King Egica’s (r. 687–702) anti-Semitic virulence was remarkable even for a Visigoth. At the Sixteenth Toledo Council in November 695, his demands that the high clergy assent to the imposition of draconian measures presented Jews with intolerable dilemmas: emigration; forced conversion; impoverishment; and worse. Some emigrated, more converted (temporarily), while some of their leaders reached out to their coreligionists in North Africa and Mesopotamia. In ways that now elude precision, it seems obvious that Jews appealed to Arabs for relief from the Visigothic “final solution.” “We can hardly doubt that the Jews of Spain looked upon the Arabs as liberators,” the distinguished medievalist Richard Fletcher concluded. A furious Egica had reached the same conclusion and promptly instigated the Seventeenth Toledo Council, at which grave charges of treasonous plottings within and without the realm were drawn up against Jews. Evidence was presented of secret Jewish appeals for help in undermining the monarchy—those secret contacts with Jewish communities in Egypt and with the Muslims who were just then adding North Africa to the Dar al-Islam. It was recalled that Jews had sided with Muslims during the second rashidun caliph’s siege of Jerusalem. The council’s decrees were pitiless. Barring conversion, all adult Jews were to be sold as slaves and their children distributed among Christian families.
