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Academic Study of Islamicate Jewry
(12,763 words)
Prior to the second half of the twentieth century, much of the research devoted to the Jews of the Islamic world followed in the paths established by the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars of the nineteenth century and dealt with the history, literature, and thought of the medieval period. Judeo-Arabic civilization was one of the major foci of Wissenschaft scholarship, as too were aspects of Hispanic Jewish history and culture—but only for the classical Islamic Middle Ages (ca. 850–1250) in the…
Date:
2014-09-03
Tiferet Yisrael School (Ar. al-Madrasa al-Waṭaniyya al-Isrā'īliyya)
(384 words)
The Tiferet Yisrael (Glory of Israel) School in Beirut, known in Arabic as al-Madrasa al-Waṭaniyya al-Isrā'īliyya (The Jewish National School), was established by Ḥakham Zakī Cohen and his son Salīm in 1874. It was one of the first and more successful indigenous attempts to create a modern Jewish religious school in the Arab world. Due to financial difficulties, the school closed after one year, but it reopened as a bo…
Proverbs
(2,754 words)
1. Judeo-Arabic As in many traditional cultures, Arabic-speaking Jews drew upon a rich lexicon of proverbs, maxims, and aphorisms in both oral and written expression. These gnomic expressions, in addition to being original creations, derived from a variety of sources. The specifically Jewish sources included biblical and rabbinic literature, and the principal non-Jewish source was the local Arab milieu. Specifically Muslim dicta from the Qur’an and ḥadīth rarely entered Judeo-Arabic usage. Rather,…
Date:
2015-09-03
Amram ben Diwan
(457 words)
Amram ben Diwan is one of the best-known saints (Heb.
ṣaddiqim) in the pantheon of Moroccan Jewish holy men. According to tradition, he was a rabbinical emissary (Heb.
shadar or
meshullaḥ) from Hebron, who arrived in Morocco with his son, Ḥayyim, sometime in the eighteenth century and took up residence in Fez. When Ḥayyim fell gravely ill, Rabbi Amram prayed, offering his life for that of his son, who miraculously recovered. Shortly thereafter, while on a visit to O…
Romanelli, Samuel
(588 words)
Samuel Romanelli was born in Mantua on September 19, 1757. Little is known about his youth, but clearly he had a superb Jewish and secular education in the Italian Jewish tradition. An accomplished linguist, he was fluent in ten languages. He was a poet, playwright, and translator of European literature into Hebrew. In 1786, while returning home to Italy from London, he was stranded in Gibraltar (see Gibraltar) and, strapped for funds, accepted an offer to accompany a merchant on a business trip to Morocco. Losing his passport, Roman…
Rassemblement Mondial du Judaïsme Marocain
(17 words)
see Zionism in the Maghreb to be combined Norman A. Stillman
Barukh, Marco
(399 words)
Marco (Joseph Marcou) Barukh, an early apostle of pre-Herzlian Zionism in the Muslim world, was born in Constantinople in 1872. He studied at several European universities and because of his involvement in radical student groups was under police surveillance for much of his brief adult life. His involvement with Jewish nationalism began in 1893 when he joined the Kadimah student association in Vienna. The following year he was in Algeria, where he tried to propagate the Jewish national idea among the rapidly assimilating Algerian Jews. He published a short-lived journal,
Le Juge, bu…
Sacred Grottoes, Pools, and Trees
(25 words)
See Pilgrimages and Pilgrimage Rituals, Saints' Tombs (Modern Period), Saints' Tombs Venerated by Jews and Muslims Norman A. Stillman
Kāhina, al-
(415 words)
Al-Kāhina (Ar. the sorceress) was the name given by the Arabs to the leader of the Berber Jerāwa tribe in the Aurès Mountains region of the Central Maghreb (present-day Algeria). The name reflected the fact that she was an ecstatic who prophesied and performed divinations. Al-Kāhina led the resistance against the Muslim Arab invaders after the fall of Byzantine Carthage in 692/93 to Ḥassān ibn al-Nuʿmān. She inflicted a major defeat on him and drove his forces out of Ifrīqiya (modern Tunisia) almost to Tripoli. For several years, she held sway over a lar…
Executive Editor's Introduction
(4,122 words)
Why an Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World? Until the middle of the twentieth century, over a million Jews lived in the Islamic world, some 800,000 of them in the Arab countries. Some of these Jewish communities were very ancient, as in Iraq and Iran, where there had been a Jewish presence since the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century B.C.E. In most other Middle Eastern and North African countries, there had been Jews since Greco-Roman times, long before the Islamic conquests of the seventh centur…
Tlemcen
(2,104 words)
Tlemcen (Ar. Tilimsān) is a city in western Algeria situated 138 kilometers (86 miles) southwest of Oran, 91 kilometers (56 miles) west of Sidi Bel Abbès, and 63 kilometers (40 miles) east of Oujda across the Moroccan border. Nourished by springs and called Pomaria (city of orchards) in Roman times, Tlemcen lies at the crossroads of major east-west and north-south trade routes. Although Arab historians state that Judaizing Berber tribes lived in the area at the time of the Islamic conquests, there is no evidence for a Jewish presence in Tlemcen at that time. 1…
Ibn Mishʿal, Aaron
(332 words)
According to a legend still current in Morocco, Aaron ibn Mishʿal was a rich Jew who became the ruler over the Muslims living in the Taza region of east-central Morocco early in the second half of the seventeenth century. As tribute Ibn Mishʿal took Muslim maidens into his harem each year until the sharif Mawlāy…
Abū ʾl-Barakāt al-Baghdādī
(2,228 words)
1. Life Abū ʾl-Barakāt Hibat Allāh ibn Malkā al-Baghdādī al-Baladī was a physician and philosopher in twelfth-century Iraq. His contemporaries dubbed him “the Singular One of the Age” (Ar.
awḥad al-zamān), and some claimed that as a philosopher he had attained the level of Aristotle himself. Born in Balad, near Mosul, around 1077, Abūʾl-Barakāt was one of the foremost Jewish intellectuals of his time. Under his Hebrew name, Baruch ben Melekh, he wrote Bible and Talmud commentaries in Judeo-Arabic, including commentaries on the Book of Ecclesiastes and on tractate Soṭa of the Babylonian Talmud. Fragments of his writings have been preserved in the Cairo Geniza. It was under his Hebrew name, too, that he was honored in a Hebrew panegyric by Isaac ibn Ezra in which he is also called Nethanel, a rendering of Hibat Allāh (
…
Sephardi Impact on Islamicate Jewry
(2,362 words)
1. Demographic Impact The arrival of Sephardim in the Islamic world following the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497 marked a veritable watershed in the history of the Jews of the Muslim world. Many of the exiles sought a refuge in the Islamic kingdoms of the Maghreb, in Mamluk Egypt and the Levant, and in the expanding Ottoman Empire, which within a generation would take over all of the Middle East and North Africa from Persia to Morocco. The Iberian refugees infused new vitality—de…
Ibn ʿAṭāʾ, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm (Abraham ben Nathan)
(471 words)
Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm Ibn ʿAṭāʾ (Abraham ben Nathan) was leader of Qayrawanese Jewry in the first third of the eleventh century. He was a member of a wealthy elite that included the Ben Berekhiah, Tahertī, and Ibn al-Majjānī families. His father, Nathan, may have been a communal official, although this is not clear. He was a major supporter of the academy (
bet
midrash) in Qayrawan and was also a generous contributor to the Babylonian yeshivot, particularly to the Sura yeshiva, the renewal of which he helped to finance. Ibn ʿAṭāʾ served as court physician to the Zirid amirs Bādis (r. 996–10…
Ibn Gikatilla/Ibn Jikatilla
(24 words)
See Ibn Chiquitilla, Isaac (fl. 10th Century) , and Ibn Chiquitilla, Moses ben Samuel ha-Kohen (11th century) Norman A. Stillman
Interfaith Relations
(4,378 words)
1. Medieval Period It would be anachronistic to think in contemporary post-Enlightenment terms of interfaith relations in the medieval Islamic world. The modern virtues of social, religious, and political equality would have been totally incomprehensible to anyone living in the Dār al-Islām (Domain of Islam)—or in Byzantium and Latin Christendom, for that matter. Muslims, Christians, and Jews all believed that they had been granted the most perfect of divine dispensations and, whether they had been given te…
Sefrou
(2,036 words)
1. General Description and History Sefrou is a large town in north-central Morocco that had over thirty thousand inhabitants at the end of the twentieth century. It is located at an altitude of 850 meters (2,790 feet) in the foothills of the Middle Atlas just above the Sais plain only 30 kilometers (18 miles) south of Fez. The town is situated in a green, picturesque setting surrounded by gardens and fruit orchards (most notably cherry) that give it an oasislike aspect. The area is watered by seve…