The years between 900 and 1200 in Spain and North Africa are known as the Hebrew golden age, a sort of Jewish Renaissance that arose from the fusion of the Arab and Jewish intellectual worlds. Jews watched their Arab counterparts closely and learned to be astronomers, philosophers, scientists, and poets.
But this was a time of only partial autonomy. Jews were free to live in the Islamic world as long as they paid a special tax to Muslim rulers... Jews had their own legal system and social services but were supposed to wear identifying clothing.
While Jewish communities in Arab and Islamic countries fared better overall than those in Christian lands in Europe, Jews were no strangers to persecution and humiliation among the Arabs and Muslim. As Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis has written: "The Golden Age of equal rights was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam."
- (by Mitchell Bard, referencing Bernard Lewis, "The Pro-Islamic Jews," Judaism, (Fall 1968), p. 401.)
