Joseph ibn Naghrela

Origins and early life

Joseph ibn Naghrela was born around 1035 in Granada, the son of Samuel ha-Nagid, the poet, general and vizier of the Zirid kings who has his own fiche on this site, and he was raised a Jew, educated in Hebrew, Arabic and Talmud, partly under the guidance of Rabbi Nissim Gaon of Kairouan, whose daughter he married.

Work and career

When his father died in 1056 he succeeded him in both his offices: vizier of the Muslim king Badis al-Muzaffar and nagid, head of the Jewish community of Granada, an accumulation without parallel in the Islamic world. He maintained his father's patronage of Hebrew letters, kept the great library and continued to support scholars and poets; the completion and copying of his father's poetic works owed much to him. Contemporary Arabic sources describe him as abler than he was cautious, and his rivals accused him of favouring his co-religionists and of plotting to hand Granada to the neighbouring taifa of Almeria, a charge modern historians treat as unproven.

On 30 December 1066 a mob incited by an antisemitic poem of Abu Ishaq of Elvira stormed the royal palace, found Joseph in hiding, killed him and crucified his body on the city gate, and then massacred much of the Jewish population of Granada, some fifteen hundred families by the chronicles' count.

Later years

His death and the pogrom that followed are stated plainly here because they mark the end of the golden age of Granadan Jewry and are among the first recorded massacres of Jews in a Muslim land, described by Bernard Lewis as untypical of the general history of Islamic rule. His widow and son fled to Lucena.