Hasdai ibn Shaprut
Hasdai ibn Shaprut was the Jewish physician who became the caliph Abd al-Rahman III's minister without the title, the man who received the embassies from Constantinople and from Otto the Great at Cordoba, negotiated with the Christian kings of Leon and Navarre, ran the customs and the caliph's Jewish community, translated Dioscorides with a Byzantine monk, and by his patronage of the grammarians and poets began the golden age of Hebrew letters in Spain; his letter to the king of the Khazars, asking whether it was true that there was a Jewish kingdom beyond the Black Sea, and the king's reply, are the best-known documents of the Khazar question. He was born about 915 at Jaen into a wealthy family, learned Arabic, Latin and Romance as well as Hebrew, and came to the caliph's notice as a doctor, with a cure for poisons the Arabic sources call by name. Abd al-Rahman made him head of the customs, which was where the money came in, and used him for the work a Muslim minister could not do with Christians. In 949 the emperor Constantine VII sent an embassy with a Greek manuscript of Dioscorides' herbal, and Hasdai, with the monk Nicholas sent from Constantinople to help, made the Arabic version that was the basis of Andalusi pharmacology. In 953 Otto I's envoy, the abbot John of Gorze, arrived with a letter the caliph would not receive because it insulted Islam, and it was Hasdai who spent months persuading the monk to have another letter sent, which the monk's biographer records with admiration for the Jew's wisdom. He went to Leon in 956 to treat and to negotiate, and in 958 arranged the visit to Cordoba of the deposed king Sancho the Fat of Leon and his grandmother the queen of Navarre, whom he cured of his obesity and whom the caliph put back on his throne with a Muslim army, which was the point. He brought the grammarian Menahem ben Saruq and the poet Dunash ben Labrat to Cordoba and their quarrel over Hebrew metre is the beginning of Spanish Hebrew poetry. He bought manuscripts from Baghdad and corresponded with the academies of Sura and Pumbedita. He served the next caliph, al-Hakam II, and died about 970. The letter to Joseph of the Khazars, written by his secretary Menahem in a Hebrew acrostic, asked how the Jews of Spain might pray for their king.
- Lived: 915 CE – 970 CE
- Nationality: Andalusi
- Roles: physician, diplomat, statesman, patron
