Newsroom | March 28, 2015
Oferta Especial
A millennium ago, a giant lived in a Jewish population entrenched in the Muslim al-Andalus, south of the Iberian Peninsula. The so curious story of his discovery dates back to October 20, 2006, when a villager of Lucena in the province of Cordoba, took his dog for a walk one afternoon.
The southern part of the population was being removed by the works to build a new road. After his usual walk, running around all over the ground, the dog returned with something strange in the mouth. It was a human femur.
Nervous, the pet owner quickly got in touch with the local police and, in the midst of all this confusion, the femur ended up surrounded by agents of the Civil Guard and the National Police.
Daniel Botella, municipal archaeologist, still remembers how the police called him the same night. There were many more bones scattered. “Initially, it was thought that they were the graves of Civil War,” he recalls. But after a more detailed study, they came to another conclusion: “There was a huge Jewish cemetery with several graves.”
And one of them, with the remains of the giant, who died at age 30 and was buried naked, wrapped in a shroud, with his face toward to Jerusalem.
“The machinery used to build the new road destroyed part of their legs, so we can not confirm his real stature,” says anthropologist Joan Viciano, who was commissioned to do the study of those remains while working at the University of Granada.
However, the scientists finally found a “huge jaw” and a series of bones that suggest the enormous size of the man and they were in the presence of a probable case of “gigantism.”
According to the results of many years of hard research that have just been published in the renowned scientific journal “Anthropologischer Anzeiger,” the alleged giant would have lived around 1050, according to carbon-14 dating at points close to his grave. It corresponds with the decline of the Caliphate of Cordoba. The town of Lucena was then called Eliossana, “God save us” in Hebrew, and was living its heyday.
“It worked as a separate Jewish city of Islamic power. Muslims and Christians were totally prohibited to access inside its walls,” point out the director of the Archaeological Museum of Lucena.
According to Ibn Hawqal, a Muslim traveler of the tenth century, Lucena was the city in which Jews castrated slaves were destined for the palaces of Muslim leaders.
That giant Jew had to attract attention in a town where the average height was 1.69 meters. The length of his jaw was 10 centimeters, compared to the 7.5 average for the rest of skeletons found in the necropolis.
The scientific hypothesis is that the big man of al-Andalus suffered a rare disease that causes a gland at the base of the brain, the pituitary, produces more amount of growth hormone. If the problem occurs in a child, it is called gigantism and, in adults, is known as acromegaly. Researchers believe that the pathology of the Jewish giant, possibly caused by a pituitary tumor, started when he was about 15 years old.
There were 346 graves, 196 of them with human remains. The Hebrew Eliossana population must reach 2,500, calculated archaeologist.
Jews never destroy the documents containing the name of their god, but they store them until they rot in tanks known as “genizas.” In the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, it was found in the late nineteenth century a geniza with some documents from the ninth century inside, including some from Lucena that illuminate the era in which lived the Andalusian giant.
Botella indicates that the city hosted the “more relevant Jews” of al-Andalus, after Cordoba assault in 1013 and the Slaughter of Granada in 1066, a massacre of thousands of Sephardic executed by Muslims. Among those relevant Jews this giant must emphasized, at least physically. Scientists have dubbed him TB-5, but it is impossible to know what his real name was and what he was spent.
The remains of the giant, as those of other dead had no grave goods. Just a stone was found around his grave, belonging to another tomb, which preserves a Hebrew inscription, written with the awkwardness of a child who runs out of paper and shrinks the letters: “Rabbi Lactosus sleeps in peace. Rest in peace until the Comforter who announces peace in the "Door of Peace" comes. Tell him, rest in peace.”
Botella remembers as the Jewish community blocked the investigation of the cemetery. “The Israeli Parliament sent a diplomatic complaint to the Spanish government. When the then foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, went to the United Nations, he met a Jewish demonstration against the excavation of the necropolis of Lucena.” Moratinos personally negotiated the conditions for the scientific investigation of the remains with the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain.
The bones of the Giant were sent in 2011 to the University of Granada, to undergo a series of radiographic and microscopic analysis, but they had to be returned immediately to Lucena by complaints from the Jewish community.
“For them, the rest of the dead had been desecrated,” explains Botella. On December 18 of that year, all the bones were again buried in their tombs, in a solemn ceremony that was presided by the chief rabbi of Spain, Moshe Bendahan, in the presence of more than 40 representatives of Jewish communities coming from different European countries.
The Andalusian giant, as believers in the Lord demanded, rest in peace again.
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