Shmuel HaNagid
993 CE–1056 CE · Rishonim · Cordoba
Shmuel HaNagid was born in Córdoba in 993 into a Jewish merchant family and received a broad education in Torah, Talmud, Hebrew and Arabic letters. When the Berber revolt and civil war (fitna) shattered Córdoba, he fled south around 1013 and settled in the port of Málaga, where he worked as a merchant and scribe while continuing his studies. His mastery of Arabic prose and administration drew him into the court of the Zirid kings of Granada. Under Habbus and then Badis he rose to serve as vizier and battlefield commander of the Muslim kingdom's army for nearly two decades. He was at the same time Nagid, head of Iberian Jewry, a patron of Torah scholarship, one of the greatest Hebrew poets (Ben Tehillim, Ben Mishlei, Ben Kohelet), and a halachist. He died around 1056.
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CordobaקורדובהAl-Andalus, Spain
What they did here
Born into a Jewish merchant family in the Umayyad capital and schooled in Torah, Talmud, and Hebrew and Arabic letters, until the Berber revolt and civil war forced him to flee south around 1013.
Cordoba in this era
In the 10th century Cordoba, capital of the Umayyad caliphate, was one of the largest cities in Europe and the centre of Andalusi learning. Under the patronage of the Jewish courtier Hasdai ibn Shaprut it also became the first home of Hebrew grammar and poetry in Spain: Menahem ben Saruq and Dunash ben Labrat worked there, and the grammarian Ibn Janah was born there before moving to Zaragoza. After the caliphate collapsed (1031) and the Almohads took the city (1148), many Jews left; Maimonides, born there in 1138 (some sources say 1135), left with his family.
About Cordoba
Córdoba, on the Guadalquivir in Andalusia, southern Spain, came under Roman rule in the 3rd century BCE and, as Colonia Patricia, became capital of the province of Baetica; Seneca was a native. Taken by Muslim forces in 711 or 712, it became the seat of the Umayyad emirate founded by Abd al-Rahman I in 756 and of the caliphate proclaimed in 929, which ended in 1031. Its Great Mosque was begun in the 780s. The city was the birthplace of the Islamic scholars Ibn Hazm, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), later its chief judge, and the Quran commentator al-Qurtubi, and of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (usually dated 1138). Ferdinand III of Castile captured Córdoba in 1236, and the mosque became a cathedral.
In Cordoba at the same time
Across the traditions, in Cordoba at the same time
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Shmuel HaNagid’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.