This engaging history...begins when the last members fo the roman provincial middle class were still living amid faded glories, complaining of high taxes, too man people on welfare and too much crime in the streets. Then came the Visigoths rampaging through the country, raping, burning and looting, with the Jews as their special targets. The Arabs were brought in as saviors, their entry paved by Jewish soldiers, advisers and diplomats. Elmer Bendiner describes Cordoba at its zenith in the beneficent reign of Abdar Rahman III and his Jewish diplomat and physician, Hasdai ibn Shaprut. He gives us the tastes and smalls of Cordoban banquets and the sounds of music that accompanied them. Here is Ziryab, the setter of fashions who taught women how to wear [their] hair and how to set their tables. Here also are the scholars, rabbis, poets, pirates, conniving eunuchs and the women who wielded a power that was never formally granted to them. And here are Andalusian troubadours, both Jews and Arabs, who sang of sacred and sensual love and wine more than of war
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