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Maimon (Ar. Maymūn) ben Joseph ha-Dayyan (ca. 1110–ca. 1166), the father of Moses Maimonides, was a disciple of  Joseph ha-Levi ben Meʾir ibn Migash, with whom he studied in Lucena. Maimon served as a rabbi and jurist in Cordova until the Almohad conquest. He was a scion of an important Sephardi family of al-Andalus documented as far back as the beginning of the tenth century. Almost all of his forebears were judges (Heb. dayyanim) and communal leaders: The sources trace the family line back for seven generations from Maimon’s father, Joseph the sage. Joseph’s father was Isaac ha-dayyan, Is…

Samuel ibn Naghrella (Abū Ibrāhim Ismāʿīl ibn Yūsuf ibn Naghrīla), best known in Jewish history as Samuel ha-Nagid, was born in Cordova in 993, the second son of a wealthy family from Merida. The quintessential representative of the Andalusi Sephardi courtier class, he was an outstanding Hebrew poet, an accomplished talmudic scholar, a patron of the arts, and a powerful vizier. He took great pride in his Levite ancestry, and addressed his son, Jehoseph Ibn Naghrella, as “descendant of Moses” ( Poemas, vol. 1 , ed. Sáenz-Badillos and Targarona, 32, 1). He considered Merari, Assi…

Joseph ibn Abītūr (ca. 939–after 1012) was born in Merida in al-Andalus in the mid-tenth century. He had an Arabic last name (Abītūr) and a Romance appellative (Satanas, Santas, or Santos). His family had been in Sepharad for more than six generations. In a letter to Samuel ha-Kohen, Ibn Abītūr says that “although his great-grandfather was not an erudite man, he was a powerful one who imposed five death penalties,” quite exceptional for a Jewish judge and only possible in the exile. He explains that his Romance family name, Ibn Shaṭnash, came from Heb. shoṭ enosh (scourge of humanity), an…

1. RabbaniteJewish scholarship in Muslim lands was deeply enriched by its absorption of Arabic and Greco-Arabic learning, which included grammar and philology, poetics, hermeneutics, history, science, and philosophy, all of which contributed profoundly to forging substantially new methods of biblical interpretation. While Scripture had long been central in Judaism, earlier interpretation was dominated by creative midrashic ways of rewriting the Bible, which by the Muslim period had been consolida…