Seville (Ar. Ishbīliya) is the principal city of Andalusia in southwestern Spain. Jewish tradition holds that Jews first settled there at the time of the destruction of the First Temple (586 b.c.e.), but there is no evidence of a Jewish community until the Visigothic period. In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville, who authored polemics against the Jews, presided over the Third Council of Toledo, which enacted a series of anti-Jewish laws.

In 712 Seville was conquered by Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr, and according to the anonymous Arab chronicle Akhbār Majmūʿa (p. 16), he organized a Jewish guard …