The Cervantes Institute, I.K. Thessaloniki and the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki organize the opening of the exhibition "The Golden Age of the Jews of Alantala" on Tuesday, June 4 at 19.00:XNUMX p.m. at the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, (Ag. Mina 11).
Greetings will be given by: David Saltiel, President KISE & I.K. Thessaloniki, Isaac-Nino Saltiel, President of the Committee of the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki and Pilar Tena, Director of the Cervantes Institute.
The exhibition will be prefaced by Dr. Xenia Eleftheriou, Scientific Manager of the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki and the public will be guided by the curator of the exhibition, professor of the University of Granada, José Martínez Delgado.
The exhibition will run until August 30, 2024.
A few words about the report:
If instead of getting rid of everything you've written (letters, notes, e-mails), you kept it in a cupboard and left it there, what would those who discovered it hundreds of years later think about you? Something similar happens with our case, the Genizah: a drawer where all the texts that are left from a community that has now disappeared are scattered.
In Hebrew, the word genizah means "repository" and designates a place in which the sacred texts of the Jewish religion are kept, which are no longer used for reading, either because they are too old or because they have ceased to be in liturgical use. When the Jews of Fustat (Old Cairo) built their synagogue, in the 11th century, they also built a special storeroom into which, through a hole in the wall, they dropped old Bibles and prayer books, instead of throwing them away or burying them.
When this warehouse was opened at the end of the 19th century, not only Bibles and prayer books came to light, but a hidden treasure of everyday life items was discovered: shopping lists, marriage contracts, divorce papers, children's school exercises, Arabic tales , medical and Islamic philosophy books, magical amulets with spells, commercial letters and accounting books. In this abode came texts of almost every kind, which had been composed over centuries within the Jewish community of Egypt and elsewhere, since Fustat was the center of an empire which extended over almost the whole of the Mediterranean. Written documents from the entire Arab world ended up in Fustat: Maghreb, Alandalus, Palestine and Syria, Iraq and Persia.
Alantalous was a region of the Iberian Peninsula. It geographically included modern Gibraltar, as well as parts of Portugal, Spain and southern France. From 711 BC until the final dissolution of the Emirate of Granada in 1492, it was the western border of Muslim Spain or Islamic Iberia.
The Jewish community of Alantalou was one of the most prosperous of all those inhabiting the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. The names of diplomats like Hasdai ibn Shaprut, poets like Solomon ibn Gabirol or Judah Halevi, or thinkers like Maimonides still resonate in the collective imagination, as well as being very important and present figures in the modern Jewish world. This cultural glamor was always linked to the economic prosperity derived from the Mediterranean trade networks established by the Umayyad dynasty during its nearly three-thousand-year reign in Córdoba and exploited by taifas (independent provinces) and the Almoravid and Almohad rulers who ruled the Alantalous.
The exhibition "The Golden Age of the Jews of Alandalus" analyzes this content and brings to the public the history of one of the most brilliant periods of the Jewish world of the peninsula through images, representations, imitations and a narrative tour that will take visitors on a journey through time .
Source: FACEBOOK, I.K. Thessaloniki