“Calamity came upon Spain from the skies / and my eyes pour forth their stream of tears.”

Americo Castro was very much of the belief that Spaniards where not such, but just Jewish or Muslims of former Al-Andalus or Sepharad. His theory is rich with examples which will be great to explore our ongoing tradition of intolerance and persecution versus the alternative of conviviality and respect we can also produce.

Learning from our past and history is including the lives of so much Spaniards then Al-Andalusians or Sephardi.

Here is one of such: 

Abraham ben Ezra

Another poet whose life was marked by exile was the last of the great Sephardic poets, Abraham ben Ezra (1093–1167, no relation to Moses). He was a friend to Judah Halevi. Although Abraham was twenty years younger than Halevi, his son married Halevi’s daughter. Like Solomon Gabirol, Abraham was a Neoplatonist, and this view influenced some of his poems, such as this one, which uses Gabirol’s phrase “fountain of life”:

Sent down from a luminous fountain of life, . . .Why were you ushered into the world and then in the dark of the body imprisoned?

His poems include a moving memorial to Jewish life in Muslim Spain, lost to the intolerance of Islamic fundamentalism, the “Lament for Andalusian Jewry,” which begins: 

“Calamity came upon Spain from the skies / and my eyes pour forth their stream of tears.”

more:https://unpblog.com/2017/04/18/excerpt-exiles-in-sepharad/