Move Over Cordoba, Here Comes Reccopolis

You know of my posts regarding Cordoba, where Muslims are attempting to take back a mosque built on a church that the Spanish reestablished as a cathedral.

Now, I have been alerted, there's an earlier mosque in Spain.  From the article:

Finally, the orientation of several buildings appears to be influenced by ideological considerations....One large (approximately 20 × 40m) newly discovered feature is certainly oriented quite differently from the palatine church (Figure 3.6); indeed, it is the only building with this particular orientation so far discovered. What appears to be its broad side faces towards the south-east (Figure 5a–b). In light of the site’s early Islamic phase, this feature requires further exploration. 

The earliest mosques in Iberia date to the eighth century...The two eighth-century mosques in Iberia at present identified archaeologically correspond to the first phases of the Umayyad Great Mosque of Cordoba (AD 785–788; Ewert 1995) and the Great Mosque of Zaragoza (Hernández Vera 2004: 75). The tendency in Islamic Iberia was to orient mosques between south-east and south (Rius 2000: 105).Insofar as can be discerned from the geomagnetic data, the plan of the large structure at Reccopolis recalls those of Umayyad mosques in the Levant, particularly that at Jerash, Jordan...Although the geomagnetic survey is inconclusive, the Reccopolis structure might also indicate a three-aisled hall (Figure 5b); such features are characteristic of Levantine Umayyad mosques—notably the Great Mosque of Damascus, the newly discovered mosque in Tiberias, and that of Khirbat al-Minya (Figure 5d), 14km north of Tiberias (CytrynSilverman 2009: 49–51, 2012).

But getting back to church-mosque-cathedral and its relevance to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, I was astounded to read this about Cordoba:

Moors created an inclusive and pluralistic society where religion was important but did not dictate public policy.

If that is true, why cannot Jews share the Temple Mount with Moslems? 

And by the way, that Islamic Professor, S. Amjad Hussain in the article writes

By 1492 all the Moor-controlled areas had been wrestled back by Christian kings. Muslims and Jews were given the choice of either converting to Catholicism or leaving the country. Hundreds and thousands of Jews and Muslims took refuge in Morocco across the Straits of Gibraltar. Countless others were burned at stake for refusing to convert.

Did that burning-at-the-stake relate to Muslims as well?

So I asked an expert and received this reply:

Muslims, who ruled a portion of the Iberian peninsula until the demise of the Kingdom of Granada (Eastern Andalusia) in January 1492, were expelled from the Kingdom of Castile and the Catalan-Aragonese confederation in 1609 (mainly in order to crush the economy of the latter and substitute the Muslim population by Castilian nationals), but normally no Muslims were burnt at the stake. After 1492, no Jews remained in Spain...Some of them were indeed burnt at the stake, as Christian apostates (in fact all of them were Jewish apostates), were burnt at the stake. According to their own laws, Christians cannot burn Jews. 

This article tries to substitute the Jews with a mix of Jews and Muslims, and, in addition, it adds a spin of a Spanish imperialistic idea (that the three cultures lived together in harmony). In fact, when the Almohad Berbers invaded the Iberian peninsula in the second half of the Twelfth century CE, Jews were harshly persecuted. The Jewish community of Lucena, which once was called "the Jerusalem of Al-Andalus", totally disappeared, and the Rambam had to flee with his family from Cordova, like many others. In the Iberian peninsula, according to Jewish Chronicles, good places for Jews were Cordova (between the Seventh and the Eleventh centuries), Toledo (between the Eleventh and the Twelfth centuries, Gerona and Barcelona (between the Ninth and the Fourteenth centuries) and Narbonne (in France today, but also within the Jewish concept of Sepharad, during all the Middle Ages until the end of the Thirteenth century).

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Juan Carlos Girauta's Error

I am not sure that all who read the anti-Catalonia piece in the Jerusalem Post caught the full force of these lines at the end:

As a liberal democracy, Israel should favor the rule of law in Spain, and make its voice heard, together with other Western allies such as the US, the EU, France and Germany, in support of Spain’s constitutional order. And it should hope Spain recognizes the signs of friendship and responds in kind with a more reliable friendship.

In doing so, Israel will also ensure that at no point will the Spanish Jewish communities, strongly Zionist, be accused of incompatible loyalties between Spain and Israel, and targeted by those who always look to claim dubious fidelity of Diaspora Jews toward their legitimate national governments.

They were composed by a member of the Spanish Congress from Barcelona on behalf of the Ciudadanos Party, one Juan Carlos Girauta.

Credit

I am willing to give Senor Girauta a bit of leeway here, but not that much.

I consider that a veiled threat, even if unintended.  He should know better.

And considering that Spain is very anti-Semitic, I doubt whether supporting Catalunia's independence will make that much difference or, for that matter, supporting a unified Spain.

Now, it so happens that it is claimed that he

expressed strong sympathies for right-wing Zionism (to the point of calling then-president Zapatero an anti-Semite) 

and in the matter of that 2015 Mattisyahu incident, he termed it Judeaophobic. 

He also called for

"protecting freedom of expression in the university classrooms of our country".

when the Faculty of Psychology of the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) on February 25, 2016, called to cancel the lecture of an Israeli professor. Haim Eshach, a specialist in teaching science and technology in the preschool stage.

Those were admirable expressions and honorable acts.

But Jews should be able to express their opinions about the countries in which they live freely with no pressure to conform and certainly not at the risk of being accused of a dubious charge of dual loyalty.  Especially in the matter of Catalonia.  As they do.

Lovers of Zion need grasp that rights and liberties as well as all civic responsibilities and obligations belong to Jews as citizens in Spain, the United States and France.

Fir if nit, is Spain a true democracy?

Well-meaning, perhaps, as his intentions were, his words need to be revised.

P.S.  And why the editor at the JPost did not excise them or rephrase then is another question.

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Spain for Palestinian Statehood But For Catalonia...?

JPost reports:

The Palestinian Authority announced on Thursday that Spain has decided to recognize a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines before September. A spanish diplomat told Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath that Spain would support making the state of Palestine a UN member.

Aw, and all that Catalonia gets is autonomy?

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There Goes the Sun

From the news:

The Spanish Government has disqualified the Israeli team from the bi-annual Solar Decathlon because the team is located in “occupied territory” - Samaria. Engineers, architects, solar experts and other visitors to the Solar Decathlon will thus be denied the opportunity to study and benefit from the solar-powered energy-economical “Stretch House” designed and built by students of the Ariel University Center of Samaria.

Wait! Will they try to stop the sun from shining over Ariel next? Shiloh?

Oh my gosh!

And to think, these guys kicked the Arabs out of "occupied territory" themselves.

We don't get the right to reconquista?

A Grave Matter

If you go here, the second wall poster alerts all that Spain is engaged in work that is disturbing a Jewish graveyard.

And the New York Times (gasp!) updates:-

A group of Orthodox Jewish leaders from New York has called on Spain to stop what they said is the excavation of an ancient Jewish burial site in Toledo, in central Spain.

Rabbi David Niederman, president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg and one of those leading the campaign, said that the cemetery lay beneath, and adjacent to, a school built in Toledo in the 1970s. Builders, who unearthed Jewish graves during the school’s original construction, were now excavating new ones in order to extend the school, he said.

Rabbi Niederman said the disinterment of graves, which is largely forbidden in Judaism, added a fresh violation to a painful history for Jews in Spain.

A spokesman for the Spanish Foreign Ministry said the regional government in Toledo had reached an agreement with local Jewish representatives over re-burying the remains.

Now, the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg is a Hassidic group most probably strongly affiliated with Satmar. But, be that as it may (or may not), anyone know who rests in those graves?

Found this at Voz Iz Neais.

History Is Slippery

A follow-up to this

Here:-

Sir, – Paul Preston’s reply (Letters, April 10) to David Roman’s criticism of the review of Preston’s book about the Spanish Civil War, We Saw Spain Die, manifests a disturbing bias.

...Preston chooses to overlook and to remain completely silent on Roman’s most serious contention – that the Republican side, at the time, was equally guilty, and perhaps more so, of perpetrating appalling atrocities (he cites the slaughter of thousands of prisoners transferred from prison in Madrid to nearby Paracuellos de Jarama, arguably the biggest atrocity during the Civil War)...

It is a pity that in this way Preston uses his authority to lend credence to the prevailing simplistic, fashionable, liberal-leftist orthodoxy, officially sanctioned by the current Spanish government, that the Republican side fought the Civil War against Fascism in defence of liberal representative democracy. The Left in Spain now seeks to exploit the memory of nationalist atrocities as part of a cynical, opportunistic campaign aimed at associating the conservative opposition with the Franco regime.

In marked contrast, objective historians, using evidence available in the Moscow archives since the collapse of the USSR, show that the threat to the Second Republic came just as much from the revolutionary Left, and increasingly as the Civil War progressed, from the Moscow-dominated Republican government itself through Stalin’s main instrument, the Spanish Communist Party...had the Republican side won, the most likely outcome would have been the establishment of an East European-style communist regime during the Soviet era, i.e., a state in which all meaningful vestiges of democracy and opposition would have been brutally eliminated at the cost of thousands of lives.

JOHN HARGREAVES
Flat 1, 23 Nightingale Lane, London SW4.

Insight Into Spain

I sent a good friend, born in Majorca and who knows Spain well, this article on Spain's 'Jewish Problem'.

The article asserts:

But now, more than 500 years later, Spanish anti-Semitism is on the rise once again. According to a recent study published by the Pew Research Center, nearly half of all Spaniards have negative views of Jews, a statistic that marks Spain as one of the most anti-Semitic countries in Europe. According to Pew, 46 percent of Spaniards hold negative opinions of Jews, up more than double from the 21 percent of Spaniards with such views in 2005.

Spain is also the only country in Europe where negative views of Jews outweigh positive views; only 37 percent of Spaniards think favorably about Jews. By comparison, 36 percent of Poles have negative views of Jews while 50 percent have positive views; in Germany, 25 percent negative versus 64 percent positive; in France, 20 percent negative versus 79 percent positive; and in Britain, 9 percent positive versus 73 percent favorable. (According to Pew, 77 percent of Americans have favorable views toward Jews, compared with 7 percent unfavorable.)

I asked him to explain and he wrote back (original text; I don't want you to think it's not authentic):

Shalom Yisrael.

I can guess that on the last years Spain experiences a growing process of Islamization, both from immigration from Muslim countries and from conversion of "Christians" to Islam.

I put "Christians" in quotation mark because there is a large zone in southern Spain, Andalucía, or Al-Andalus in Arabic, that always felt very close to the Arabic Culture and even Religion. That feeling is flourishing on the last years, as you can see from the next links I add. (see here and here)

And don´t forget the deep legacy of Franco, who drove in all his speeches a pressing message of 'anti' three concepts: Jews, Communists and Free-Masons.

Finally, even for atheist or secular Spaniards, the inheritance of the Roman Catholic Church was always beating, and I remember from my childhood the sermons every Sunday with a clear quotation against the deceiver Jews.

Do you know Javier Solana? He always adds a subtle message against Israel, only a smooth hint, that for us, or for any western listener doesn´t means any special thing, but that for a Spaniard is a clear explanation of the 'real' situation: 'those are Jews, what else do you expect from them?'

Well, so there is a problem.

Like Poetry?

From a book review of THE DREAM OF THE POEM, Hebrew Poetry From Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492, Translated, edited and introduced by Peter Cole, 548 pp. Princeton University Press:-

One day in 10th-century Baghdad a visiting foreign student named Dunash Ben Labrat showed his teacher, the revered scholar Sa’adia Gaon, a poem he had composed in a novel style. Sa’adia handed the poem back with the comment “Nothing like it has ever been seen in Israel.” This dubious compliment, which all teachers of creative writing might wish to employ, failed to discourage Dunash. He took himself, and his new poetry, back home to Muslim Spain. There, despite the dismay his mediocre verses prompted in other aspiring Hebrew poets, his style caught on. Within a few decades, from these unpromising origins, a brilliant and original body of Hebrew verse began to take shape. Virtually stagnant since late Biblical times, Hebrew poetry and the language itself would be transformed by a succession of poets of genius and their imitators. In Peter Cole’s rich new anthology, the extent of their astonishing achievement is fully revealed for the first time in English.

Dunash’s innovation was strikingly simple. He adapted the meters of classical Arabic poetry to Hebrew. This was more radical than it might seem. Arabic is a quantitative language, like ancient Greek; long and short vowels are scrupulously marked, and this imparts a subtly variable music to the lines. Biblical poetry, by contrast, emphasized stress. It took ingenuity, as well as artistry, to force Hebrew into this unaccustomed pattern.

Only 13 of Dunash’s poems survive, along with one by his wife (whose name is lost), and it seems improbable that out of such feeble stuff — Sa’adia was right to be noncommital — a poetic renaissance might take flight. But the history of Hebrew poetry in Spain, as Cole makes clear in his witty and erudite notes, thrived on happy accidents. One of its greatest poets, Shmu’el Hanagid, the 11th-century general and sometime vizier to the Muslim ruler of Granada who was also a distinguished Talmudist in his spare time, composed more than 2,000 poems, the manuscript of which lay undiscovered until 1924, when it “was found by chance in a crate.” The work of Shelomo Ibn Gabirol, Shmu’el’s cranky contemporary (and poetic equal), was snatched from a fireplace in Iraq “where it was about to become fuel for the week’s laundry.” Many other poets’ works were discovered in the Cairo Geniza, that brimming storeroom in the Ben Ezra Synagogue where much of medieval Jewish history lay in tattered bundles until the late 19th century.

Hebrew poetry in Spain begins with Dunash around 950, but for almost two centuries, Arab poets there had been refining a body of literature unsurpassed for allusiveness and wit. So seductive were its melodies that Jewish poets living under Muslim rule were inspired not simply to imitate it in Hebrew but to rival and, at times, surpass it, taking not only meters from their Arab models but also themes, tropes and entire genres. When Yehuda Halevi wishes to evoke a male friend’s charms, he says, “My heart is pure, but not my eyes.” The sentiment may be “Platonic,” as Cole claims, but there is a delicate, and very Andalusian, uncertainty to the verse; it manages to be at once chaste and erotic. In another poem Yehuda enjoins his soul “to seek the Lord and His thresholds” and “offer your songs like incense.” Austere poems praising God alternate with sensuous evocations of a lovely girl’s — or boy’s — cheek or curls.

More here.