HISDAI IBN SHAPRUT was a statesman, physician, and community leader in Muslim Spain. As the foremost Jewish notable in Muslim Spain, Hisdai ibn Shaprut used his wealth and prestige to safeguard Jewish interests and to inaugurate a golden age of Jewish learning.
Background
HISDAI IBN SHAPRUTH was born in 915 in Spain. His father, the wealthy Isaac ibn Shaprut, had moved from Jaen to Cordoba, where Hisdai was born. During the reign of Abdar-Rahman III (912-961), who adopted the title of caliph in 939, Cordoba was not only the Umayyad empire’s capital but also (with some 500,000 inhabitants) the most populous city in Europe.
Education
After studying medicine, Hisdai became physician to the caliph, a post that he retained under his successor, Hakam 11(961-976).
Career
After a Byzantine delegation visiting Cordoba had presented the caliph with a rare Greek pharmaceutical manuscript (c. 948), Hisdai led the team of scholars that quickly translated it into Arabic. Hisdai was also entrusted with diplomatic missions. He conducted negotiations with envoys of the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto I (953), but achieved his greatest triumph in Navarre, while treating the deposed King Sancho of Leon for obesity (958). Not only did Hisdai cure his patient, but he also helped restore him to the throne by inducing Sancho and his grandmother, the queen of Navarre, to sign a peace treaty with Abdar- Rahman in Cordoba.
Tales of a warlike Jewish kingdom in Asia had long intrigued the medieval West. Through his diplomatic contacts, Hisdai managed to verify these reports of a Khazar buffer state near the Caspian Sea and then earned a special place in history by the story of the letters he dispatched (c. 958) to Khaqan Joseph, the last ruler of Khazaria. Joseph’s detailed reply explained how King Bulan and many of his people had come to embrace Judaism — a theme which Judah Halevi would later take up in his philosophical Kuzari — and also described the Khazar kingom’s situation only a decade before its power was shattered by Russian invaders (in 969). This correspondence had an enormous psychological impact on Jews at a time when they were damned by Christendom as a perfidious” and stateless nation. However, since the original Hebrew letters have not been preserved, their authenticity is now a matter of scholarly conjecture and debate.
Religion
A scholar in his own right, he financed the purchase or copying of Hebrew manuscripts, fostered the writing of secular Hebrew poetry, and extended his patronage to learned Jews. Hisdai likewise took the initiative of appointing Moses ben Hanokh the Babylonian as Cordoba’s chief rabbi and head of a new Talmudic college there. This step, virtually-severing the old ties with the Babylonian academies, made Spanish Jewry an independent cultural community.