From the tenth to the twelfth centuries, the Jews of Muslim Spain experienced a remarkable cultural renaissance. This flowering began under the patronage of Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a Jewish courtier serving in the court of the Caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥman III of Cordova. With Ḥasdai’s encouragement, Jewish poets and scholars flocked to Andalusia from Irag and North Africa, launching what was to become known in Jewish history as The Golden Age of Spain. Particularly noteworthy were the poets, who borrowed freely from the form and poetic content of Arabic poetry to introduce a new system of prosody in pure Biblical Hebrew. The sophisticated literary movement that unfolded blended secular Arabic motifs and the Hebraic tradition in new and revolutionary ways. At its forefront were Jewry’s religious leaders, presenting an unusual example of thoroughgoing acculturation to the surrounding culture. However, the popularity of Golden Age Hebrew poetry was not confined to one class, but appears to have been widely shared and disseminated among Jews as part of a broader cultural agenda. The stimulus for this poetic revolution, in contrast to other forms of cultural expression, appears to have been the claims to perfection of Arab poets and linguists. No evidence exists to indicate whether the new Hebrew poetry was known beyond the confines of the Jewish community. In general, caution should therefore be exercised in claiming that it is testimony to cultural pluralism and cultural symbiosis among Christians, Muslims and Jews in medieval Spain.