236 A History of Judaism
influence of the Jewish community in Islamic Spain. Jews had been
settled in Spain by at least the early fourth century, since the Council of
Elvira in 305 attempted to impose restrictions on Jewish social relations
with Christians, forbidding Christians to live in the house of Jews, or to
eat in their company, or to bless the produce of their fields, and in 417
or 418 the community in Minorca was converted en masse by force
following a riot vividly described in a letter celebrating the event com-
posed by a local bishop. They fared little better under the Visigothic
kings who supplanted the Roman state in the Hispanic peninsula as the
empire weakened. When in 613 King Sisebut, ruler of Hispania and
Septimania (in south- west France), ordered all Jews to be baptized or
leave the kingdom, many went into exile. Those who remained, or
returned in ensuing years under more lenient regimes, became in many
cases crypto- Jews. They or their descendants were among those who
welcomed the arrival of Muslim invaders in 711 – according to Arabic
accounts, the invaders handed over major towns such as Cordoba,
Granada, Toledo and Seville for Jews to garrison.^9
It would be wrong to characterize the following centuries of Jewish
life in Islamic Spain as idyllic, not least because Jews (like Christians)
were subject to heavy taxes in the Islamic state. But Jews prospered par-
ticularly under the tolerant regime of the Umayyads, with their capital
in Cordoba, which itself became a major Jewish centre. Several Jewish
dignitaries served in the administration and armies of these Islamic
rulers, becoming drawn into the complex dynastic politics following the
Berber conquest of Cordoba in 1013. The rise of such dignitaries did
not always have positive consequences for the wider Jewish population –
it was, for instance, the cause of a dramatic massacre of Jews in Granada
in 1066 – but in general Jewish life flourished in Islamic Spain until the
mid- twelfth century, when the Almohad dynasty from Morocco invaded
and enforced a flurry of forced conversions to Islam.
Already from the early eleventh century Jews’ position within Mus-
lim society was complicated by the start of Christian reconquest from
the north, and the periodic willingness of Christian kings, mindful of
the advantages of Jewish political and economic support, to grant their
Jewish subjects many more rights than they had enjoyed under earlier
Christian regimes. Such tolerance did not last: in 1235 the Council of
Tarragona attempted to control the influence of the Jews by both finan-
cial and political restrictions and in 1250 a more systematic attack on
the local Jews was launched in Saragossa. The attitudes of the Catholic
monarchs to the Jews varied throughout the fourteenth century, with