2023-09-14 11:08:12
«I think the right thing is to try to free her although only God knows the most correct way. The last agreement with the pervert was for September-October and it does not give us even one more hour. In this direct and literary way the Hebrew poet urged Halfon ben Natanel in the 12th century to the members of his community to rescue a young Jewish girl who had fallen captive in a territory disputed between Christians and Muslims. The text talks about the cost of the rescue, the dates and even the malicious character of the person who kept her prisoner. If then there was no time to lose, today it is all that time that has been completely lost.
This snapshot of another time, of another Spain and of a culture that evaporated without leaving a trace is part of the valuable collection of texts about Andalusian Jews which has been saved to this day thanks to a particular time capsule: a geniza that those responsible forgot to empty for 900 years. These rooms are common in all synagogues and Jewish cemeteries and are used to deposit sacred documents that are no longer going to be used, but they cannot be destroyed either according to Jewish tradition.
Specifically, the poet’s letter and other writings come from a synagogue in Cairo, where at the end of the 19th century two British researchers found nearly 200,000 manuscripts about the daily life of Jews in Al Andalus that were quietly gathering dust. Following a long British tradition, many of these fragmented texts ended up in Cambridge due to unclear circumstances.
The daily life of a lost town
«Our exhibition aims to introduce the public to the Andalusian world, which is not the same as the Castilian era of the Jewish quarters or later synagogues, such as those of Córdoba or Granada. We are talking about a time about which we hardly know anything and where, for example, the house of a Jew in the Córdoba of the Umayyads was in no way different from that of a Christian or a Muslim,” explains José Martínez Delgado, who is the curator of an exhibition in the Sefarad-Israel Center which, under the title ‘The Golden Age of the Jews of Alandalús’, reconstructs the daily life of this people scattered throughout the Peninsula.
The professor of the University of Granada He has been translating some of the documents from this graveyard of words for two years and fighting with data the rocky myths that surround this community. «We have to stop talking about the Spain of the three cultures, because in Al-Andalus there was only one: the Muslim one. What others simply had were fiscal options that were more or less respected,” she points out.
11th century letter from a Jewish woman asking for help for her ABC illness
Letters between merchants, judicial reports, shopping lists, marriage contracts, wills, children’s books, promises of gifts between brothers… The collection that today belongs largely to the University of Cambridge does not contain large documents on military enterprises or correspondences between notable characters, but fragments of the daily life of the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean during the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, when Al Andalus It was considered the global heart of this culture. «We are talking about the Córdoba of the Umayyads and during the taifas of the three large urban centers where they enjoyed the most influence: Granada, the port of Almería, for trade; and Lucena, which was the great academic center,” Martínez Delgado highlights about a cluster of stories where sometimes the outcome is missing.
Voices from beyond the grave
Not in vain, all the economic and cultural splendor ended abruptly with the arrival of the fanatic Almohads in the 13th century. The intransigence of this group of invaders caused religious minorities in Muslim territory to be practically exterminated. «When the fiscal pact came to an end, the Sephardim considered their world destroyed and they mourned it in poems that we preserve today. In their exodus they became disseminators of the Andalusian legacy throughout the world and were ahead of the Toledo School of Translators in bringing Muslim culture closer to Europe, although they carried out the translation from Arabic to Hebrew and not to Latin. considers Martínez Delgado. Many embraced martyrdom, while others fled to the north of the Iberian Peninsula, Provence, Italy or Egypt. The most brilliant era of the Spanish Jews was over. Those who stayed merged with the Castilian Jews who centuries later were to be expelled by the Catholic Monarchs. “That is another story that deserves an exhibition in its own right,” the curator clarifies.
In addition, one of the walls of the free-entry exhibition, which opens its doors this September 15 until March, is dedicated to texts written in the Arabic language by Jewish authors. Using this language, the Jews of Al-Andalus could communicate freely with their brothers from Palestine, Egypt, Syria and Iraq and access literature and science from across the Middle East without their religion being an obstacle. A joint project of Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge highlights the mixture that the manuscripts breathe between Christian, Muslim and Jewish ideas. “Here is a great story where you can see the practice of the language at every moment and the exchange between very different writings,” says Ben Outhwaite, one of those responsible for this research.
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