Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World

The Navon family, of Spanish origin, settled in the Ottoman Empire from the Iberian peninsula after the expulsion in 1492 and 1497. It included several important rabbis, scholars, and public figures in Istanbul and Jerusalem during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.Ephraim ben Aaron Navon (ca. 1677–1735) was a rabbi in Istanbul and Jerusalem. Born in Istanbul, he moved to Jerusalem around the beginning of the eighteenth century, but in 1720 left as a rabbinical emissary ( shadar or meshullaḥ) to the cities of Turkey. When this mission was concluded in 172…

Yitzhak Navon, the fifth president of the State of Israel (1978–1983), was born in Jerusalem on April 9, 1921. His father, a descendant of Jews who were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century, came to Jerusalem from Turkey in 1870; his mother, a descendant of Morocco’s renownedIbn ʿAṭṭār family, arrived there in 1884. The polyglot Navon studied Hebrew literature and Islamic studies at the Hebrew University.Navon served as secretary to Moshe Sharett during his tenure as foreign minister of Israel and as chief of staff to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. H…

Navpaktos (Tur. İnebahtı; It. Lepanto) is a Greek port town on the northern coast of the Gulf of Corinth about 215 kilometers (134 miles) southeast of Athens and about 15 kilometers (9 miles) southwest of Patras. A Romaniot community existed in Byzantine times, and after the arrival of the Sephardim, its synagogue was known as Qahal Qadosh Grego or Qahal Qadosh Toshavim.Benjamin of Tudela found about a hundred Jews in Navpaktos around 1170. For most of the fourteenth century the Jews enjoyed economic prosperity. The town was taken over by the Albanians in…

Murtażā Khān Naydāvūd (Morteza Neydavood), born in 1900, was a composer and master tār player. The son of master tombak (chalice drum) player Bālā Khān, Murtażā Khān was one of twentieth-century Iran’s most renowned masters of Persian classical music. A pupil of two of the most towering figures in Persian classical music, Āqā Ḥusaynqulī (1853–1916) and Ghulām-Ḥusayn Darvīsh (Darvīsh Khān, 1872–1926), Naydāvūd began studying the tār at the age of six and, remarkably, reached the status of ustād (master) before the age of twenty.Other than his technical and compositional contrib…

Nédroma (Ar. Nadrūma) is a city in western Algeria in the Trara mountain range at the base of Mount Filaoussene, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) northwest of Tlemcen and 17 kilometers (11 miles) from the coast. According to a local Muslim legend, the exiled Joshua son of Nun came to the region of Nédroma; with Berber help he drove out his enemies, and later died there. The tomb of Sidi Youchaa (Joshua), on the coast several kilometers from the town, was an important pilgrimage destination for Muslims and Jews, but the Jews associated the site with the second-century Palestinian tanna, Rabbi Sime…

Joseph ben David Nehama (Néhama) (March 17, 1881 – October 29, 1971) was an educator, historian, and public figure whose name is closely associated with the Jewish community of Salonica. He was born on March 17, 1881 into a prestigious family that had been settled in Salonica for many generations. One of his relatives, Judah ben Jacob Nehama (1824–1899), a leading nineteenth-century reformer, was headmaster of an Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) school.Nehama began his own seventy-year association with the AIU as a child. Following his education in a traditiona…

Judah ben Jacob Neḥama was born into a prosperous and respected family in Salonica.  His father, Jacob, served as an agent for English companies in Salonica. Among other activities, the Neḥama family transported merchandise (the precise nature of the products remains unknown) through the Austrian shipping company Lloyd, which engaged in trade throughout the Mediterranean Basin from its headquarters in Trieste, and also represented the interests of the Hapsburg dynasty in the region. Neḥama studi…

Nehemiah bar Kohen Ṣedeq Gaon served as gaon of the academy of Pumbedita from 960 to 968. He was apparently of priestly descent. Nehemiah led an emerging faction against Aaron Sarjado after the latter, a member of the merchant class rather than the scion of a gaonic family, was appointed gaon of the academy of Pumbedita in 943. The immediate cause of Nehemiah’s secession was Aaron’s decision to appoint Sherira ben Hananiah and not Nehemiah to the post of av bet din ("president of the court" -- the second-highest rank in the yeshiva hierarchy) following the death of the incumbent av bet din, Amra…

Ayyūb Loqmān Nehūrāy was born in Kashan in 1882 and died in Tehran in 1952. He was the Jewish representative in the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, from the second through the thirteenth session (1909–1943), with the exception of the fifth Majlis (1924–1926), when Shemu’el Haïm was elected as Jewish representative.Nehūrāy’s father was Ḥakīm Ayyūb, the son of Nūr Maḥmūd, one of Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh’s (r. 1848–1896) physicians. Nehūrāy earned his medical degree at Dār al-Funūn, the first polytechnic school in Iran, and then opened a clinic in Tehran. …

Carlos de Nesry, the son of Rabbi Yaḥya Nezry (Berb. Nizrī), was a lawyer in the Court of Appeals of Tangier. In 1940, he served as a member of the Jewish Community Council of Tangier. An eloquent speaker, writer, and journalist, he changed the spelling of his surname and added the “de” to Hispanicize his image. Nesry was often seen wearing a cape and moved among the café set. He circulated a petition in Tangier asking the Nobel Committee to award him the prize in literature.  Nesry interpreted the life of the Jews of Tangie…

Nicknamed Abu al-Barakāt, Nethanel ben Mevorakh was the middle son of Mevorakh ben Saʿadya, who served as ra'īs (or colloquially rayyis) al-yahūd (Ar. head of the Jewish community, i.e. nagid) of Fustat from ca. 1078 to 1082 and from 1094 to 1111. Nethanel seems to have been born around 1095. Unlike his father and his brother Moses, Nethanel did not ascend to the headship. On the other hand, he was an active participant in the culture of the political and economic elite of his community, and may well have served the Fatimid court, as perhaps is indicated by allusions to him in Geniza documents t…

Nethanel ben Moses ha-Levi was a physician at the Fatimid court, a renowned scholar, and a communal leader in twelfth-century Egypt. The Cairo Geniza has preserved a fascinating letter that Nethanel wrote to his friends as a youth. In it he complains that his father, Moses, then the “Sixth in the Society of Scholars” (i.e., the yeshiva) and a physician in the government hospital, had paid him 25 dinars, a large amount by any standard, to stay home and study rather than go out with his friends. The investment paid off: Nethanel became a famous physician and received an appointment to the …

Nethanel (al-)Fayyūmī(Nethanel ben al-Fayyūmī) (d. ca. 1165) was a scholar and philosopher who lived in Yemen, apparently in Sanʽa, where he served as head of the Jewish community. The attributive name ( nisba) Fayyūmī indicates that his family might have originally come from Egypt. Some scholars (Adler and Kaufmann) identify him with Nethanel ben Moses ha-Levi, the gaon of Fustat, whereas others (Mann) with the son or, more plausibly, the father of Jacob ben Nethanel al-Fayyumi (Gottheil and Levine), to whom Maimonides wrote his famous Iggeret Teman (Epistle to Yemen). Nethanel …

Nethanel-Hibat Allāh ben Jeshua al-Maqdisī was a Jerusalemite who fled to Fustat after the Seljuk conquest of 1073. From a Cairo Geniza document it appears that he was a master weaver. While in Fustat, he was a junior partner in a textile venture with a certain Ṣedaqa he-Ḥaver ben Muvḥar according to a deed dated 1086.In the schism of 1038 to 1042, Nethanel supported Nathan ben Abraham in his challenge to the gaonate of Solomon ben Judah. Nathan’s court met in Nethanel’s home, drawing up a deed there in 1040 that Nathan signed as rosh yeshivat geʾon yaʿaqov (head of the yeshiva of the Pride…

The Neṭīra family was an influential family of banker notables (Ar. jahā bidha; sing. jahbadh) in Baghdad roughly contemporaneous with Saʿadya Gaon, from the end of the ninth century. Neṭīra and his sons, Sahl and Isḥāq, successfully appealed to the Abbasid caliph on a number of occasions on behalf of various gaonic figures and against the exilarch. Nathan the Babylonian (see Nathan ha-Bavlī) reports that Neṭīra personally appealed to al-Muʿtaḍid on behalf of Kohen Ṣedeq Gaon of Pumbedita in the latter’s conflict with the exilarch ʿUqba, who had diverted income ordi…

Amnon Netzer (1934–2008) was a pioneering scholar of Iranian Jewish history and culture, and of Judeo-Persian language and literature, who introduced Iranian Jewish literature to the world and made significant research contributions in Iranian Jewish history. His broad knowledge and rigorous investigative methodology served as a bridge connecting the pre-Islamic Iranian Jewish heritage to the modern period.Amnon Netzer (1934-2008) was one of the leading scholars of Iranian and Judeo-Iranian studies and by far the most published scholar in the latter …

The largest and the most modern Sephardic synagogue in Istanbul, Neve Shalom (Oasis of Peace), is located in the Beyoğlu district, near the Galata Tower, and within walking distance of the Tunnel Square. In 1938, to make room for the synagogue, the reception hall of a Jewish primary school was converted into a house of worship. In 1948, the board of trustees of the temple decided to build a proper synagogue on the site. The following year, when all the preparations were completed, two Jewish architects, Elyo Ventura and Bernard Motola, both graduates of the Istanbul Technical University, …

Nevu’at ha-Yeled (Heb. The Prophecy of the Child) is a vague medieval Aramaic text whose historical background and original intent are unclear. Its storyline puts five prophecies in the mouth of a child named Naḥman. Jews usually interpreted Naḥman’s unintelligible words as referring to past, present, and future events. One such exegete was the Sephardi kabbalist Abraham ben Eliezer ha-Levῑ, known as ha-Zaken (ca. 1459/60–1529/30), who wandered the Levant following the expulsion from Spain and wrote a commentary to the Nevu’at ha-Yeled. He construed some of Naḥman’s sayings …

see United States of AmericaNorman A. Stillman