Until 31 March 2024 and under the title The Golden Age of the Jews of Al-Andalus, the Centro Sefarad-Israel is organising an exhibition at its headquarters at Calle Mayor, 69, Madrid, which documents the daily life of the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula from the 10th to the 13th centuries thanks to the documents discovered in the Guenizá of Cairo.
The guenizás are rooms located in synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in which all those documents of a sacred nature were deposited that were left unusable but which Jewish tradition prevents from being destroyed. At the end of the 19th century, British researchers began to study the documents kept in the guenizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt. The more than 200,000 manuscripts found there dated back in many cases to the 10th century and included letters, judicial reports, marriage contracts, wills… and allowed the researchers, who studied this discovery for years, to create a portrait of what life was like in the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean during the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, a time when al-Andalus was considered one of the epicentres of the cultural and economic splendour of the Jewish world.
A large part of the results of the analysis of these documents, many of which are kept at the University of Cambridge, can be seen in this exhibition, curated by José Martínez Delgado, professor at the University of Granada.
The exhibition will allow visitors to delve into the life of a society that contributed names of diplomats such as Ibn Shaprut, poets such as Ibn Gabirol or Judah Halevi, or thinkers such as Maimonides, as well as a vast cultural heritage that has survived to the present day. Through facsimiles, virtual reproductions, images and recreations, The Golden Age of the Jews of Alandalus offers a journey through the authentic testimonies of the period, which allows us to get closer to their way of life, their concerns, needs, skills and problems. A journey from the origins of this important community to its exodus that helps to question how much is really known about the Middle Ages and whether the intimate, everyday life of today is really so different from that of the Andalusian ancestors.
