Judaism In Spain
The history of the Jews in the current-day Spanish territory stretches back to Biblical times according to Jewish tradition, but the settlement of organised Jewish communities in the Iberian Peninsula possibly traces back to the times after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The earliest archaeological evidence of Hebrew presence in Iberia consists of a 2nd-century gravestone found in Mérida. From the late 6th century onward, following the Visigothic monarchs' conversion from Arianism to the Nicene Creed, conditions for Jews in Iberia considerably worsened. After the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the early 8th century, Jews lived under the ''Dhimmi'' system and progressively Arabised. Jews of Al-Andalus stood out particularly during the 10th and the 11th centuries, in the caliphal and first taifa periods. Scientific and philological study of the Hebrew Bible began, and secular poetry was written in Hebrew for the first time. After the Almoravid and Almohad i ...
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