Medieval Jewry in general resigned from the cultural and even more so the political ambitions entertained by the Moslems and Christians. The involvement of a Jewish intelligentsia—who observed their religion most devoutly—in the secular activities of Islamic Spain between the 9th and 11th centuries is, therefore, surprising. There had been nothing in Jewish history quite like it since the Hellenistic period. Indeed, Jewish participation in and competition with Moorish culture in Spain went even further than has generally been thought. I have recently been able to prove that the earliest parts of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain’s most famous castle, are largely remnants of a palace built by the Jewish vizier Yehoseph ibn Nagralla as an expression of the quasi-messianic ambitions he had inherited from his father, the famous statesman, poet, and Talmudist, Samuel ha-Nagid. Implied in this discovery is an extremely intimate relation between emancipated Spanish Jews and the courtly culture of the Ummayyad caliphs of Cordova who ruled Spain from the 8th through the early 11th centuries. These developments may illustrate some aspects of Ahad Ha-am’s distinction between Jewish “creative competition” and “destructive assimilation” or “imitation.”
Though the Ummayyads were related by blood to Mohammed, they had originally (in Mecca) opposed the new religion preached by the Prophet. With the subsequent conquests of Islam, however, and the foundation of an Islamic empire stretching from South Arabia to Southern France and East Iran (a situation that offered opportunities for power and wealth to the family of the Prophet) the Ummayyads gave up their opposition, establishing themselves as caliphs first in Damascus and later in Cordova. Their conversion to Islam seems to have been more political than religious—they never capitulated to the ascetic ethic of the Moslem creed—and their worldliness was reflected in the opulence of their royal courts, which attracted poets, philosophers, artists, and architects. While in Damascus, the Ummayyad caliphs made ample use of what was left of Greco-Roman and Persian art in the Near East to achieve a splendor to vie with Baghdad which was then ruled by the Abbasid caliphs (of the Arabian Nights). The extent of the Ummayyads’ emancipation from orthodox Moslem tenets can be appreciated from the recently unearthed ruins of al-Mafjar, one of their “desert palaces” near Jericho. The lantern tower and façade of this Grand Trianon were found to be decorated with life-size statues of scantily clad boys and girls, and even a representation of the caliph himself—a flagrant violation of Islam’s injunction against graven images.
In Cordova—to which they moved in the wake of the Arab conquest of Spain—the Ummayyads went even further in cultural license than in their Syrian days. In their courtly life, they imitated the ostentatious ceremonial of the Roman emperors; using Byzantine methods, they also built a strong civil and military administration which was nevertheless extremely flexible. Similarly, they brought about their own synthesis of the Islamic art of Baghdad and Damascus with newly imported Byzantine and Persian forms and techniques such as the mosaic. (In spite of religious prohibition, the Ummayyads brought in plastic art from Byzantium, where it seems to have been put up for auction during the Empire’s iconoclastic period.) The novel composite style of Cordova’s Great Mosque (itself inspired by the Roman aqueducts with their multiple arcs) later became an important influence in shaping both the Romanesque and Gothic architecture of Christian Northwest Europe.
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Among those who had facilitated the Arab conquest of Spain were the Jews. Increasingly oppressed by the Visigoth rulers of the Hispanic peninsula, the Jewish population had welcomed the Arabs as liberators. In turn, the Arabs extended marked toleration to their Jewish subjects, finding them not only loyal but even useful as interpreters of European ideas. Eventually Jews came to be employed in the highest offices of the state. In the 10th century, for example, the Jew Hasdai ibn Shaprut was the principal statesman at the court of the Ummayyads. In Jewish history he is especially remembered for his negotiations with the Khazar czardom between the lower Volga and the Black and Caspian Seas, which had been newly converted to Judaism. This conversion of an entire kingdom was welcomed by the Jews as a divine confirmation of their hopes and must certainly have stimulated their return to a more active role in history.
Two hundred years of living under the wing of the Ummayyads had an emancipating effect on the Jews. The Islamic monotheistic creed, derived indirectly from Judaism, did not strike the Jews as a step forward, nor did the ethics of the Koran appear superior to the ideals of the Hebrew prophets. But the Ummayyad court of Cordova, in many respects liberated from normative Islam and consequently open to multifarious interests, drew the Jews on into a similar widening of horizons. By the 10th and 11th centuries, the culturally mature Jewish circles of Cordova combined the Ummayyads’ courtly elegance and interest in the arts with a vastly enlarged concern for the intellectual possibilities of their own tradition. They carried on the Rabbinic traditions of Biblical and Talmudic studies at magnificent academies while at the same time venturing into new fields of intellectual endeavor. The formal study of Hebrew linguistics was promoted among the Cordovan Jews, and systematic theology and philosophy (both Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic) became an important pursuit. Moreover, although the Cordovan Jews spoke Arabic and Spanish in their daily life, they dared to use the Hebrew of the synagogue and the scholars in lyric poetry that had the forms and rhythms—and, in many cases, the content—of secular Arabic verse. The writing of Hebrew poetry about love and nature could not be justified by the example of Solomon’s Song—which was interpreted allegorically as a dialogue between God and Israel; nevertheless, with its distinctly secular and erotic surface, its language lent itself to these themes. Hebrew drinking songs followed more directly the Arabic pattern. Apart from poetry, linguistics, philosophy, and theology, the Cordovan Jews showed great interest in science, in mathematics and astronomy especially, and—as we shall see—architecture and plastic art. But the important fact to notice about this flourishing of creative activity is that it represented not “assimilation” to the world of Islam but a fundamentally Jewish response to the challenge of Arabic culture. Through their new poetry and philosophy, the Jews, though in exile, could uphold their national pride and express their unique individuality.
Later—after the caliphate was overthrown by Berber and Slav mercenaries—Cordovan Jews carried the spark of Ummayyad humanistic liberalism to other Spanish towns. Ibn Gabirol and others introduced a breath of cultural life into Saragossa, and Maimonides brought the Cordovan spirit to the en-enlightened Egyptian court of Saladin as late as the end of the 12th century. But the most important apostle of the Cordovan idea was Samuel ibn Nagralla (922-1056), called by his fellow Jews ha-Nagid, the Prince.
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Born in Cordova, Samuel left the city when it was sacked by the Berbers in 1012; eventually he made his way to Granada, where he was accepted into the service of the reigning Berber prince Habbus. Lacking loyal citizens among Arabs and Christians, and fearing rivalries among his own Berber ranks, Habbus was glad to employ Samuel in the financial administration of the kingdom. The Jew, belonging to no party, could be trusted, and Habbus—among his illiterate and ferocious Berber soldiery—must have been happy to find a man trained in administration and one who could enhance his royal dignity by writing diplomatic letters that vied in elegance with those of the most civilized courts. Gradually Samuel seems to have made Habbus’s successor, Badis, dependent on his administrative manipulations. Also Samuel successfully led the armies of Granada for more than ten years in warfare against the rulers of hostile neighbor cities like Almeria and Seville. These battles are described by Samuel in Hebrew odes which are still extant.
Samuel used his major-domoship to rebuild a “new Cordova” of Jewish culture in the hitherto insignificant country town of Granada, and, astonishingly enough, the barbaric Berber king permitted him to do so. Celebrated poets and scholars, among them ibn Gabirol, were invited by Samuel to become members of his academy and to educate his son Yehoseph. Since Samuel was himself an ambitious litterateur, he personally presided over this academy. It seems that ibn Gabirol, for whom he was no match as a poet, once dared to criticize one of Samuel’s “icy” over-intellectual poems, and was soon driven out of the major-domo’s “countenance.” In odes of proud self-justification and poems of love to Samuel’s prodigious son Yehoseph, ibn Gabirol attempted reconciliation, but the vizier would brook no challenge to his absolute authority, and apparently remained adamant.
It does not surprise us that, in these triumphant circumstances, Samuel should have seen himself in a kind of latter-day role. But Samuel’s messianic dreams, as we are able to reconstruct them speculatively, were not strictly of the traditional “orthodox” kind. Tinged with Cordovan secularism, they involved visions of an independent Jewish kingdom, probably within the kingdom of Granada itself, to be a center not only of Rabbinic study but of power and riches, the fine arts and philosophy. Samuel seems to have felt himself equal to—indeed, at times, to have identified himself with—King Solomon, who was to the medieval mind the epitome of the ideal ruler.
As the master of a royal harem (I Kings 2), as the gallant friend of the Queen of Sheba, and as the presumed author of the Song of Songs, Solomon remained the model for sensuality and courtliness. Moreover, the molten images of “oxen” and lions with which, in apparent defiance of the Second Commandment, he adorned his palace and Temple, and the secular wisdom of the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (both of which were ascribed to his authorship), all helped to create an impression of Solomon as an ingenious but skeptical hedonist. In this character he became the hero of countless medieval legends told by Jew, by Christian, and especially by Moslem throughout the Middle Ages.
But it was also Solomon the magician and great builder who stirred the imagination of medieval rulers. His architectural accomplishments were imitated both in Christian Byzantium by as early an emperor as Justinian (who in the 6th century erected the Hagia Sophia Church with the avowed purpose of outbuilding Solomon) and within Islam by the Cordovan Ummayyads who—following the fantastic descriptions of Solomon’s legendary palaces—built palaces of their own in which the floors were of shining or transparent materials decorated with sea symbols so as to resemble lakes, and in which the interiors of the domes were fitted with cunningly lit surfaces that created an illusion of dripping water or of a rotating firmament—to suggest the aerial or submarine palace of the Solomon legends.
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It was in the spirit of this latter-day conception of Solomon that Samuel raised his son Yehoseph (the name is a Hebrew archaism typical of the father’s method of grammatical reconstructions) who succeeded him as vizier under Badis. Yehoseph was educated to fulfill Samuel’s exorbitant political and cultural ambitions.
King Badis turned, in the later part of his life, into an alcoholic, neglecting the affairs of state and virtually leaving all decisions to Yehoseph. The king lived in the Albaicin Castle opposite the Alhambra hill, high above Granada. The Alhambra (Arabic for “The Red Castle”) was the site of some old fortifications, and here Yehoseph built his own—Solomonic—palace. This fact is expressly stated in the memoirs of the last Berber King of Granada, Badis’s grandson Abdallah. Such a construction gave Yehoseph the opportunity for Solomonic display.
The Talmud forbids a direct imitation of the Temple or any of its adornments; nevertheless Yehoseph used modified versions of the Solomonic symbols for his profane palace. One of Yehoseph’s halls displayed a dome encrusted with gems and played on by changing lights, so as to give the illusion of rotating: this was Solomon’s Palanquin (mentioned in the Song of Songs 3:9-10: “King Solomon made himself a palanquin of the wood of Lebanon, he made the pillars thereof of silver, the bottom thereof of gold, the covering thereof of purple”). The courts were covered with roses of Sharon and other flora of the Song of Songs. And there was even a “sea,” a fountain, as in Solomon’s Temple, but it was supported by twelve lions instead of the twelve “oxen” of the original (I Kings 7:23-25). We owe this information and various other details to a hitherto overlooked poem by ibn Gabirol which must be, for many reasons, a description of Yehoseph’s palace:
The dome is like the Palanquin of Solomon
hanging above the rooms’ splendors. . . .
And there is a full Sea, matching Solomon’s
Sea, yet resting on no oxen;
But there are lions in phalanx on its rim,
seeming to roar for prey—these whelps,
Whose bosoms are like wells that gush
spurts up from their mouths like
streams. . . .
The evidence by which I have been able to establish that this palace was the oldest Alhambra castle itself is too detailed to set forth here, but my conclusion was first suggested by a consideration of ibn Gabirol’s poem in the light of an overlooked passage in the aforementioned memoirs of Abdallah. These memoirs were written after Abdallah had been exiled to Morocco, and they contain a vivid description of the powerful ambitions of Samuel and Yehoseph. Abdallah credits Samuel ibn Nagralla with good service to his grandfather Badis and great-grandfather Habbus, but he accuses Yehoseph ibn Nagralla of having murdered Badis’s son, the heir to the throne (Abdallah’s own father), and of having plotted against Badis with the ruler of the neighboring town Almeria. One example of Yehoseph’s overweening arrogance, writes Abdallah, was the fact that he dared build for himself an Alhambra castle which was, Abdallah implies, more beautiful than the royal palace of his grandfather (on the Albaicin hill in Granada).
The principal extant monument of Yehoseph ibn Nagralla’s palace among the present Alhambra structures is the Fount of Lions (the original basin of which seems to be preserved in the Abencerrages hall). Apart from this, much of the castle’s foundation and masonry, the plan of large sections, and, most important, the architectural spirit of the palace as a whole, must be placed in the 11th century and credited to the Cordovan Jews of the Nagralla circle.
The Alhambra was one of the most ambitious architectural projects in the history of exiled Jewry. A modern scholar, aware of the Talmudic prohibitions, is shocked at the liberties these “orthodox” Cordovan Jews took by using Solomonic motifs in the erection of a profane palace. In particular, the plastic art of the Alhambra seems to be a flagrant contravention of the Second Commandment. But ibn Gabirol in his poem praises the palace jubilantly; one surmises that at moments the resurrection of a Jewish kingdom in Granada must have appeared imminent, and the license taken in the building of the palace can perhaps be explained as an aspect of the exaltation which the Cordovan circle experienced when their triumph seemed to herald the millennium.
Such presumption provoked the revenge of Nemesis, and bigotry was her weapon. The tolerance of the Ummayyad days had vanished with the downfall of the caliphate, and now the Almoravides—those fanatic African hordes, introduced into Spain as mercenaries by the frightened Moslems to fight the Christians—crusaded against the latter but also against the liberalism and secular culture of the Moslems themselves. For these uncouth fanatics it was also a crime to allow a Jew to occupy a high position. The riches amassed by the Jews of Granada were a tempting prey. Personal enemies of the Nagralla family had been pamphleteering against Yehoseph for some time. In an invective directed against the rich Jews of Granada, against their complete domination of the town, and against their Nagid, Yehoseph (and his palace), one poet wrote:
They divided up Granada, capital and
provinces
and everywhere is one of those accursed
ones;
They seized Granada’s revenues . . .
That ape of theirs has his mansion faced
with stone
and makes the purest springs flow thither.
Incited by such polemics, a mob stormed the king’s palace, where Yehoseph had fled for protection. Rumors had been spread to the effect that Yehoseph had killed Badis and invited the armies of the King of Almeria to invade Granada in order to establish him as ruler. Even when Yehoseph led the king out alive onto a balcony, the masses would not disperse; he, together with a large number of the Jewish community of Granada, was killed during the riots of that day.
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The Nagrallas came too early. For the majority of the Spanish Jews of this period, the idea of a cultural secularization and self-emancipation from certain religious restrictions against art had no appeal. And for the Jewish nation as a whole, waiting throughout the Middle Ages with passive yet passionate expectation for the Messiah to deliver them from exile, the idea of self-redemption through political and cultural action did not come for another nine hundred years. As the Middle Ages wore on, and as conditions in Western Christendom became more and more unfavorable to Jewish participation in the life around them, Jewish life itself inevitably turned inward and parochial. Concomitantly, the notion that an involvement in secular culture must necessarily constitute a betrayal of Judaism took strong hold on the Jews of Europe. Today, however, the secularist achievements of the Nagrallas seem one of the few examples in the history of the Jewish diaspora (the Hellenistic period being another) of the way in which Jews could observe their religion fully without withdrawing from general culture—a case of “assimilation” that was not destructive of Judaism but a means of enriching Jewish culture.
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