Cordoba קורדובה
Capital of Muslim Spain and cradle of the golden age: city of Chasdai ibn Shaprut and birthplace of the Rambam.
In the tenth century Cordoba was probably Europe's largest city — libraries, baths, physicians, poets. The caliph Abd al-Rahman III made a Jew, Chasdai ibn Shaprut, his physician and diplomat, and Chasdai used his standing to patronise Jewish learning: he brought grammarians and poets to Spain, supported an academy, and famously corresponded with the king of distant Khazaria, said to be a Jew.
So begins the golden age of Spanish Jewry, when Torah, philosophy, medicine, secular poetry and state service could occupy a single life. Cordoba produced scholars and poets, and in 4898 Moshe ben Maimon — the Rambam — was born here.
The age was short. In 4908 the Almohads invaded demanding conversion to Islam, and the Rambam's family fled. A fourteenth-century synagogue still stands in the old quarter.