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Al-Andalus
(10,143 words)
Al-Andalus was the Arabic name throughout the Middle Ages for the Iberian Peninsula, including what is today both Spain and Portugal, although with the progress of the Reconquista, the name al-Andalus came to be limited to Muslim-ruled territory, which eventually was only the Nasrid kingdom of Granada. The name al-Andalus (Ar. al-Andalīsh) has been connected to the Vandals, who had given the name Vandalacia to the former Roman province of Baetica. Arabic-speaking Jews used the term, and Moses Maimonides, even years after he had immigrated to Egypt, wo…
Qalʿat Banī Ḥammād
(515 words)
Qalʿat Banī Ḥammād (also known as Qalʿat Ḥammād and Qalʿat Abī Ṭawīl) was the capital of the Hammadid dynasty in the Central Maghreb (today Algeria) during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The fortified town, which today lies in ruins, sits in the Maadid Mountains and dominates the Hodna Plain 500 meters (1,640 feet) below. The site was chosen by Ḥammād ibn Buluggīn in 1008 as his stronghold when he broke from the authority of his nephew, the Zirid ruler in Qayrawan, Bādīs ibn al-Manṣūr (r. 996–1016). At first, the population of the town was mainly made up of Ḥammād’s fel…
Alexandria
(2,461 words)
1. Medieval Alexandria (Ar. al-Iskandariyya), on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and the western edge of the Nile Delta, is the principal port city of Egypt and was the capital until the Arab conquest, when it was replaced by Fustat. There was a substantial Jewish community in the city from the third century B.C.E. (According to Josephus, Jews already settled there at the time of Alexander's founding of the city.) Alexandria became the principal center of Hellenistic Jewish culture in Antiquity. It was there that the Bible was translated into Greek (the…
Ratti-Menton, Benoît Ulysse-Laurent-François, Count de
(13 words)
see Damascus Affair (1840) Norman A. Stillman
Onomastics
(18 words)
see Names and Naming Practices - Kurdistan Names and Naming Practices - Yemen Norman A. Stillman
Heqdesh (Qodesh, Waqf, Ḥabs)
(990 words)
Charity and social welfare have since ancient times been an integral part of the Jewish communal ethos. Already in biblical times, funds and property could be consecrated to the needs of the Temple (Bet ha-Miqdash) in Jerusalem (e.g., see II Kings 12:5–17; Mishna Temura 7:2, Sheqalim 4:7). The term for dedicated property was
heqdesh (consecrated). The Talmud forbade the dedication of
heqdeshproperty in the biblical sense following the destruction of the Temple, since the misappropriation of such property would have constituted sacrilege (Heb.
meʿila). But in the Middle Ages bo…
Anti-Judaism/Antisemitism/Anti-Zionism
(12,562 words)
1. Traditional anti-Judaism in the Islamic World A historical survey of Islamic attitudes toward and treatment of Jews must take into account the facts that Islam is (1) a religion with a corpus of doctrines, beliefs, and practices that have evolved over fourteen hundred years and have been subject to widely varying manifestations and interpretations; (2) a body politic, united at first, but becoming more divided over time; and (3) a civilization that despite local and regional differences has neverthe…
Anqāwa (Al-Naqawa), Ephraim
(493 words)
Ephraim ben Israel Anqāwa (fl. late 14th to early 15th century), known to his devotees simply as Rab (Heb. master), was a Sephardi rabbinical scholar, philosopher, and physician who became a leading saint in the Maghrebi Jewish pantheon of holy men (Heb.
ṣaddiqim). His tomb in Tlemcen became an important site of pilgrimage (Ar.
ziyāra). Ephraim was born in Toledo, where his family had lived since the twelfth century and had their own synagogue, established by his great-uncle Abraham ben Samuel, who was murdered in 1341. Ephraim’s father, Israel ha-Qadosh (Heb. the martyr), was the …
Identité et Dialogue
(14 words)
see Azoulay, André; Assaraf, Robert; Berdugo, Serge Norman A. Stillman
Anqāwa (Al-Naqawa), Raphael
(429 words)
Raphael ben Mordechai Anqāwa (Raphaël Encaoua and also Ankaoua in the usual French transcription) was a leading Moroccan halakhic authority. The scion of a distinguished Sephardi rabbinical family, he was born in Salé in 1848. He was a pupil of Issachar Assaraf, the chief rabbi of Salé, whose daughter he married. At the relatively young age of thirty-two, he was appointed
dayyan in Salé. His reputation for judicial acumen spread his name throughout Morocco. In 1910, he published his collection of responsa
Qarne Reʾem (The Horns of the Buffalo) in Jerusalem, which enhanced his …
Wargla
(461 words)
Wargla (Warglān; Fr. Ouargla) is an oasis town in the Algerian Sahara located 659 kilometers (410 miles) southeast of Algiers. It was once an important way-station on the caravan route to Timbuktu and West Africa. Nothing is known about the town before the Islamic period. The Muslims of medieval Wargla were adherents of the Kharijite Ibāḍī sect, which was generally tolerant of Jews. The Jewish community in Wargla during the Middle Ages was apparently a Karaite center and is noted as such by Abraham ibn Ezraand Abraham Ibn Da’ud. In his commentary on Exodus 12:11, Ibn Ezra ment…
Duwayk, Jacob Saul
(16 words)
see Duwayk (Dweck, Dwek, Duek, Douek, Doweck, Dowek) Family Norman A. Stillman
Ghriba Synagogues
(550 words)
Ghrība (Coll. Ar. wondrous, unique) is the name given to seven supposedly ancient synagogues in Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria which are considered to be holy places and have become pilgrimage sites. The most famous of the Ghrība synagogues is the one in the village of Dighet near Hara Seghira on the island of Jerba. The others are located in Yefren and Mʿanin (actually between Mʿanin and al-Qsir) in the Jebel Nafusa region of Libya, in Le Kef in southern Tunisia and Ariana on the northeastern coast, and in Bône (Būna) and Biskra in Algeria. Many of the Ghrība shrines are in places that …
Women
(23 words)
see Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah; Clothing, Jewelry and Make-up; Education; Life Cycle Practices; Marriage; Prostitution; Polygyny; Veiling Norman A. Stillman
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 boarding school in 1878 and attracted students from Damascus, Aleppo, Jaffa, and even as far away as Istanbul and Izmir. By 18…
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 Ouezzane to collect funds for the religious institutions in Hebron, he fell ill and died and was buried in the nearby cemetery of As…
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 th…
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. Middle Ages to the Almoh…
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 Rashīd, the founder of the Alawid dynasty (r. 1666–1672), went to his residence disguised as a maiden, killed him to avenge the honor of Muslim maidenhood, and took his wealth. This foundation legend of the Alawid dynasty has been analyzed in detail by the French scholar Pierre de Ceniv…
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 Soṭ…
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…
Egyptian Riots (1945, 1947)
(393 words)
Mass demonstrations against Zionism were called for November 2, 1945 (Balfour Declaration Day) in the major cities of Egypt by several Egyptian nationalist and Islamist groups, such Miṣr al-Fatāt, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Young Men’s Muslim Association. A report by the British police commissioner of Cairo written three days before the demonstrations noted “considerable ill-feeling . . . against Jews,” but stated that security precautions in place alleviated any cause for concern. Events proved othe…
Baḥuṣim
(368 words)
Baḥuṣim (Heb. outsiders), or sometimes
baḥūṣiyya, a slightly arabized variant of the Hebrew, was the name Jewish townsfolk gave to the semi-nomadic, tent-dwelling Jews who lived in
duwwārs, or small encampments, in the area extending from the region around Jerid and Le Kef in western Tunisia to the province of Constantine across the border in Algeria, where they could be found between Suq-el-Ahras and Tébessa and in the southern oases. Muslims referred to them as
Yahūd al-cArab (Ar. Bedouin Jews). The
baḥuṣim were often allied with or under the protection of larger Arab tribal confed…
Judeo-Arabic - History and Linguistic Description
(3,619 words)
Of all the Jewish literary and spoken vernaculars of the post-talmudic period (Yiddish, Jewish Neo-Aramaic, Ladino, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Tat, Judeo-Berber, Judeo-Provençal, to mention only some of the better known), Judeo-Arabic holds a place of special significance. It has had the longest recorded history—nearly fourteen hundred years. It has had the widest geographical diffusion, extending across three continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe) during the Middle Ages. Until early moder…
Date:
2014-09-03