Statue of Maimonides in Córdoba defaced with a swastika
The Jewish sage was born in the city in the 1130s; the statue, created in the 1960s, has become a key tourist site
A statue of Maimonides in his Spanish hometown of Córdoba has been defaced with a swastika, with the city’s Mayor describing the “the extreme seriousness of the message of hate it represents.”
The vandalism of the statue, which is situated in the heart of what was once the Spanish Jewish community in Córdoba, was discovered on Saturday. Subsequently, the city authorities covered up the defaced base of the statue with a sign ahead of repair, while local police are investigating the hate crime.
Maimonides, also known by the acronym “Rambam”, was born in Córdoba in the 1130s, but the family was forced to leave a decade after his birth when they refused to convert to Islam following the Almohad conquest of the southern part of the Iberian peninsula. He subsequently lived in Egypt for most of the rest of his life, becoming a renowned doctor, and even serving as the physician to Saladin. His writings – particularly on the Torah and philosophy– are still widely studied within Judaism, and he is considered one of the foremost Jewish scholars of the last millennia.
The statue, sculpted more than 60 years ago, is a noted tourist attraction in the city; it sits in Tiberias Square, so-called because the Israeli city is the site of the sage’s final resting place, on a hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee.
In a response to the vandalism, Barcelona’s Jewish community, the largest in Spain, described how the city’s Great Synagogue “proudly bears the name ‘Maimonides’ in homage to one of the greatest Sephardic thinkers in history, born in Córdoba…attacking his statue with a Nazi symbol is an attack on our shared history, on the Golden Age, on our culture, on the values of knowledge, freedom, and coexistence that his legacy represents. Hate can never prevail over culture.”
The European Jewish Congress said that “the desecration of this monument with one of history’s most hateful symbols is a stark reminder that antisemitism continues to target not only Jewish people, but also Jewish history, memory and culture.”
The entire Jewish population of Spain was notoriously expelled from Spain in 1492 on the orders of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. In recent decades, a number of Jewish people who can show their ancestry have been able to claim the Spanish citizenship which their forbears were stripped of. However, within the last few years the current left-wing Spanish government has become one of the most vociferous critics of Israel, with antisemitism statistics in the country showing a sharp rise.