Stop 1 of 11280–1305Redacted
CastileקסטיליהIberia
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
Castile in this era
In late 13th-century Castile, under the reign of Alfonso X (1252–1284) and his successors, the kingdom was a complex tapestry of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish coexistence, though Christian reconquest was steadily advancing southward. The Jewish communities of Castilian cities like Toledo, Burgos, and Segovia enjoyed considerable autonomy and prosperity during this period, with Jews serving as physicians, translators, tax collectors, and administrators to the crown; Alfonso X himself patronized Jewish and Muslim scholars as part of his ambitious cultural projects. Yet this golden age was fragile—the late 13th century saw rising Christian popular hostility, economic pressures, and the beginning of restrictive legislation that would intensify in the following century. The anonymous redactors working in Castile during these decades were likely compiling legal and exegetical texts in an era when the great centers of Iberian Jewish learning still flourished, even as the winds of persecution began to gather; within a few generations, the expulsion of 1492 would erase this entire world.
About Castile
Castile is a historic region of central Spain. It began as a county of the Kingdom of León, became a kingdom in the eleventh century, and was united with León in 1230 under Ferdinand III, forming the Crown of Castile, which led the Christian conquest of much of Iberia. The 1469 marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon joined the two crowns, laying the basis of the Spanish monarchy. Castile's large medieval Jewish communities produced major scholars, including kabbalists such as Joseph Gikatilla and Moses de León, whom most modern scholars regard as the main author of the Zohar; Jews who would not convert were expelled in 1492. Map coordinates are placed at Madrid as a regional centroid.
See other sages who lived in Castile→