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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
Zionism Among Sephardi/Mizraḥi Jewry
(13,800 words)
1. General introduction The mainstream modern Zionist movement was founded and developed by Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern and Central Europe, and institutions such as the World Zionist Organization and the Zionist Congresses were dominated by Ashkenazi European Jews. The majority of the pioneer settlers (Heb.
ḥaluṣim; usually rendered in English as halutzim) who created the new Yishuv and its institutions in Palestine were also Ashkenazim, and they became the principal founders of the State of Israel. Not surprisingly, therefore, most of the s…
Date:
2015-09-03
LISCA (La Ligue Internationale Scolaire contre l'Antisémitisme)
(19 words)
see LICA (La Ligue Internationale contre l'Antisémitisme Allemand) Norman A. Stillman
Stillman, Yedida Kalfon
(873 words)
Yedida Kalfon Stillman (née Messodi Khalfon-Poney), world-renowned scholar of Islamic and Jewish culture, was born in the mellah of Fez, Morocco, on April 8, 1946. At age five, she immigrated to Israel with her large family, spending the first two years in a transit camp (
maʿabara) tent. The family hebraicized her name to Yedida. She grew up in the overcrowded, prefabricated housing of the Katamonim section of Jerusalem, a neighborhood overwhelmingly populated by Jews from Arab countries. There she developed her talent for languages, picking up more than a s…
Seleqṣeya
(353 words)
In mid-1951, the young and struggling State of Israel adopted a policy of selective immigration (Heb.
seleqṣiya) that placed severe restrictions upon poor Moroccan Jews who were unable to pay their for their own immigration, had no family breadwinner accompanying them, or had a family member in need of medical care. Under the new policy, the Jewish Agency accepted for ʿ
aliya only families accompanied by a healthy breadwinner between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. The policy also applied to Jews from Tunisia, albeit to a lesser extent. There were two primary rationales for th…