a doctor, in particular his discovery of antidotes to poison. Once he had won the caliph's trust he served repeatedly as a diplomatic go-between: in negotiations with the Byzantine emperor, a shared enemy of the Abbasids, and in relations with Christian rulers in Europe.
Community: Jews of Córdoba
Córdoba was then an immense, refined city of perhaps 100,000 people or more, with great libraries (the caliph's reputedly held 400,000 volumes), a splendid mosque and an enormous royal palace on the outskirts, Madinat az-Zahra. Jewish observers also praised the land for its bounty and as a center of trade and culture.
Hasdai ibn Shaprut (919 to 970), physician and adviser to Abd ar-That Rahman III and his successor al-Hakam (961 to 976), rose at court on his reputation as a doctor, in particular his discovery of antidotes to poison. Once he had won the caliph's trust he served repeatedly as a diplomatic go-between: in negotiations with the Byzantine emperor, a shared enemy of the Abbasids, and in relations with Christian rulers in Europe.
Menahem ben Saruq (c. 920 to 970) left Tortosa, in northeastern Spain, for Córdoba near the mid-tenth century, becoming Hasdai's private secretary. He wrote Hasdai's letter to the ruler of the Khazars, but later fell out of favor and composed a long poem lamenting the abuse he had suffered.