Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World

Yaakov Saadoun, the son of a shoemaker, was born in 1928 in the Tunisian city of Sfax, where his family lived in Picvill, a new quarter built by the French. Saadoun attended the Alliance Israélite Universelle school until World War II, then went on to a French commercial school and became a clerk in a shipping company. Deeply affected by the German occupation of Sfax (November 1942 to April 1943), he joined  Tséiré Ohavé Tsion (Heb. Ṣeʿire Ohave Ṣiyyon), a local Zionist organization, when he was eighteen. He soon became one of its leaders and the editor of its newsp…

Saʿadya ben Judah, the scion of a family of physicians and heads of the Jewish community of Egypt, was a son of the nagidJudah ben Saʿadya. Since Judah died when Saʿadya was a child, the leadership of Egyptian Jewry passed to his uncle, Mevorakh ben Saʿadya, and thus Judah never became nagid or raʾīs al-yahūd (head of the Jews).  He was still active in the Jewish community when his uncle received the title nagid in 1094. The title rayyis granted to Saʿadya ben Judah in a poetic dirge did not indicate an official position in the community but rather a high rank at the Fati…

Saʿadya ben Joseph, the greatest scholar and communal leader of the late gaonic period, was born in 882 in Dilāṣ, in the Fayyūm province of Egypt (after which he is often called al-Fayyūmī). He began to study Jewish sources and general science and philosophy while still in Egypt, around 900, and by then had already corresponded with the philosopher and physician Isaac Israeli of Qayrawan. Toward the end of the first decade of the tenth century he left Egypt for Palestine, apparently to Tiberias, the seat of the Palestinian yeshiva, where his wife and children joined him later.…

Al-Ṣabāḥ (The Morning) was a four- to sixteen-page daily in Judeo-Arabic published in Tunis from November 1, 1904 to May 14, 1940. (The French part of its masthead read: Es-Sabah, seul quotidien israélite du Nord-Africain, le plus fort tirage des journaux israélites de Tunisie). As the organ of philanthropic Zionism, al-Ṣabāḥ was the most popular Jewish daily in Tunisia. It was founded and managed by Jacob Cohen, an accountant and teacher at the Alliance Israélite Universelle school, and Simon Cohen, and was edited successively by Jacob Cohen, Daniel Hagège, …

Rafael David Saban, born in Istanbul in 1873 into the family of a wealthy merchant, began his religious studies at a very early age and was taught by influential rabbis such as Yosef Kohen, Yomtov Kohen, and Konorte Delson. At the age of eighteen, Saban was ordained a rabbi and became the private secretary of the prominent religious leader Moşe Levi. Saban had years of experience in the affairs of the Turkish-Jewish community prior to his appointment to the chief rabbinate in 1953, for over the years he had been a member of several administrative committees, such as the Religious Council, the Is…

Rifat Saban, a grandson of Raphael Saban, a former chief rabbi of Turkey, was born in 1939 in Istanbul. He graduated from the Law Faculty of Istanbul University in 1964 and since then has practiced commercial law. From 1978 to1980 he was general manager of the BEREC Dry Battery Factory in Istanbul.Saban has been active in the Turkish Jewish community since his youth, and since 1983 has been a member of the Advisory Council of the Turkish Chief Rabbinate. From 1984 to 1986 he was president of Fakirleri Koruma Derneği (Society to Protect the Poor), the successor to theB'nai B'rith Lodgeof Con…

see FarhūdNorman A. Stillman

Musa Sabi (1914–1987) was a renowned Iranian lawyer, author, and translator.Musa Sabi (Pers. Mūsā Ṣabī), the distinguished Iranian Jewish lawyer, author, and translator, was born in Kerman on March 21, 1914, one of his father’s ten children. Not much is known about his early education, but since secondary education was limited in Kirman, he was sent to Isfahan to attend the Stuart Memorial College, which was run by the British Church Missionary Society, and later became the school’s prefect. In 1938, Sabi…

See Pilgrimages and Pilgrimage Rituals, Saints' Tombs (Modern Period), Saints' Tombs Venerated by Jews and MuslimsNorman A. Stillman

The walled city of Saʿda (Ar. Ṣaʿda), the capital of North Yemen, was once an iron-mining and tanning center and an important station on the Himyarite Sanʿa–Mecca trade route. It is built on a plateau 2,300 meters (7,546 feet) high about 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Sanʿa. When the Zaydi imām al-Hādī ilā al-Ḥaqq from northern Persia established the Zaydi state in northern Yemen in the tenth century, he chose Saʿda as its capital, and it became a center of Zaydi Shiʿite learning. Al-Hādī Mosque in Saʿda is still an important Zaydi Shiʿite educational institution.Around the same time…

Ṣadaqa ibn Munajjā (also known as Ṣadaqa al-Ḥakīm) was an Arabic-writing Samaritan scholar and a renowned physician. Born probably in Damascus, he served at the court of the Ayyubid ruler al-Malik al-Ashraf Mūsā (d. 1237) in the Upper Mesopotamian city of Ḥarrān, where he died after 1223. Much of our information about his biography and bibliography comes from an entry in the Kitāb ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ (ed. Rida, pp. 717–721), the famous encyclopedia of physicians by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (1203–1270). On the basis of manuscripts discovered so far, Sam…

Saʿd al-Dawla ibn Ṣafī b. Hibat Allāh b. Muhadhdhib al-Dawla al-Abharī was an Iranian Jewish physician who served Arghūn (r. 1284-91), the fourth Mongol īlkhān, as chief minister ( ṣāḥib-dīwān, or wazīr). He was executed just before the death of his master. The Ilkhanids (ca. 1260-1335) were a Mongol dynasty that ruled Iran, the southern Caucasus, most of Anatolia, Iraq, and the territory covered by modern Turkmenistan and northern Afghanistan.Saʿd al-Dawla, originally from the town of Abhar in western Iran, first appears in the sources as an agent or broker of some kind (Ar.-Pers. dall…

see Iran/PersiaVera B. MoreenBibliographyFischel, Walter J., Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Mediaeval Islam ( London: Royal Asiatic Society Monographs, no. 22, 1937).Gil, Moshe, Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 241-248, 520-532.Goitein, S. D,  A Mediterranean Society:  The Jewish Communities of the World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza.  6 vols.  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) [Reprint 1999].Al-Iṣfahānī, Abū Nuʿaym,  Ḏikr aḵbari- Iṣfahān (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1931), 1: 22-23.Al-Iṣṭakhrī, I…

Safed (Heb. Ṣefat, Ar. Ṣafad) is a town in the Upper Galilee area in Israel, situated about 40 kilometers (25 miles) northeast of Tiberias. Jews have lived in Safed at least since the eleventh or twelfth century, and the town was a major center of Jewish commercial and scholarly activity during most of the sixteenth century, when it boasted a large Sephardic community. The Jewish presence declined thereafter, and until the second half of the eighteenth century only a few hundred Jews resided the…

The town of Safi (Ar. Asfī) on the west coast of Morocco is said to have been settled originally by Canaanites, named by Carthaginians, and settled by Romans, Goths, and Jews from Palestine before the Muslim conquest. It is also said that in 1174 its patron saint, Shaykh Abū Muḥammed Ṣāliḥ, built a ribāṭ (fortress retreat) for members of the Sufi military orders who guarded the borders of the Dār al-Islām and engaged in religious exercises there. Safi attracted Portuguese attention at the beginning of the sixteenth century. A Portuguese fort was built in 1508 after a commercial conc…

The Safras are a Sephardi banking family that built a worldwide banking network. Their first known bank, Safra Frères, was founded in Aleppo in the mid-nineteenth century. It traded in gold and currency, and financed the camel caravan trade in the Ottoman Empire. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Jacob Safra (1891–1963) settled inBeirut, where he founded a new bank. Taking advantage of the booming commerce in the French-ruled port-city, Safra consolidated his bank on a firm basis. In light of the growing anti-Jewish propaganda in the l…

According to local Jewish tradition, the Great Synagogue of Aleppo,known as Al-Ṣafra (the Yellow), was built by Joab ben Zeruiah, the commander of King David’s army, right after he conquered Aram Ṣoba (Aleppo). However, the west wing, the oldest part of the synagogue, was probably built in the fifth century C.E. The oldest surviving inscription is from the year 834. The building was partly damaged after the Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century and then was turned into a mosque. The central part of the synag…

Albert (Abraham) Saguès (1883–1956) was born in Constantinople-Hasköy (Istanbul) to Moïse Nissim and Sarah Sarfati. He was educated at the École Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris, where he earned the brevet supérieur (teaching certification granted upon graduation from four years of normal school) and brevet d'hébreu (diploma for Hebrew, entailing a salary increase). His teaching career with the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) began in Cairo in February 1903 and continued in Hamadan, Iran, in October 1903, and Seneh, Iran in 1904.Saguès became head of the school in …

Sahl (Abū ʾl-Sarrī) ben Maṣliaḥ was a Karaite exegete, legal scholar and propagandist who lived in the second half of the tenth century. The overwhelming majority of his works, composed both in Hebrew and in Arabic—sometimes with the two languages combined in the same composition—remain in manuscript and await publication. Sahl, the Arabic rendering of the Hebrew name Jashar , was a resident of Jerusalem, but according to his own testimony traveled abroad as a missionary seeking to convert Rabbanites to Karaism. He is best known for his anti-Rabbanite polemic in Hebrew known as Sefer Tokh…

Abū ʿAmr Sahlān ben Abraham was a payṭan (liturgical poet) and head of the Iraqi congregation in Fustat from 1034 until 1049 or 1050. He succeeded to this post after the death of his father, Abraham ben Sahlān (1016–ca. 1032), and like his father he carried the rabbinic titles alluf from the geonim of Baghdad (probably from Hay Gaon of Pumbedita) and ḥaver from the Jerusalem yeshiva, reflecting the dual allegiance maintained by ambitious leaders adept at negotiating complex networks of patronage. Sahlān bore other lofty titles presumably granted him by the Iraqi exilarchHezekiah. His f…

Abū ʾl-Faḍl Sahl ibn Faḍl al-Tustarī (al-Dustarī; Heb. Jashar ben Ḥesed ben Jashar) was a Karaite scholar and exegete from the famous Tustarī family. He came from Tustar (Shustar) in Persia and toward the end of the eleventh century settled in Jerusalem, where he soon entered into conflict with Jeshua ben Judah, the head of the Karaite community there. Sahl was one of the last known Karaite scholars active in Jerusalem. His son was taken captive by the Crusaders in 1099. Composing all of his works in Arabic, he wrote numerous commentaries, but nothing has been preserved except fragme…

Abū ʿAbd Allāh Saʿīd ibn al-Ḥasan al-Rūzbihān (d. 861) was, according to Moshe Gil, a Jewish scholar who converted to Islam around the same time as his teacher, Yūsuf ibn Mūsā ibn Rashīd al-Qaṭṭān (d. 867) of Rayy and Baghdad. Both appear in al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s Taʾrīkh Baghdād (History of Baghdad). While they are not described there as having apostatized from Judaism, Gil argues that the name Rūzbihān, the Persian equivalent of the Hebrew name Yom Ṭov, was common among Jews. This was a period during which a number of Jewish converts to Islam achieved distinction as scholars.Marina …

Saʿīd ibn Ḥasan was a Muslim polemicist against Judaism and the Bible who lived in the late thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century. He was born into a Jewish family in Alexandria and was taught the Hebrew Scriptures in childhood by his father. By his own account, both his father and he were “Jewish scholars” ( min ʿulamāʾ banī Isrāʾīl). Saʿīd accepted Islam in his hometown in the second half of May 1298, at a time when a certain Ibn al-Muwaffaq was a preacher in the local mosque. After his conversion, Saʿīd took up residence in Damascus. He p…

see Pilgrimages and Pilgrimage Rituals, Saints' TombsNorman A. Stillman

see Rabat-SaléNorman A. Stillman

Avram Salem (Sālim; d. 1907) was a Jewish medical student turned activist in the Young Turk movement. Originally from Salonica, Avram and his brother Asher both studied medicine at the Royal Medical Academy in Istanbul. While there they became involved in political activitiesdirected against the reactionary regime of Sultan Abdülhamit II (r. 1876–1909) and were exiled to Tripoli in 1897 for “having nourished modern ideas.” Simon notes that they, together with the physician Dr. Albert Bakish, were almost the only Jewish activists sent to Libya.Avram and possibly his brother esca…

Emmanuel Raphael Salem (1859–1940) was a lawyer and specialist in international law, as well as an active member of the Jewish communities of Salonica and Istanbul during the final decades of the Ottoman Empire. Named after his ancestor Rabbi Emmanuel Salem, he was born to Raphael Salem, a moneychanger, and Flor née Carasso; through his mother, he was related to the political activist and fellow Salonican lawyer Emmanuel Carasso (Karasu, 1862–1934). His early education consisted of both traditional religious studies and modern subjects, and he had mastered Turk…

Sālim Manṣūra (1916–2007) was born in Sanʿa in Yemen and entered his father Yaʿīsh’s alcohol and rosewater business, an enterprise that was lucrative but dangerous because of the severe punishment for selling alcohol to Muslims (in fact, Yaʿīsh Manṣūra’s home was once demolished on the orders of Imām Yaḥyā Ḥamīd al-Dīn). Through his trade in luxury goods and alcohol, Sālim Manṣūra developed close ties with the imām’s family and especially his son and heir, Imām Aḥmad (d. 1962).Due to his unusual familiarity with the inner workings of the Muslim courts, Manṣūra often acte…

Salmon ben Jeroham (Yerūḥam),—known in Arabic as Sulaym, or Sulaymān, ibn Ruḥaym, flourished in Jerusalem around the middle of the tenth century alongside such important Karaite littérateurs as Abu ʾl-Surri ibn Zūṭṭā, David ben Abraham al-Fāsī, Ḥasan ben Mashiaḥ, Sahl ben Maṣliah, Japheth (Yefet) ben ʿEli, and Joseph ibn Nūḥ. According to the chronicle of Ibn al-Hītī he died in Aleppo. His patronymic should probably be spelled Yerūḥam, as implied by the rhyme with yenūḥam in ( inter alia) the proem to his commentary on Esther (Ms. RNL Yevr.-Arab. I 4467, fol. 1v), though …

see ShalomNorman A. Stillman

Şalom ( Shalom) is a weekly newspaper in Istanbul that was founded in 1947 by the journalist Avram Leyon and is now published by Gözlem Gazetecilik Basın ve Yayın. The only paper serving the Jewish community in Turkey, it focuses on news of the Turkish Jewish community, domestic and international affairs, and Jewish culture and traditions. In addition, Şalom has op-ed columns that discuss social and political issues in Turkey and abroad. Şalom’s motto, “ A lo tuerto tuerto, a lo dereço dereço” (Right for the right, crookedness for the crooked), is printed above the masthead of every issue.Af…

1.  Origins and Glory Days, 1430–1595 The Jewish community of pre-Ottoman Salonica was mostly Greek-speaking, and its life-style was much the same as that of the city’s Greek Christian residents. The Ottoman conquest of Salonica in 1430 did little to change this. With the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, however, Sultan Mehmet II ordered all the Jewish residents of Salonica moved to his new capital as part of the sürgün programof population transfers. As a result, there were in all likelihood no Jews at all in Salonica between 1453 and 1492, since none …

al-Salṭana, Ḥisām, MashhadṢalūbā seeBustanay Salūnī n-nās (People Ask Me, Sami Elmaghribi), Elmaghribi, Samy (Amzallag)Salusque Lusitano seeUsque, Solomon ben Abraham Salut cousin (film, Merzak Allouache), Elmaleh, Gad şalvar (trousers), Clothing, Jewelry and Make-up, Clothing, Jewelry and Make-upsalvation, Abraham ibn Ezra on, Ibn Ezra, Abraham (Abu Iṣḥāq)Salzer Weissmann, Hélène, Béhar, RachelSamanpazari Synagogue (Ankara), AnkaraSamaria, Samaritans under Muslim Rule in Ottoman Period, Samaritans under Muslim RuleSamaritans  in Abbasid period   dress codes,…

The archaeological history of Shechem, the chief city of Samaria, goes back to the fourth millennium B.C.E. Early in the second millennium, it is mentioned in the Egyptian execration texts. Over the centuries, the district was continuously populated. The Samaritans, as they emerged, always retained their capital, and the rural population of Samaria preserved their ethnic identity. Despite severe reduction in numbers in the medieval period, they never disappeared completely and survived in their old homeland.1. Early Islamic period (634–1099)The victory of the Muslims at the batt…

Samarkand, today the second largest city in Uzbekistan, is one of the oldest cities in the part of Central Asia known historically as Transoxiana.  It was large and well populated in antiquity as well as in early Islamic times. Located at the crossroads between India, Afghanistan, Iran, and the Turkish steppes, along the Silk Road to Turkestan and China, it was an intensely fertile region, where agriculture flourished thanks to irrigation sustained by the Zarafshān River.Although the Jewish presence in Samarkand can be assumed to be ancient because of the trade routes …

Abū Naṣr al-Samawʾal ibn Yaḥyā al-Maghribī (d. 1175), a renowned mathematician and physician, was the son of Judah ibn Abūn (Abū ʾl-Baqā Yaḥyā ibn ʿAbbās al-Maghribī), a rabbi and poet from Fez who moved to Baghdad prior to al-Samawʾal’s birth, and of Hannah, the learned daughter of Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm al-Baṣrī al-Lāwī (the Levite). As a child, Samawʾal was taught Hebrew writing, the Hebrew Bible, and the commentary literature by his father. From the age of thirteen, he was trained as a mathematician and physician…

Joseph ben Isaac Sambari, who lived in Cairo probably between 1640 and 1703, was a scholar with unique interests. Whereas most of his contemporaries had no interest in writing history, Sambari, in addition to engaging in biblical studies, was also a noted historian. His teacher was Ḥananiah Barhon, and his patron was Raphael Joseph, the chief financier (Ar. ṣarrāf bāshī) of the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Qaraqash ʿAlī. Like David Conforte, Sambari attended Abraham Scandari’s rabbinic academy, and over the years he made considerable use of its library. Shimon Shtober, who has writte…

A famous physician in Cairo, Samuel (Abū Manṣūr) ben Hananiah came from a family of physicians that included his father and brother and was appointed court physician to the Fatimid caliph al-Ḥāfiẓ (r. 1131–1149). According to Muslim chroniclers, his master, facing the prospect of a civil war between his two sons, summoned Samuel immediately upon his ascent to the throne along with another physician, a Christian. He asked Samuel to prepare a deadly drug for one of the sons. Samuel refused, claiming he did not know how to prepa…

Samuel ben Daniel ben Azariah was the eldest of the four sons of the Palestinian gaon Daniel ben Azariah (1051–1062). He was born around 1050, and when his father died, he moved with his mother and siblings to Damascus. By 1074, Samuel was the head of the Jewish community in Damascus and of a rabbinic court there. He bore the yeshiva title “third” and also the title of nasi. Samuel was the probable author of a florid public epistle announcing his father’s death, the middle part of which has survived in the Cairo Geniza.Marina RustowBibliographyGil, Moshe.  A History of Palestine, 634–1099, tra…

Samuel ben David was exilarch in Baghdad during the Mongol conquest of 1258. His name appears in the letter of Jacob ben Elijah of Valencia (or of Venice?) to the apostate Pablo Christiani describing the situation of the Jews in Baghdad at the time. In order to raise funds to defend the city against the Mongol forces, the Abbasid caliph al-Mustaʿṣim (r. 1247–1258) imposed an enormous tax on the Jews, allegedly at the behest of Muslims who, according to Jacob, claimed that the head of the yeshiva and the exilarch were extremely wealthy: “the head of the yeshi…

Almost nothing is known about Samuel ben Hananiah, who lived in al-Andalus in the eleventh century, possibly in the second half. The only information about him is from Moses ibn Ezra, who states in Kitāb al-Muḥāḍara wa 'l-Mudhākara (p. 72 ) that he was a contemporary of Isaac Ibn Ghiyyāth, the renowned religious scholar and poet from Lucena, which may indicate that Samuel ben Hananiah was connected to this important center of Jewish life and culture, although there is no confirming evidence. Ibn Ezra describes him as virtuous, devout,…

Samuel ben Ḥophni (d. 1013) was the gaon of the Sura yeshiva and an original exegete, theologian, and halakhist who continued in the Judeo-Arabic cultural and literary path forged by Saʿadya Gaon. Ben Ḥophni was a scion of a family that occupied a leadership position at the Pumbedita yeshiva in the tenth century. His grandfather Kohen Ṣedeq ben Joseph was gaon of Pumbedita from 917 to 935. His uncle Neḥemiah was gaon from 960 to 968, and his father, Neḥemiah’s younger brother, had been av bet din (chief judge of the court). Around 998, Samuel was selected to succeed Ṣemaḥ Ṣedeq b…

Samuel ben Hoshaʿna was one of the central figures of the Jerusalem yeshiva in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. He first appears in Cairo Geniza records in a letter from 990 dealing with yeshiva affairs but does not yet have a title. He subsequently advanced to the rank of ḥaver (fellow of the academy), was named fourth by 1002 at the latest, and was styled third by 1004, the highest rank he attained. His piyyuṭim(liturgical poems) were preserved in the Geniza. Samuel was also the author of a letter written in 1002 describing the Fatimid battles in Palesti…

Sanʿa (Ar. Ṣanʿāʾ), the capital of the Republic of Yemen, has been the principal city of Yemen and its religious, political, and economic center throughout history, although for political reasons rulers have frequently preferred other cities as their capital. Sanʿa is located at an elevation of 2,200 meters (7,218 feet) above sea level on a plateau on the western slope of Jabal Nuqūm at the center of the Yemeni Highlands, 170 kilometers (106 miles) from the Red Sea coast and 300 kilometers (186 …

Sanandaj (Sene, Sinna, Sinno) is the capital of the Iranian province (Pers. ustān) of Kurdistan and lies approximately 129 kilometers (80 miles) north of Kirmanshah. It was founded around 1640. The city was the seat of the Kurdish princes and nobility of Ardalan and a center of Kurdish and Persian poetry and other literary productivity. The Muslim-Kurdish population is Sunni, in contrast to the generally Shī’ī population in the rest of Iran. In addition to the Kurdish majority, Christian Chaldeans, Armenia…

Santarém (Ar. Shantarīn) is a city in Portugal to the northeast of Lisbon. It had an important Jewish community throughout the Middle Ages, but there are no details about its Jews during the Islamic period. The first reliable information about a Jewish presence dates from 1140, when King Afonso Henriques (Alfonso I)conquered Santarém and found a noteworthy number of Jews and a synagogue considered to be the oldest in Portugal. He was the first Portuguese king to issue legislation on the relationships between Jews and Christians.In 1265, Dinis (Denis) ascended the Portuguese thron…

see Ṣanūʿ (Sanua), Yaʿqūb (James)Norman A. Stillman

Yaʿqūb Ṣanūʿ, an Egyptian patriot, journalist, and playwright also known as James Sanua, represents one of the rare instances of a Jew who was actively involved in Egyptian politics. His father, Raphael, was a Sephardi Jew who had come to Egypt from Livorno and under the Capitulations (Ar. imtiyāzāt) enjoyed the status of a protégé. Yaʿqūb, born in Cairo in 1839, received a scholarship to study in Europe and went to Livorno for three years. On his return to Cairo, he earned a living for a few years by teaching foreign languages (of which he k…

see BrazilNorman A. Stillman

Jacob Saphir (1822–1886) was a Jewish traveler and writer born in Oshmyany (Ashmyany) in what is now Belarus. His family moved to Palestine while he was still a child, settling in Safed, but in 1836, after their deaths, he moved to Jerusalem. In 1848, the Jewish community of Safed commissioned Saphir to travel as a meshullaḥ (emissary) through "the southern lands"  to collect alms, the so-called ḥaluqa, for the poor of Jerusalem. In 1854, he undertook a second journey, this time to raise funds for the construction of the Ḥurva Synagogue in Jerusalem, which…

Sapho, a multi-talented artist best known as a singer with a strong East/West repertoire and a supporter of peace and human rights, was born in 1950 to Jewish parents in Marrakesh. At age sixteen, she immigrated with her family to France, and was soon accepted by the Petit Conservatoire de Mireille in Paris. Despite a 1977 contract with RCA, she did not receive much publicity until her second album,  Janis (1980), produced in London, which was followed in quick succession with three more albums by 1983. During this period, she became known for her dramatic stage …

Ḥanokh Saporta (Ṣaporta, Sasportas) was a scholar from the Iberian Peninsula who moved to the Ottoman Empire before the expulsion of 1492. Born into one of Catalonia’s foremost Jewish families, Saporta first settled in Edirne (Adrianople) together with other distinguished rabbis from Spain and Portugal who became the leaders of the local Romaniot, Ashkenazi, and Italian congregations. Around 1481, sometime after the arrival of Isaac Ṣarfati from Germany, Saporta moved to the new Ottoman capital of Istanbul. There he headed a yeshiva whose students came from many different …

Saragossa is a city on the river Ebro, in Aragon, in the northeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula. It began as a Celtiberian village on which the Carthaginians built a military post called Salduie. In Roman times it was called Caesaraugusta, in honor of the emperor Augustus. The Muslims reduced the name to Saraqusṭa when they took the city in 714. The Christians called it Zaragoza.1. Muslim SaraqusṭaDuring the emirate of Cordova, Saragossa resisted an attack by Charlemagne in 777 and became the most important city of the Upper March (Ar. al-thaghr al-aʿlā) of Muslim Spain. During the…

see Bosnia, Bosnia-HerzegovinaAvigdor Levy

Abdol Hossein Sardari was Iran’s diplomatic representative in Paris after its legation relocated to Vichy in 1940.  He  safeguarded the lives and property of Iranian Jews in France by persuading the Nazis that Iranian “followers of Moses” were of Iranian blood and Aryan racial stock.Abdol Hossein Sardari was born into a privileged aristocratic family in Tehran in 1914. His mother, Afsar-Salṭana, was Shah Nāṣir al-Dīn Qājār’s (r. 1848–1896) niece, married to the eccentric Sulaymān Adīb al-Salṭana. The couple had four sons and three daughte…

The Ṣarfati (Ṣarfaty, Ṣerfaty, ha-Ṣarfati) family of rabbis, jurists ( dayyanim), and government-appointed civil leaders ( negidim, sing. nagid ) was prominent in Morocco from the sixteenth through the twentieth century. The family traced its genealogy to descendants of the famed Jacob ben Meʾir Tam(Rabbenu Tam, ca. 1100–ca. 1171) who had migrated to Spain from France (Heb. Ṣarfat; hence the family name). After the Spanish expulsion in 1492, one branch of the family settled in Fez. A complete Ṣarfati family tree may be found in Benṭov’s introduction to Toledot Yiṣḥaq.The first note…

Isaac Ṣarfati was a German rabbi who settled in the Ottoman Empire prior to the conquest of Istanbul in 1453. He is thought to have been the author of the famous circular letter urging the Jewish communities of Central Europe to immigrate to the Ottoman realms. Although his surname indicates a family origin in northern France ( Ṣarfat), Ṣarfati came to the Ottoman Empire from Germany. Soon afterwards, he became a prominent member of the rabbinate of the Jewish community in Edirne (Adrianople), then the Ottoman capital. Rosanes and others have argued that Ṣarfati served as chief ra…

Karen Gerşon Şarhon is a scholar of Judeo-Spanish, a singer in the Los Pasharos Sepharadis group, and the coordinator of the Ottoman-Turkish Sephardic Research Center. She was born in 1958 in Istanbul and graduated from Robert College and later on from the Linguistics and American Literature Department of the Bosphorus University (formerly Robert College) in Istanbul. She has an M.A. in social pyschology, having written her thesis on the Judeo-Spanish language, and has taught English in the Foreign Languages School of Bosphorus University.In 2006 Şarhon  became the coordinato…

see Banking (Modern Period)Norman A. Stillman

Sar Shalom ben Boaz served as gaon of Sura from either 847 or 851 until 857. More than one hundred of his responsa (or those attributed to him) have survived. Like gaonic responsa in general, the majority were addressed to the Jews of Qayrawan. Their survival attests to the strong relationship between Sura and Qayrawan under Sar Shalom’s gaonate. His immediate predecessor at Sura, Kohen Ṣedeq bar Ivomay (or Ikhomay), and his successor, Naṭronay bar Hilay, similarly corresponded extensively with Qayrawan. All three maintained ties with the Jews of the Iberi…

Abū Zikrī Sar Shalom (Yaḥyā) ben Moses ha-Levi served as raʾīs al-yahūd (nagid) in Fustat around 1170 to 1171 and again from around 1173 to 1195. Like his predecessors in office Maṣliaḥ (1127–1139), Samuel ben Hananiah (1140–1159), and his brother Nethanel ha-Levi ben Moses (1159–ca. 1169), he bore the title gaon. Before his appointment to the headship of the Jews, Sar Shalom held the post of av bet din (chief judge) in the branch of the Palestinian yeshiva in Damascus. According to the twelfth-century traveler Benjamin of Tudela, the gaon of the yeshiva was Sar Shalom’s brother Azariah.…

Israel Sarug (d. 1610) was born into a prominent Egyptian rabbinic family. His activities in the first few decades of his life are uncertain. It may be that he became acquainted with Isaac Luria in Egypt and followed him to Safed, but it is also possible that he arrived in Safed only after Luria’s death to study with his surviving disciples. What is clear is that in 1594 he went to Italy, where he had an influence on Pico della Mirandola and other Neoplatonists. One of his most illustrious students was Naphtali Ṣevi Bacharach, whose voluminous ʿ Emeq ha-Melekh (Valley of the King) set forth …

Jacob Sasportas (ca. 1610–1698), born in Oran, Algeria, was one of the most outspoken opponents of the messianic movement around Shabbetay Ṣevi and his prophet, Nathan of Gaza. He is best known for his Ṣiṣat Novel Ṣevi (Heb. The Fading Flower  of Glorious Beauty [Ṣevi] - Isa. 28:1), an invaluable collection of letters and documents about the Sabbatean movement. An abridged version, Kiṣṣur Ṣiṣat Novel Ṣevi, was printed in Amsterdam in 1737 and again in Altona in 1757, but the full work was only published by Isaiah Tishby in 1954.Sasportas was by all accounts a divisive character invo…

Aaron ben Joseph Sasson(1550 or 1556–1626) was a rabbinical scholar and author in the Ottoman Empire. A native of Salonica, he studied in the yeshivot of that city and became an outstanding student of Mordechai Maṭalon (d. 1580). Counted as one of Salonica’s foremost scholars, Sasson was a respected teacher and rabbi, as well as an adjudicator ( poseq) of questions of religious law. Petitions reached him from cities near and far, and his opinions were cited by many of Salonica’s rabbis, particularly Solomon ben Isaac ha-Levi(le-Vet ha-Levi, 1532–1600), his father-in-law. The …

The Sassoons (Sasons, Sassons) are a prominent Jewish family of Baghdadiorigin whose commercial and financial networks dominated trade in India and the Far East at the height of the British colonial period. Members of the family engaged in philanthropic and scholarly enterprises throughout the Jewish world. The Sassoons were typical of the Jewish notable families that prospered in business and finance in the late Ottoman period cities likeIstanbul (the Zonana, Aciman/Adjiman, Camondo/Kamondo, and Gabbai families), Izmir (Smyrna), Damascus, and Acre (Akko, the Farḥi family), a…

Linet Şaül is a Turkish Jewish opera singer (soprano). She was born in 1970 in Istanbul. She graduated in 1995 from the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford in the United States and later studied with the Italian baritone Licinio Montefusco. Since 1998 she has been performing at the Izmir State Opera. Some of her roles include Don Giovanni (Zerlina), Faust (Siébel), Fidelio (Marzelline), Barber of Seville (Rosina), and Carmen (Frasquita). She has given concerts in Turkey, Italy, South Africa, and Uruguay. In 1995 she was a finalist in the Internationa…

see Banking (Modern Period)Norman A. Stillman

Sāzmān-i Bānovān-i Yahudī-yi Irānī, the Iranian Jewish Women’s Organization (IJWO), was founded in Los Angeles in 1976 as a successor to Sāzmān-i Bānovān-i Yahud-i Iran (SBYI; The Jewish Ladies’ Organization of Iran), which was founded in Tehran in 1947. The SBYI was established in response to the need to ameliorate health and educational conditions for Jewish women and children. Although it still exists in Iran in name, its apogee was between 1947 and 1978. Its organizational activities included the establishment o…

David ben Moses ha-Kohen Scali (Sqalī) was born during the Ten Days of Repentance in 1861 in Debdou, Morocco, a city whose description as a city of priests ( kohanim) he linked to its origin in the Spanish city of Seville. He died in Oran, Algeria, in 1949. Scali ascribed great importance to his priestly ancestry and diligently detailed his descent from the priestly families of ancient Israel. As did members of other families in the Sephardi diaspora, Scali indicated his priestly status by attaching the word kohen (priest) to his surname (e.g., Kohen-al-Ḥaddād, Kohen-Ṭawīl, Kohen-…

Georges Scemama was born into a Jewish family in Tunis around 1905. He held Tunisian citizenship and worked as a clerk. In the early 1930s he was active in the Union of Business Employees. He was also a member of the underground leadership of the Communist Party from 1933 to 1936, and in June 1936 became a member of its secretariat. He represented Tunisia at the Congress of the French Communist Party in Arles from December 25 to 27, 1937, and was elected secretary of the Tunisian Communist Party at the Ariana Congress  in Tunis on May 20–2…

Nessim Scemmama (Nissim Samama, Shamama) was born in 1805 into a very humble family in the ḥāra (Jewish quarter) of Tunis. Ambitious by nature, Scemmama opened a fabric shop in the ḥāra, the proceeds from which supported him and his extended family, including his three wives (see Polygyny). Scemmama’s life took a dramatic turn when one of his clients, the general Maḥmūd ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAyyād, impressed by his industriousness, invited him to join his retinue. As the general’s servant, Scemmama had access to the court of the bey, where he impressed everyone he met with his ha…

Sedat Sami Scialom (1939—2008), a well-known Turkish businessman, was president of the Grafika Maya Reklam Ajansi, a major advertising agency founded by his father. Scialom graduated from the Lycée Saint Michel in Şişli, Istanbul in 1957 and from the Faculty of Economics of Istanbul University in 1961. He then went to Belgium for his higher education, graduating from the École Supérieure Technique de Publicité in 1963.            While studying in Brussels, Scialom worked at Bodden et Dechy, an advertising agency, as a client representative. Later, he moved t…

The scientific work of Jews in the Islamic world represents an important part of the history of science in Jewish civilization. To begin with, there are reports, though difficult to verify, that a Jewish physician in Syria, Māsarjawayh, translated a Syriac text on medicine into Arabic in 684. Then, the best-known astrologer of the Abbasid Caliphate, Māshāʾallāh (d. ca. 810–815), was Jewish, and was among those responsible for ascertaining the most propitious time for the founding of Baghdad. Of Māshāʾallāh’s writings in Arabic, only excerpts and cita…

Lucien Sciuto (1868–1947) was a journalist, poet, and writer who was active in the last years of the Ottoman Empire and afterwards in Egypt. Born into a religious family in Salonica in 1868, he received his primary education at the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) school there, continuing his studies independently after leaving school at the age of fourteen. He began his literary career in 1884 with Poèmes misanthropiques, and another volume of poetry in French that included the satirical “l’Or.” In 1894, he published Paternité (Paris, 1894), which included a poem dedicated…

see United States of AmericaNorman A. Stillman

Paul Sebag was a Communist activist, sociologist, and historian of Tunisia. Born into a bourgeois family in Tunis in 1919, he was educated in Paris. On his return to Tunis, he joined the Communist Party in 1936 and was one of its leaders from 1939 to 1943. He was arrested at the beginning of 1941 and sentenced to life at hard labor but was released in late 1942. After the liberation of Tunisia from German occupation in May 1943, he became a member of the editorial board of the underground communist newspaper L’Avenir Social.Sebag was professor of philosophy at the prestigious Lycée Carn…

Seder Eliyahu is a semi-midrashic work that differs from the majority of midrashic compilations in style, structure, language, and thematic emphasis. It consists of a series of teachings in homiletic style that incorporate midrashic materials, stories, and parables attributed in some cases to prominent tannaim, and presents itself as the work of a narrator who speaks at times in the first person. Unlike most midrashic works, Seder Eliyahu is not structured as an anthological or collective compil…

The Book of Josippon, or Sefer Josippon, is an account of Jewish history during the Second Temple period. Since the Middle Ages it has been considered a central source in the study of Jewish antiquity. It was widely distributed in several versions that vary in language and length. Scholars have tried to determine which version was the original Josippon. The lack of satisfying explanations, combined with the book’s importance and complexity, resulted in David Flusser’s comprehensive research, published in two volumes in 1979 and 1981. Flusser determined that the shor…

Sefer Maṭʿame Binyamin (The Book of Benjamin’s Delicacies), a Judeo-Persian homiletic commentary to the Pentateuch, was written by Benjamin ben Elijah of Kashan, a preacher active in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Little is known about the author. From the available Judeo-Persian manuscripts, it appears that he was a poet as well as a preacher in the Jewish community of Kashan, where he completed Maṭʿame Binyamin in 1823. Sefer Maṭʿame Binyamin is structured as a homiletic and didactic commentary on the weekly Torah portions (Heb. parashot). The complete work, comprisi…

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…

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…

Born on September 29, 1874 in Tatar-Bazrdjik (Pazardzik), Bulgaria, Oro Sémach (née Guéron) was one of the first women to attend school in Bulgaria. She was educated at a school opened by the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1888, and at the age of twenty became principal of the AIU girls’ school in her hometown. In September 1895, she married one of the leaders of the Alliance, Yomtob Sémach (1869–1940), scion of a wealthy family in Edirne (Adrianople), and they had four children. Adventurous in nature, they followed the caravan routes to Damascus and Baghda…

Yomtob Sémach(1869–1940) was one of the most influential educators of the Alliance Israelite Universelle(AIU) system in Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire, and Morocco over a period spanning fifty years. He was born in Yambol, Bulgaria, in 1869 into a wealthy merchant family originally from Edirne (Adrianople) and was educated at the local AIU schools and then at the École Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris. He began his teaching career at an AIU school in Sousse, Tunisia, in 1891, but returned to Bulgaria two years later following the death of his father, and was appointed f…

Ṣemaḥ Ṣedeq ben Isaacserved as gaon of Sura from sometime after 987 until before 999. He was the first gaon of the Sura academy after the four-decade closure that began in 942. A grandson of Ṣemaḥ ben Palṭoy, gaon of Pumbedita from 872 to 890, Ṣemaḥ Ṣedeq corresponded with Elhanan ben Shemariah, whom he knew as a student of Sherira and Hay Gaon in Pumbedita, and he made efforts to strengthen ties between Sura and Fustat. In letters he wrote to Elhanan preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Semaḥ explained his position on theological topics such as God's unity and attributes.  He…

1.    Demographic ImpactThe 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…

After the riots of 1391, the situation of Spanish Jewry became increasingly difficult, and during the century leading up to the expulsion, a change in the orientation of Spanish-Jewish culture took place. The very enterprise of Torah qua study and application of Jewish law was becoming less than central to the community’s self-definition. Against this backdrop, Rabbi Isaac Canpanton (1360–1463) consciously elaborated a novel hermeneutic methodology of talmudic study, based on the insight that there was a close inner affinity between medieval semantics (based on Aristotle’s De In…

1.DefinitionThe term Sephardim refers to descendants of the Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula who settled in many parts of the world and maintained various characteristics of their identity as well as a sense of affinity to a greater “Sephardi Nation” worldwide. The typical characteristics of the group are the use of the Judeo-Spanish language (the vernacular called Judezmo, the written language called Ladino); adherence to the Sephardi liturgy and rites, and to certain legal rules and pra…

Sephardi (pl. Sephardim) refers either to the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula and their descendants after the expulsion from Spain in 1492 or, in juxtaposition to Ashkenazi (Ashkenazim), to one of the two major traditions of Jewish law and custom, with the Sephardim following Rabbi Joseph Caro’s sixteenth-century code, the Bet Yosef. In either case, the meaning of the term has varied over time and is best understood in changing historical contexts. It derives from the place-name Sepharad, which appears in the biblical book of Obadiah (1:20) and was identified as Spain in the Aramaic Targum …

Serah bat Asher was a granddaughter of the biblical patriarch Jacob (Genesis 46:17). A cave and synagogue connected with her in central Iran, 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) west of Isfahan, near a village called Pīr Bakrān in the area of Linjān, has become one of the holiest places of Iranian Jewry and an important pilgrimage destination.Legend explains how Serah ended up so far from the land of her forefathers and why this place is so holy for Jews. According to a local tradition partially based on Midrash ha-Gadol, when the sons of Jacob returned from their second journey to buy food in …

Surrounded by Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, and Bosnia, Serbia (Ott. Tur. Ṣırb) is an inland country in the northwestern Balkans. The earliest records of a Jewish presence in Serbia date from the late fourteenth century, when Jews from Hungary settled in Belgrade. They were followed in the fifteenth century by Jews from Bavaria and Italy. With the conquest of Belgrade in 1521, Ottoman rule of Serbia was consolidated. After the conquest of Buda in 1526, more than two thousand Jews from Hungary were settled in Ottoman territories, and some of them came to Belgrade. In …

Saul Serero (1566–1655) was descended from Jews expelled from Spain who settled in Fez. He served as rabbi in that city in the first half of the seventeenth century. During the first decade of his career, Morocco was in the throes of a fierce civil war between the heirs of Sultan Aḥmad al-Manṣūr. The war brought considerable suffering to the Jews of Fez, as it did to everyone else in the country. Serero and several of his colleagues were signatories on a number of regulations instituted by desce…

Abraham Serfaty is a internationally prominent Moroccan political activist who spent many years in prison and became a symbol of the popular resistance against King Hassan II’s authoritarian government. Staunchly anti-Zionist and a supporter of the Palestinians, Serfaty represents a model of the Moroccan Jew in eyes of many of his Muslim fellow citizens—assimilated, respected, and attached to his ancestors’ North African homeland. Many of his coreligionists, however, see him as subversive and marginal to the Jewish community. Abraham Serfaty was born in 1926 in Casablanc…

Raphael Jedidiah Solomon ben Joshua Ṣeror (1681–1738) was one of the rabbinical elite of the Jewish community of Algeria in the early eighteenth century, the last era of communal stability before the French occupation and the ensuing erosion of the traditional way of life. Although a leading religious scholar, Ṣeror also possessed broad general knowledge: “He knew the quality and the matters of the country. . . and all turn to him for his medical wisdom, for his great acumen in the understanding of nature that he knows and with which he is familiar” (Introduction to Pri Ṣaddiq).Ṣeror was re…

The town of Serres(Gk. Serrai; Turk. Siroz) in eastern Macedonia was known as Siris in Antiquity and Dirra in Byzantine times. Jews may have lived in Serres throughout the Byzantine period, but there are only a few references to a Jewish presence there in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Benjamin of Tudela, who visited the region around 1167, mentions the towns of Demitrizi with fifty Jews and Drama with 140, either of which might have been Serres. The names of local Romaniot families included Galimidi, Meshulam, Mizrahi, and Ḥazzan. The Ottomans conquered Serres, which the…

Jews lived in Sétif(Ar. Saṭīf), in the Constantine region of Algeria, in Roman times, according to inscriptions that confirm the existence of a synagogue in the ancient city of Sitifis. Whether Jews also lived there in the Middle Ages is by no means clear. The town is described by medieval Arab geographers such as al-Bakrī as large and having inexpensive markets, but no Jews are mentioned, nor does the name of the town appear in documents from the Cairo Geniza. The French entered the city in 1838 during the conquest of Algeria. In the early years o…

Seville (Ar. Ishbīliya) is the principal city of Andalusia in southwestern Spain. Jewish tradition holds that Jews first settled there at the time of the destruction of the First Temple (586 b.c.e.), but there is no evidence of a Jewish community until the Visigothic period. In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville, who authored polemics against the Jews, presided over the Third Council of Toledo, which enacted a series of anti-Jewish laws.In 712 Seville was conquered by Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr, and according to the anonymous Arab chronicle Akhbār Majmūʿa (p. 16) , he organized a Jewish guard …

Sfax (Ar. Safāqus) is an important port city on the Gulf of Gabès on the east-central coast of Tunisia. It is situated in the wide Tunisian central plain and is subject to influences both from the modern north and the more traditional south. Sfax was built in 849 on the ruins of the Roman cities of Taparura and Thaenae. Its economic basis lies in olive trees and olive oil, maritime industries (fish, sea sponges, shipbuilding, fishing nets), textiles, and phosphate and sulfur mining in nearby Gafsa.The origins of the Jewish community of Sfax are unknown. Cairo Geniza documents at…