http://www.acjna.org/acjna/articles_detail.aspx?id=590

Peaceful and Creative Eras

Indeed, some of the most peaceful and creative eras in Jewish history took place in the Muslim world. From the l0th to the 14th centuries, Jews flourished in Islamic countries — in Spain, Persia, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. While the Jewish communities in Christian Europe endured persecution, Jews in these Muslim countries enjoyed freedom and security. There were, of course, certain civil disabilities for Jews in Muslim societies. As “dhimmi,” or “protected” citizens, Jews and Christians were, from the age of 9 and without exception, expected to pay a yearly poll tax. For all but the most prosperous, the charge was onerous. Goitein described the “season of the tax,” when payment was due, as a time of “horror, dread and misery.” And there were occasional periods when the dhimmi were persecuted. Still, compared with their treatment in Europe, life for Jews in the Moslem world was largely peaceful.

In her book, The Ornament of the World, Professor Maria Rosa Menocal of Yale University explores the history of Jews under Muslim rule in Spain: “Throughout most of the invigorated peninsula, Arabic was adopted as the ultimate in classiness and distinction by the communities of the other two faiths. `The new Islamic polity not only allowed Jews and Christians to survive but, following the Qur’anic mandate, by and large protected them and both the Jewish and Christian communities in al-Andalus became thoroughly Arabized within relatively few years of Abd-al-Rahman’s arrival in Cordoba … In principle, all Islamic polities were (and are) required by Qur’anic injunctions … to tolerate Christians and Jews living in their midst. But beyond that fundamental prescribed posture, al-Andalus was, from these beginnings, the site of memorable and distinctive interfaith relations. Here the Jewish community rose from the ashes of an abysmal existence under the Visigoths to the point that the emir who proclaimed himself caliph in the 10th century had a Jew as foreign minister.”

Heart of the Arab World

Living in the heart of the Arab world, Jews first served their apprenticeship in the sciences with Islamic intellectual masters and, in time, became their collaborators in developing the general culture of the region. A striking example of this breadth of interest was Maimonides (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, 1135-1204), a native of Cordoba. What chiefly characterized Jewish thought in this period was its search for unity — the attempt to reconcile faith with reason, theology and philosophy, the acceptance of authority with freedom of inquiry. In Arab countries in the Near East and North Africa, where there existed this free intermingling of cultures, there blossomed a rich and unique Jewish intellectuality in Arabic.

Beginning with the 10th century, especially in the kingdom of Cordoba under the enlightened Omayyad caliphs Abd al-Rahman and his son, Al-Hakin, there appeared a galaxy of Jewish scholars, historians, philologists , grammarians, religious philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, doctors and poets. During the 11th century, Ubn Usaibia, a Muslim scholar, listed 50 Jewish authors writing in Arabic on medical subjects alone.

The Golden Age of the Jews in Islamic North Africa, Babylonia and Southern Spain may be said to have taken place from the 9th to the 13th centuries. One of the earliest and most gifted mathematicians and astronomers in Spain, for example, was Abraham bar Chivya (d.c. 1136) who became known to the learned Christian world as Abraham Savasorda. He was considered the foremost mathematician of the 12th century in Europe and was the first writer to introduce the scientific method of the Greeks and the Arabs into Europe.