Saragossa

(1,937 words)

Article Table of Contents

1.

1. Muslim Saraqusṭa

2.

2. Christian Zaragoza

3. Bibliography

Saragossa is a city on the river Ebro, in Aragon, in the northeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula. It
began as a Celtiberian village on which the Carthaginians built a military post called Salduie. In
Roman times it was called Caesaraugusta, in honor of the emperor Augustus. The Muslims
reduced the name to Saraqusṭa when they took the city in 714. The Christians called it Zaragoza.

1. Muslim Saraqusṭa

During the emirate of Cordova, Saragossa resisted an attack by Charlemagne in 777 and became
the most important city of the Upper March (Ar. al-thaghr al-aʿlā) of Muslim Spain. During the
taifa period, after the end of the Cordova caliphate, Saragossa was governed until 1039 by the
Banū Tujīb and then by the Banū Hūd.Under their leadership it attained great prosperity and
wealth, its status as a border city making it attractive to merchants from both sides. The tolerance
and liberalism of the kings of Saragossa made it possible for Muslim, Christian, and Jewish
intellectuals to live together with mutual respect and great creativity. In 1110 the city fell into the
hands of the Almoravids, but in 1118 it was conquered by Alfonso I el Batallador. Saragossa then
became the capital of the Christian kingdom of Aragon.

There were Jews living in Saragossa during the late Roman and Visigothic periods, but little is
known about the Jewish community in that period or under the caliphate. Almost no notable
scholars lived there. Saragossa is the place where the German deacon Bodo converted to Judaism
in 839 (taking the name Eleazar) and married a Jewish woman. He later left for Cordova, where he
engaged in a polemic against his former faith and was answered in four polemical epistles
by Paulus Alvaro(Alvarus of Cordova).

The prosperity of Saragossa, however, coincided with the fall of the caliphate at the beginning of
the eleventh century, when it became the new home of numerous Jewish scholars and rich
families from Cordova seeking a safer place in the north. Ashtor estimates the number of Jews
during the taifa period at approximately twelve hundred. Most of them were artisans and
merchants engaged in shoemaking, leather tanning, textile manufacture, and related enterprises.
There was, as well, a noteworthy group of intellectuals who participated in the city’s Arabic
culture.

During the eleventh century Saragossa was the true heir of Cordova as a privileged place for
Jewish cultural life. Poetry, philosophy, philology, biblical exegesis, and science all attained a high
level of development. In the 1030s Jekuthiel ibn Ḥasan held a high office at the court of Yaḥyā ibn
al-MundhirII. Jekuthiel was the patron of many young Jewish poets and scholars. When he was
killed in 1039, his death was lamented in very beautiful and moving compositions by the great
poet Solomon ibn Gabirol, who was born in Malaga around 1021 and came as a teenager to
Saragossa, where he wrote many of his works. Other distinguished Jewish scholars in eleventh-
century Saragossa, under the Tujībids and the Banū Hūd, were the politician, philologist, and
poet Joseph ibn Ḥasday, his son the philosopher and politician Ḥasday ibn Ḥasday, the illustrious
grammarian and lexicographer Jonah ibn Janāḥ, the philologist, exegete, and translator of the
works of Ḥayyūj into Hebrew Moses ibn Chiquitilla, the liturgical poet and philologist Levi ibn
Altabban and his disciples, the comparative linguists Isaac ibn Barūn and Jacob ibn Altabban, the
author of popular ethical works Baḥya ibn Paquda, the physician and philosopher Menaḥem ibn al-
Fawwāl, the grammarian Abraham ibn Qamniʾel, the satiric poet Moses ibn al-Taqana, the
talmudist and judge David ben Saʿadya, and the pharmacologist and physician Jonah ibn Biqlarish.
With the exception of poetry, most of their works were written in Arabic. Controversies like the
heated dispute on philological questions between Jonah ibn Janāḥ and Samuel ha-Nagid (with
other disciples of Ḥayyūj) are a proof of the high level of knowledge of Hebrew attained in the city.

Some of what we know about Saragossa is less positive: After having lived there for several
years, Solomon ibn Gabirol left, writing very bitterly against the members of the community and
their attitude toward him: “Is it nothing to live among people who can’t tell their right hand from
left? / I am buried, but not in a graveyard, in the coffin of my own home; / I suffer with neither
father nor mother, indigent, young and alone— / on my own without even a brother, not a friend
apart from my mind . . .” (Nihar be-qorʾi geroni in Ibn Gabirol, Secular Poems, eds. Ḥ. Brody and Ḥ.
Schirmann, Jerusalem, 1974, pp. 67-68).

The influence of Islamic thought on some Jewish thinkerswas particularly strong in Saragossa. For
instance, Baḥya ibn Paquda used many Arabic sources for his Kitāb al-Hidāya ilā Farāʾiḍ al-Qulūb
(Duties of the Hearts), taking considerable elements from Mutazilite theology and from ascetic
(zuhd) and mystical (Sufi and taṣawwuf) writings, from al-Ghazālī and the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ
(The Epistles of the Brethren of Sincerity), to name but a few. Other Jewish writers of the epoch
were also familiar with this important mystical encyclopedia and other Shi’ite works brought to
Saragossa from the Orient.

As shown by Lacave, the Jewish quarter was located in the southeastern part of the city inside the
Roman walls and separated by its own wall from the rest of the city. The main synagogue was
northeast of the fortress. No buildings of the Muslim period have been preserved, except the
Jewish baths on Coso Street. The narrow streets and communal buildings of the old Jewish quarter
disappeared in the process of modernization of the city. In the thirteenth century, with the growth
of the Jewish populace, the old quarter expanded to a new one outside the walls; its site has been
thoroughly studied by Blasco. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were no less than
six documented synagogues.

2. Christian Zaragoza

Alfonso I conquered the city in 1118. As underlined by Baer, the conditions of the capitulation
were more favorable for the Jews, who were allowed to remain in their homes, than for the
Muslims, who had to abandon their houses and settle outside the walls. Jews were accepted in the
service of the court (not without some protests from Christians?) and their signatures appear
frequently in important official documents.

Some aspects of the intellectual atmosphere of the city seem to imply that there was a deep
internal division in the community. On one side, several distinguished families that preserved a
high degree of Andalusian culture, like the Alconstantini, de la Cavalleria, and Benveniste, had the
confidence of the kings and served the crown in administrative posts. These families were the
undisputed leaders of the aljama of Saragossa, especially in regard to decisions like the approval
of the ban against Solomon of Montpellier for his attacks on Maimonides and his disciples. On the
other side, traditionalist Jews were predominant among the lower strata of the populace, as can
be seen in their attitude toward Judah ibn Sabbetay at the beginning of the thirteenth century, or
in respect to Solomon Bonafed two centuries later. Economic tensions related to the payment of
taxes rose to the surface in 1264, when the city’s rich and poor Jews appealed to King James I in
defense of their respective and opposed interests.

Baer estimates that the Jewish population of Saragossa in the fifteenth century was about two
hundred families. He describes the community’s last two centuries as a period of prosperity,
followed by decline and ruin, with a revival in the fifteenth century. Commerce related to cloth
was one of the main occupations of the city’s Jews, although there were also many artisans and
even cultivators of fields.

The Black Death of 1348 claimed many victims in the Jewish community of Saragossa. In contrast,
they were not affected by the events of 1391, due to the fact that the king was in the city and did
not allow the persecution to proceed.

At the end of the fourteenth century, the most influential Jewish family in Saragossa was the Ben
Lavi or de la Cavalleria family. Solomon ben Lavi and his son Benveniste tried to maintain a high
level of Hebrew culture in their homes, congregating several notable poets and intellectuals of the
time. The group of poets known as the “Saragossa circle”included some of the most illustrious
literary figures of the last generations of Jewish life in the Iberian Peninsula. The members of the
circle felt themselves to be the continuators of Andalusi cultural and literary traditions. The most
important of them and the natural leader of the circle was Solomon ben Meshullam de Piera,
preceptor of the sons of Don Benveniste. Vidal ben Lavi, Vidal Benveniste, and Solomon Bonafed
were the best-known members of the group.

After 1391 the two last monarchs of the House of Barcelona tried to assure a few years of peace in
which the aljamas of Aragon could be rebuilt. But the king who followed them, the
conversionist Ferdinand I(Fernando de Antequera), sought with all possible means to bring about
the conversion of the Jews, ordering them to send emissaries to the Disputation of Tortosa (1412–
1414). The social pressure had the desired effects: many Jews from the crown of Aragon converted
during these years, among them several important members of the Ben Lavi family. These
conversions and the imposed preaching of Vicente Ferrer began the decline of the communities of
Aragon, and especially of Saragossa. In 1486, at the request of Torquemada, King Ferdinand
ordered the Jews of Saragossa expelled. The decree was probably not executed, because there
were Jews in the city until the general expulsion in 1492.

Angel Saénz-Badillos

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Cite this page

Angel Saénz-Badillos, “Saragossa”, in: Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, Executive Editor
Norman A. Stillman.