citrus fruits, bananas, figs, cinnamon and almonds. The introduction of cotton, silk, flax and wool produced the cash needed to satisfy the growing prosperity.
In spite of this progress, discord and turbulence was never far away. Christians, under Islamic discriminatory laws, appealed to neighbouring Christian rulers to intervene on their behalf. New Christian converts to Islam were considered with suspicion by the Arabs and had little possibility of gaining any real power in their Islamic society. The Jews alone and without allies seemed to have no claims to historical sovereignty over Spain. They were the Sephardim, or Spanish in Hebrew.
As many Muslims left Spain to study with famous scholars in North Africa, Cairo and Persia, so did Jewish scholars travel to the Jewish intellectual centres like those of Yeshivot on the Tunisian coast and in Baghdad where the Babylonian Talmud had been written.
International trade was the paths along which many Jewish families acquired prestige in Muslim Spain. It was common for Jews to travel great distances and they were noted as regular passengers on boats commuting between Seville and Alexandria. The business partnerships and formal friendships between Jewish, Muslim and Christian families were signs of a peaceful and profitable coexistence between those communities groups at that time.
Some of these trading companies acquired huge monopolies due to factors particular to medieval Jewry. Muslims were excluded from European markets and Christians were barred from Islamic waters. Only Jews could travel freely as commercial agents in both realms. And Jews were assured hospitality among other Jews living all along the trade routes. Jewish multilingualism further facilitated the expansion of trade.
Because of their complex history, Jewish traders were able to converse in Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Greek as well as the languages of the Franks, the Andalusians and the Slavs. It is the same today, the Israelis speak Hebrew and Arabic, whilst those from North Africa spoke French, and others spoke Russian, Persian or English. In history the lingua franca of the Jewish traders and the Jewish communities they visited was Hebrew.
Cordoba was the centre of Andalusian government and it was, for a while, to become the centre of Sephardim Jewish life as well. Sephardim assimilation into Spanish society took many forms. Jews worked as vintners, farmers, traders as we have discussed, members of the royal court, physicians, scientists, textile workers; but a much more important role was that of cultural intermediary.
The Jews were well equipped to arbitrate between the mutually exclusive and hostile worlds of Christianity and Islam because they had lived in the very heartland of both worlds. In the third millennium they continued to be the intermediaries between Paris and Algharb, at the best they were considered neutral and at worse suspected of every trickery imaginable.
Algharb had become the western capital of the Jews following the absorption of Israel into the Greater Turkish Levant; the psychological loss of independence was great for many who refused to be bound to a creeping orientalisation of their way of life and the risk of cohabitation with the Arabs whom they had fought for a century.
The Golden Age could not have happened without the involvement of outstanding Sephardim in government and its bureaucracy. They made the ground fertile for the cultural explosion that was to follow. But the Golden Age of Jewish life was more than politics and administration. It was art and science, culture and philosophy.
The Jewish courtiers shared a cultural orientation and political ethos with the ruling Muslims. Their secular education was exceedingly broad and included astronomy, astrology, geometry, optics, calligraphy, rhetoric and language. When one went to see a court physician, the patient would be talking to a poet, philosopher, linguist as well as a physician.
To some extent, the history of the Jews in Muslim Spain is indeed a history of huge personalities who dominated the Jewish communities with their charisma while negotiating themselves into Gentile society. These individuals integrated Jewish traditions with Arabic and Islamic culture to create a new Jewish dynamic. Jewish people would not again experience such a synthesis of Judaic culture and thought until the modern era.
Rejection
What were the reasons for a revolt? Who were unhappy and with what? The origins of the revolt ran deep. The revolt had been led by both recent non-Gallos Settlers and the Neo French. The rebels were not only the Caliphate Arabs but also the sons and daughters of the first wave of Settlers long installed in France, they were called the Neo-French, the Beurs and Beurettes, born and educated in France of parents born and educated in France. The majority of whom had lost all contact with the lands of their grandparents and even more so since the installation of the Caliphate.
The population pressure from the Caliphate to France had intensified to levels never before seen, as war and strife pushed the young generation to escape the poverty trap that faced them and the incapacity of their leaders to provide them with jobs.
In the first decades of the century the only hope of millions of North Africans was to move to Europe. The doors of the Arab countries of the Gulf had slowly closed as oil started its long decline.
The population of the Caliphate and the Turkish Levant had more than doubled over the first decades of the century. The population of Egypt, whose territory was over ninety percent desert, had reached a staggering one hundred million, all crowded onto less than five percent of its territory. It was a human disaster in terms of poverty, misery and environment. During the same period the European Federation had approached zero growth.
The man in the street in France resented the presence of the Arabo-Muslims; to him they were the evidence of what was no longer a creeping but massive invasion from the Caliphate, responsible for the ills of France, with its unemployment and social problems. Without them France would have been a prosperous post-industrial country.
Unlike the first wave of Settlers that came to France from North Africa in the second half of the last century as unskilled labourers, the Beurs refused the humble place in society that had been that of their parents.
The Beurs were easily identified by the Gallos because of their North-African appearance, their darker skins and often wiry hair, and for many, their specific style and body language. That was part of the problem of their integration; they can easily be singled out by the Gallos who feel felt threatened by what was perceived as a Beurs culture that certainly bore vestiges of their settler background.
The New French Beurs were faced with mounting intolerance as the flood from the Caliphate increased, many sought to escape by identifying themselves entirely with the fellow citizens, the Gallos. It rarely worked and as a result they adopted more and more rebellious attitudes. Better educated than their parents and with more in common with the rest of the French of their generation with the same ambitions, they were forced by apartheid into adopting their own sub-cultural styles and language. They were the children of a forgotten generation.
Little difference was made by the man in the street between the New French and the recent arrivals from the Caliphate and Levant. He saw the Beurs' search for acceptance and equality as factors responsible for rising levels unemployment, the dire situation of the country’s social security system as well violence, crime, drugs and religious fanaticism.
In trying to avoid exacerbating the situation the authorities instructed institutions and school not to bow to religious pressure by rejecting ostentatious religious signs. This approach was based on the republican principle of secularism that had been observed almost without question for a century and was under threat. The demands for special exceptions were perceived by most of Gallo French society as a threat to their culture and traditions.
The situation of the New French Beurs was also linked to the political turmoil in the Caliphate. The recurring civil war that raged in the Caliphate between the Government and secularist reform movements flowed over into France as it targeted foreigners as well as Arab intellectuals, university teachers, journalists, and any vocal opponent to terrorism. The murder of the human ri
ghts supporters in Algiers and Rabat had received considerable media coverage.
Thousands of people lost their lives in the oppression by the authorities of the Caliphate against dissidents whilst the opposition responded with bombs and other terrorist acts. The attitude of the French to the civil war was radicalised as the war flowed over into France, the home of several millions of Caliphate Arabs. Bombs were exploded in the centre of Paris and in Marseille.
The link was made to the Caliphates population in France. It was impossible that such acts of terrorism be carried out without inside help. The accusation was extended to the Beurs, many of whom had sympathies with the different factions of the terrorist movements. The Beurs were a visible target and were made scapegoats, accused of being responsible for all the evils of a war that for the most part did not concern them.
The French saw the inner suburbs with their cités where most Settlers and Neos lived as zones of danger, which were spawning grounds for terrorism, violence and crime. The cités consisted of high-rise apartments buildings that were built in the last century for the French working classes. The cités had little amenities such as shopping centres, cinemas, easy access to