December 30, 1066: Remembering Mythically ‘Tolerant’ Muslim Spain’s Annihilationist Pogrom of 4000 Granadan Jews
DEC 30, 2025 1:00 PM
BY ANDREW BOSTOM
7 COMMENTS
This past summer (2025), following the brutal beating of an elderly Spanish man in southeastern Spain by Moroccan Muslim “youths,”—committed for the perpetrators’ perverse sense of entertainment—tensions arose. Against that backdrop, in a region which has been a hotbed of Islamic unrest for decades, the Jumilla City Council in the southeastern Spanish municipality of Murcia—conquered by sanguinary jihad war in the 8th century, ruled under the Sharia as a Muslim colony for 530 years ( 713-1243), and currently a bastion of the Moroccan jihadist Justice and Charity (Al-Adl wal-Ihssan aka “AWI”) movement— prohibited Islamic gatherings in municipal civic centers and gyms.
Siding with local Spanish cultural jihadist Muslim organizations, the Spanish Episcopal Conference, a Catholic institution, issued a statement condemning the restrictions. Commenting on this “alliance,” Duane Alexander Miller, a Professor of Theology in Spain, and scholar of Islam, noted,
…“many Catholics and Evangelicals in Spain have a romanticized, unrealistic vision of the history of Islam in Spain. They focus on the [Medieval] time of la Convivencia (coexistence), which is an idealized time when Muslims and Christians are supposed to have gotten on together well, but historically it is not correct. I think this is the only way I can explain why Catholics and Evangelicals would support these Islamist groups”
Historian Jane Gerber has described how the Jewish experience in Muslim Spain included “some of their [the Jews] most demoralized moments in the complex saga of life in dispersion,” yet still came to be “garishly packaged as ‘The Golden Age.’” She argues that two currents of apologetics—one emanating from nineteenth-century Jewish historians seeking to assimilate Jews with equality into Western European societies; the other, contemporary anti-Israel (and antisemitic) Arab historians—have sustained this fictional conception. At present, the modern “currency” afforded the mythical golden age image as Arab “tolerance,” is juxtaposed to Jewish “ingratitude” in the campaign against Israel
Ibn Hazm (d. 1064), an important Muslim jurist, and Abu Ishaq el-Biri, a prominent mid-11th century Muslim poet, made the following observations about Jews, while residing in mythically tolerant, ecumenical Muslim-controlled Spain.
[Ibn Hazm] “[A] Jew [is] of that most contemptible of religions, the most vile of faiths…They [Jews] both the ancient and modern* [*defined below] are altogether the worst liars…They are the filthiest and vilest of peoples, their unbelief horrid, their ignorance abominable…”
[Abu Ishaq el-Biri] “The vilest infidel ape [i.e., Jews; per Qur’an 5:60, 2:65, 7:166]…Do not consider that killing them [Jews] is treachery.”
As analyzed by the pre-eminent scholar of Islam’s Medieval anti-Jewish polemic, Moshe Perlmann, their inflammatory rhetoric, particularly the Qur’anic epithet “ape” for Jews, was common parlance, which ultimately precipitated the mass slaughter and destruction of the Jewish community in Granada, during a 1066 pogrom by rampaging Muslims. It is estimated that up to four thousand Jews perished, making it the largest anti-Jewish pogrom, till then, in European history.
A contemporary chronicle written by sultan Abd Allah (who became Sultan of Granada in 1073) confirms that a breach in the humiliating and discriminatory Sharia-based system of dhimmitude for non-Muslims, including Jews, also contributed to this outburst of anti-Jewish jihad violence by the Muslims of Granada:
“Both the common people and the nobles were disgusted by the cunning of the Jews, the notorious changes they had brought in the order of things, and the positions they occupied in violation of their pact [i.e., the dhimma, per Qur’an 9:29, imposed by jihad]. Allah decreed their destruction on Saturday 10 Safar 459 (December 30,1066)…The Jew [Joseph Ibn Naghrela; communal leader] fled into the interior of the palace, but the mob pursued him there, seized him, and killed him. They then put every Jew in the city to the sword and took vast quantities of their property.”
Eliyahu Ashtor’s historical analysis “ The Jews of Moslem Spain” contains this graphic description of the carnage wrought, eerily reminiscent of the barbaric 10/7/2023 jihad depredations by Hamas in southern Israel:
… “people were dragged, frightened and shivering, to be beheaded by a sword blow. The mob watched with enjoyment. Its triumphant roar mingled with the cries of pleading women and the wailing of children. Here an old man was stabbed, there a woman was hung from a beam; here a rapist violated a woman while his companion ravished her daughter, and when they were sated, they slaughtered both; the beheaded corpses of infants were everywhere. The bodies of men lay with bellies split asunder and weltered in their own blood; close by small girls lay dying quivering in final convulsive jerks. Streams of blood flowed into the narrow streets…”
Sixty years ago, Perlmann lamented how the 900-year commemoration of what he termed “the Grenada debacle of 1066,” a Muslim, mass slaughter of European Jews, incited by canonical Islamic Jew-hating motifs, was ignored:
“…it seems that the recent 900th anniversary [in 1966] of the first major pogrom on European soil passed unnoticed.”
Writing in the immediate aftermath of the March, 2004 Madrid jihadist train bombing which killed 200 and wounded some 1400, historian Mordechai Nisan recalled how apologetic Muslim scholar M. Amir Ali maintained the brutal 8th century jihad conquest of Spain was actually a “liberation” by the Muslim invaders. Nisan pondered,
“Reflecting on March 11 (2004) as Muslim terrorism killed 200 and wounded 1400 in Madrid, one wonders whether one day this event will also not be commemorated as a liberating moment.”
Ongoing ignorance of the 12/30/1066 annihilationist Muslim pogrom and its incitement by canonical Islamic motifs of Jew-hatred epitomizes a longstanding willful blindness to this Islamic continuum, from the invented Medieval “Andalusian paradise” for Jews in Muslim Spain, to 10/7/2023, and the Bondi Beach jihadist massacre of Australian Jews 12/14/2025. |
