Granada massacre

On 30 December 1066 a Muslim mob stormed the royal palace of Granada, killed Joseph ibn Naghrela, the Jewish vizier of the Zirid king Badis, and crucified his body. It then fell on the Jewish quarter. About 1,500 Jewish families are said to have been killed and the community destroyed. Joseph had succeeded his father, Shmuel HaNagid, as vizier and as Nagid, the head of the Jews of the kingdom, in 1056. Rivals resented him, and the poet Abu Ishaq of Elvira wrote a poem urging the Berbers to rise against "the Jew" who ruled them. Rumours that Joseph was plotting with the ruler of neighbouring Almería sparked the riot.

The massacre is often called the first pogrom on European soil, and it came in Muslim al-Andalus during the golden age of Spanish Jewry. It ended the most powerful Jewish political career of the Middle Ages, only a generation after Shmuel HaNagid had led Granada's armies, and showed how fragile the position of a Jewish courtier was. Jewish life and learning in Spain continued in Lucena, Seville, Toledo and Zaragoza.