Sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, July 31 into August 1, someone crept into the Plaza de Tiberíades in the old Jewish quarter of Córdoba, Spain and sprayed a swastika across the base of the bronze statue of Maimonides, arguably the greatest thinker that Judaism has ever produced. 

The paint went on the pedestal, not the face. But the target was the man himself, and the target was the face of Judaism itself.

“But, Israel…” some people will say.

To which I would say— whatever the Judeo-Spanish equivalent of bullsh-t would be. This had nothing to do with Israel. Maimonides died more than 700 years before the creation of the state. He only lived in the land of Israel briefly, before finally settling in Egypt.

When you deface a statue of Maimonides, it is about only one thing.

That is precisely what Córdoba’s city council knows. They called it an “attack on heritage” and “a message of hate of extreme gravity.” Acting mayor Cintia Bustos ordered the municipal cleaning company Sadeco to send its stone-graffiti specialists first thing Monday morning.

If that statue could speak, what would it say to us?

Not about the vandal. Maimonides, of all people, would have very little curiosity about one frightened man with a spray can. He would want to talk about the rest of us, about what to make of hatred itself, and about how not to let it move in and take up residence.

Moses ben Maimon was born in Córdoba around 1135, into a family of rabbinic judges, in a city then ruled by the........

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