[Samuel:] The story went like this:
"The vizier lay on his deathbed, and the king whom he had loyally served all his life sat at his side,
holding his hand, as the breath ebbed from him.
'What am I going to do?' the king said,
'Who will council me in the wars which encompass me on every side?'
Then the vizier withdrew his hand and pointed weakly at the bearded man who stood quietly in the corner.
In his final breaths, he said to his king, 'I never counseled you out of my own mind,
but out of the mind of this Jew, my scribe.
Do whatever he says and God will help you.'
Thus, the vizier passed, and thus your father, Samuel HaNagid,
became the new vizier to the king of Granada."
[Samuel's son, Joseph:] Wow! Papa, is that really what happened?
[Samuel:] No, Joseph, not quite that way...
... BUT, that's how it'll be told!
♫ ["Extra History Theme", Actraiser, Birth of the People by Demetori plays.] ♫
[Daniel Floyd]: Samuel HaNagid was born at the end of an era.
The Umayyad Dynasty that had ruled Spain for centuries was crumbling.
Their seat in the city of Cordoba, where Samuel grew up,
had been left in the hands of viziers ruling on behalf of a young boy who was caliph in name only.
Power was fragmented, and peace was a fast-fading dream.
Samuel had learned much from Cordoba, where the caliphs had built a vibrant city of Muslims, Christians and Jews.
Strife and prejudice lived among them all, but it lived alongside a blossoming multi-cultural scene of arts and sciences.
As a young man, Samuel spent his nights with a similarly diverse group,
writing poetry about wine and pleasure and love.
For a Jew, creating such poetry was an act of some rebellion.
The Arabs had a long-standing tradition of poetry written in this style, but Jewish poetry was exclusively religious.
The first Jew who ever adapted Hebrew to the meter of Arab poetry had constrained himself to standard religious topics,
and even then, he had been accused of "destroying the holy tongue."
But Samuel saw no conflict between being a faithful Jew and exploring the pleasures of the world.
He also had great ambition.
If the Muslim kings spent their evenings adorning the world with the jewels of poetry, then so would he.
He wrote to a friend: "It's the moon my pale soul wants;
To soar as high on wings of gathered light and do great deeds of which the whole world hears."
This ambition steeled him to finally leave Cordoba in 1013.
The Umayyad family feud had erupted into war,
and the new claimant to the throne had recruited an army from North Africa that he couldn't really control.
The city was sacked, the Jews were massacred, and Samuel, along with many of his friends, fled.
He headed south to Granada, a new kingdom that the powerless caliph in Cordoba had awarded to one of his generals.
Surprisingly, this new king welcomed the Jewish community to his lands;
To him, they were People of the Book, who worshiped The One God.
They were merchants to help build his economy, and most importantly...
... they had no stake in the political infighting that had swept across southern Spain like a wildfire.
Samuel found success as a spice merchant,
but it was his penchant for poetry and letters that brought him to the attention of the king's vizier.
Under the watchful eye of this new Muslim benefactor, Samuel was appointed a tax collector to the Jewish community.
And, yes, it was that same vizier that helped bring Samuel to the king's attention,
but not directly, and certainly not on purpose.
When the vizier died, his eldest son inherited the post, but the son was young and unreliable.
Samuel made a point of covering for him, gently informing the king that,
"Oh, uh, the new vizier is... a little hungover this morning..."
or "Oh, uh, the new vizier is not yet back from his hunting trip. I'm sure he'll return soon."
But with the ever-helpful Samuel there at all times, who really needed that young vizier?
Word of Samuel's rising star reached Jewish communities all the way in Babylonia,
where the leader of the most prominent Talmudic academy awarded Samuel the rare title of Nagid, or "Prince."
It was the name he'd become known for, and yet the king in his own country refused to give him the official title of vizier.
Jews and Christians were allowed to rise high in Muslim court, but not so high as to give commands to Muslims.
Samuel needed to take a gamble if he was to advance any further.
In 1038 C.E., he saw his chance.
The king of Granada had two sons:
The eldest son was cunning and had won the people's favor.
The youngest was a gentle soul, and the ease with which he could be manipulated made him the favorite of all the leading men at court...
... all except Samuel.
Samuel threw his lot in with the eldest son, Badis,
and through their joint machinations, they succeeded in putting Badis on the throne.
Badis cast aside the unreliable, young vizier who had sided with his brother and brought Samuel to his side instead.
Samuel HaNagid, Prince of Jews, was now the highest-ranked Jew in the history of Muslim rule.
But his vizier-ship did not begin peacefully; War broke out immediately.
Granada's own ally, Almeria, turned against them,
seeing an opportunity to strike at this young king with his impiously-appointed Jewish adviser.
Badis relished the chance to put his armies on display.
They met outside the small town of Alfuente.
Eager for the fight, riled up by their own leader's attacks against Samuel and the Jews,
the Almerians raced down the hills in a reckless charge.
But Granada's soldiers stood firm, awaiting them at the bottom of the pass.
Samuel, watching from the back lines, prayed to God to vanquish his enemies.
"God heard my prayer," he wrote that night, fired up from his first taste of battle.
"He blew on them as he once blew on pharaohs' troops, swept them away. They perished in his storm and God made manifest his might."
He wrote his poems now with a new purpose:
Not just to praise beauty, nor even to praise God, but to convince his own community that God had smiled on his appointment.
For, as much as the Jews of Granada might want to celebrate their Nagid's success at court,
they knew full well that it made them all targets.
The anti-Semitic hate that boiled over in the Jewish massacre at Cordoba remained an ever-present threat.
Samuel would have none of it.
He was better positioned than anyone in the history of Spanish Jewry, and he intended to use his power to help his people,
not just in Spain, but across the diaspora. [Editor's Note: A diaspora is a scattered population whose origin lies within a smaller geographic locale.]
He paid scribes to copy religious texts, and sent the copies freely to Jewish communities all around the Mediterranean.
Out of his own pocket, he sponsored scholars and rabbis who wanted to devote their lives to studying the Torah.
As a symbol of his commitment to unify the Jewish community, he married his son, Joseph, to the daughter of the most respected rabbi in Tunisia.
Through it all, he continued to help Badis grow the kingdom of Granada.
They installed their own puppet-king in the defeated Almeria,
defended against a threatened invasion from their most powerful neighbor,
and beat back an attempted coup from Badis's cousin.
Now experienced in war, Samuel began to lead troops in his own name.
For a Jew to command Muslim soldiers was absolutely unheard of, yet they followed him to battle, and he rewarded them with victory.
But the wars never ended.
The enemies he vanquished gave way to more enemies.
Year after year, he mustered new armies and marched across a countryside torn by unrelenting warfare.
Over time, the glory with which he'd treated his first battles drained away.
Now, before battle, he wrote a farewell letter to his son, Joseph, just in case,
trying to pass down through his poetry what he'd had no time to teach in person.
Once he was victorious, his first thought was to send a reassuring message to his son.
But the letters and the books that he sent back or the moments that he snatched between campaigns
were no substitute for a father's presence, and he knew it.
Finally, after nearly two decades of warfare, a gray-bearded Samuel HaNagid came home and collapsed.
Worn out by war, his pen had scratched its last.
"Old age is agony,
each harry hair a tongue of fire flicking at the heart, [Editor's Note: "harry" means troubling.]
and knees that, sagging from infirmity, stumble on the flat floor of my yard.
Joseph, the son he had raised from afar, tried to step into his shoes. He was only 21.
He convinced Badis to let him inherit the role of vizier, but he faced a more difficult challenge than his father ever had.
None of the king's sons was [sic] inclined to trust him,
and the king himself had grown as tired of wars and politics as Samuel had towards the end.
Joseph was left alone to face a hostile court.
He struggled.
The alliances he tried to form made his rival suspicious.
When one of the princes died unexpectedly, whisperers accused him of murder.
A rival tried to turn the king against him with furious anti-Semitic poems, denouncing Joseph's high position at court.
After ten years of struggle, it all came to a head when one of Joseph's enemies declared that he
had found proof that this Jewish vizier planned to betray Granada to the puppet-king of Almeria.
True or not, this spark ignited the flame.
An angry mob turned on Joseph, killed him,
then spread into the Jewish Quarter and massacred the local Jewish population.
If Samuel had been alive, he would have wept.
All that he had achieved, the Jewish haven that he had hoped to establish, was wiped away.
Joseph, his pride and joy, was murdered at 31.
All that remained was his poetry,
painstakingly copied out and preserved by the son who had always looked up to him. ♫ ["Birth of the People", by Demetori, fades in.] ♫
♫ ["Birth of the People", by Demetori, plays.] ♫
♫ ["Birth of the People", by Demetori, fades out.] ♫