Early Middle Ages and Crusades
Al-Hakim has the synagogues of Jerusalem destroyed at the same time as the Holy Sepulchre
1009·Jérusalem
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
The Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah ordered the destruction of non-Muslim places of worship throughout his empire. In Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre was razed to the bedrock — the event had a considerable impact in the West and ranks among the distant causes of the Crusades — and the city's synagogues suffered the same fate.
The Jerusalem community was at that time the seat of a rabbinical academy, the yeshiva of the Land of Israel, which directed the communities of Syria and Egypt and set the calendar for part of the diaspora. Its letters, recovered from the Cairo Genizah, allow us to trace its displacement to Ramla and then to Tyr during the years that followed.
The reign of al-Hakim is the only one of the Fatimid period in which the protection of the *dhimmis* was broken. His successors returned to ordinary tolerance, and the places of worship were rebuilt; but the academy never recovered Jerusalem.
- Period :
- Early Middle Ages and Crusades
- Type :
- Massacre
- Region :
- Land of Israel
- Country :
- Terre d'Israël
Documents de la guéniza du Caire ; chroniques fatimides ; Yahya d'Antioche.