Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World

see Kohen and HacohenNorman A. Stillman

Elie Cohen-Hadria was born in Tunis in 1898, but in 1921 was granted French citizenship because his mother, although born in Algeria, was a French citizen. He was educated in France and studied medicine in Lyons, specializing in the treatment of skin diseases. In 1924 he returned to Tunisia where, in addition to practicing medicine, he joined the Freemasons and became politically active. Elected secretary-general of the Tunisian Fédération Socialiste (SFIO), he served the party from the 1920s until Tunisian independence in 1956. He was also a columnist for the journal Tunis Socialiste.…

Victor Cohen-Hadria was born in Tunis in 1891. His father, a native Tunisian who worked as a bank clerk and later as an olive oil merchant, died in 1901. His mother was a French citizen born in Algeria. Cohen-Hadria was educated at the Lycée Carnot in Tunis and then went to France to study law in Aix-en-Provence. After graduation he was employed as a clerk in an attorney’s office, and worked nights at a newspaper to help support his family.Cohen-Hadria became a famous lawyer and very early in his career was made a judge ( juge de paix). He also taught at the Centre d’études de droit de Tunis, mai…

Nissim Claude Cohen (1941–2010) was born in Egypt, but his family emigrated to France in 1957. As a organic chemist, he headed research teams at Ciba-Geigy and Roussel-Uclaf (now Sanofi-Aventis) in Paris and later at Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis) in Basel, Switzerland, where he was head of molecular modeling. His teams were responsible for many patents. He settled in Jerusalem in 1996 and founded the high-tech company Syntex Ltd.Nissim Claude Cohen, the great-grandson of Ḥakham Zaki Cohen, was born March 18, 1941 in Cairo, where he attended the Lycée Français up to…

Julie Cohen-Scali Saguès, born in Oran, Algeria, in 1876, held a brevet élémentaire (teaching certification granted after three years of normal school) and brevet supérieur (certification granted after four years of normal school). From 1900 to 1904, she taught in the Alliance Israélite Universelle School for Girls in Tunis. In 1904 she was appointed principal of the AIU school in Fez, the following year she became the principal of the school in Tangier, and in 1911 she returned to the school where she had begun her career as the first…

According to many sources, bearers of the name Cohen-Tannoudji (also rendered Tanoudji, Tanugi, and Tenoudji) are all members of a single family. The name, which means “Tangier Kohen,” probably came into use with the twelfth-century Almohad conquests. At the end of the twelfth century, a Cohen family left Tangier for Sicily (see Palermo and Sicily) and joined the North African Jews there; the Latinized last name Tannugius was registered in Palermo in 1358. Expelled from Sicily by the edict of January 1493, the Cohen-Tanoudjis found a refuge in Tunis before being kicked out by Charles V i…

Born in Aleppo in 1829, Zaki Cohen (Zākī Kūhīn) was rabbi of the Beirut Jewish community. Around 1874, he founded Tiferet Yisrael (The Glory of Israel), also known in Arabic as al-Madrasa al-Waṭaniyya al-Isrāʾīliyya (The National Jewish School). Beirut’s first modern Jewish school, anteceding the Alliance Israélite Universelle school by four years, it was probably intended to be an alternative to Christian missionary schools. Tiferet Yisrael catered to the children of upper-class Jewish families, who came as boarders from neighboring count…

Tobias ben Moses Cohn (Ṭuviyya Cohen) (1652–1729) was a noted physician who served five successive Ottoman sultans. He was born in 1652 in Metz into a family of physicians from Poland (his grandfather Eleazar Cohn had gone to Poland from Palestine around the turn of the seventeenth century; his father, Moses Cohn, fled westward in 1648 to escape the Chmielnicki [Khmelnytsky] uprising). Orphaned at an early age, Cohn received a traditional upbringing in Metz and then was educated at a seminary in Cracow. He began his medical studies at the University of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in 1678, …

Mordechai Ricardo and other Sephardic Jews from neighboring Caribbean islands helped finance Colombia’s War of Independence led by Simón Bolívar. One of the first acts of the newly independent government in 1819 was to grant the rights of residence and religious freedom to Jews. The first Jews were mostly Sephardim who came to Columbia from Curaçao, among them the Senior, Correa, and Salas families. As early as 1832, Abraham Isaac Senior established a Jewish cemetery and organized a minyan. Soon afterwards, Rabbi Moisés De Sola arrived as the first religious leader. In 1854, David Perei…

The Comité Algérien d’Etudes Sociales (Algerian Committee for Social Studies) was founded during World War I to defend Jewish interests. Organized by a group of Jewish intellectuals led by Dr. Henri Aboulker, it came into being when the Jewish Consistory proved unable to defend its coreligionists against the resurgence of antisemitism in Algeria, especially in the army, and the French authorities adopted a passive attitude. The committee was active between 1915 and 1921.            From 1922 to 1930, the situation was relatively calm, but when antisemitism resurfac…

The Comité d’Aide et d’Assistance (CAA), originally called Comité d’Études d’Aide et d’Assistance, was a charitable organization founded in Algiers in 1947 by Aïzer Cherki (1882–1993) to help Moroccan Jews transiting through Algeria on their way to Israel. Jews in need would jam into the offices of the Jewish Consistory of Algiers at 11 rue Bab-el-Oued, in the lower casbah. Faced with this difficult situation, Aïzer Cherki showed both administrative skill and a legendary degree of humanity. He obtained funding, equipment, and supplies from Alge…

The Comité de Recrutement de la Main-d’Oeuvre Juive (Committee for the Recruitment of Jewish Manpower) was established by the Jewish leadership in Tunisia during the German occupation (November 1942–May 1943). Since it was responsible for all aspects of recruiting and organizing a labor force in accordance with German demands, its function was somewhat parallel to that of the Judenrat in Central and Eastern Europe. The members of the committee were Paul Ghez, Léon Moatti, George Krief, and Victor Bismut. The committee had a secretariat, a recruiting office (which…

The commenda (Aram. ʿ isqa) was a profit-sharing arrangement designed to circumvent the prohibition of lending funds to a co-religionist at interest. It facilitated financial partnerships by allowing an investor to place funds with an active partner, often for the purpose of long-distance trade. Such agreements enabled Jewish merchants to participate actively in both the Mediterranean trade and the India trade, because a single investor could have an interest in multiple cargoes being shipped at the same time, and a…

At the time of the Islamic conquests, most Jews lived in Babylonia and pursued occupations related to agriculture. There were, however, a number of important Jewish urban settlements—for example, Damascus and Alexandria—in which Jews would have been involved in crafts production; as well as Jewish communities in trading centers—such as Medina (see Hijaz) and Tyre, which supported Jewish endeavors in both local and long-distance trade. Yet investment in land, farming, and sharecropping were the primary sources of income for Jews in the early …

Mordecai ben Eliezer Comtino (1402–1482) was a rabbi, philologist, philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. Born in Constantinople, he studied under Hanoch Saporta, a distinguished Catalonian rabbi, and was greatly influenced by Sephardic culture and tradition even though he himself was a Romaniot or perhaps even of French origin. He left Constantinople in the early 1450s on the pretext of a plague epidemic and settled for a while in Edirne (Adrianople). He returned to the new Ottoman capital sometime after the conquest (May 29, 1453), and remained there until his death.In his t…

Israel ben Joseph Conegliano (Conian) was born in Padua around 1650 and died in Istanbul around 1717. He was a Jewish physician and diplomat in Padua, Venice, and the Ottoman Empire. Conegliano graduated from the medical school in his hometown on June 8, 1673, thereafter practicing in Venice for a couple of years before relocating to Istanbul in 1675. There he soon became the personal physician to the grand vizier, Karam Mustafa Pasha (in office, 1676–1683), and also treated Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648–1687). On October 10, 1682, the Venetian bailo (ambassador) appointed Conegliano as …

Albert Confino (1866–1958) was a teacher, principal, and school inspector in the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) educational network. Born in Carnabat (Karnabat), Bulgaria, Confino was sent along with his brothers to attend the Alliance school in Edirne (Adrianople), in Ottoman Turkey. The principal, Abraham Cazès (1854–1924), was the younger brother of the prominent AIU educator David Cazès (1850–1913). From Edirne Confino went to the Springer Institute in Paris, a Jewish boarding school sometimes used for future AIU teachers. His studies, begun in 188…

David Conforte (1618–ca. 1677) was born into a scholarly Sephardic family in Salonica. His teacher, Asher Zevulun, was a disciple of Conforte’s grandfather, also named David Conforte. The younger Conforte studied Torah and Kabbala in Salonica, and in 1644 moved to Jerusalem to continue his education in a bet midrash. He also spent a year in Cairo, where he studied in the bet midrash of Abraham Skandari, and some time in Gaza, learning with Rabbi Moses Najara. In 1648, he returned to Salonica, but he went back to Jerusalem in 1652 to found his own academy. In 1671 he m…

The Conseil des Communautés Israélites du Maroc (CCIM), founded in 1947, was an umbrella organization that brought together the heads of the Jewish communities of Moroccoand filled the function of a central organization for Moroccan Jewry. It was established during the French protectorate (1912–1956) within the framework of the reforms carried out after World War II by the colonial administration. In the immediate postwar years the younger generation of Jewish leaders were calling for changes in the communal organizatio…

The city of Constantine (Ar. Qustanṭīna) is located on the coastal ridge of the Atlas Mountains in northeastern Algeria about 531 kilometers (330 miles) east of Algiers. It is the capital of Constantine Province. This ancient city, 80 kilometers (50 miles) inland from the Mediterranean, stands on a plateau 650 meters (2,133 feet) above sea level; the plateau descends into ravines as deep as 300 meters (984 feet), and the Rhummel River runs through the easternmost one. Thanks to its location at a ma…

Mounting Jewish-Muslim friction in Constantine during the Algerian War of Independence exploded on Saturday morning, May 12, 1956.  As Jews coming from morning prayers took a Shabbat apéritif at Jewish-owned cafés on the Rue de France, which straddled the Muslim and Jewish quarters, a Muslim threw a grenade into a café.  No one was injured, but when the assailant fled, several Jews opened fire and followed in pursuit, eventually killing up to thirty Muslims and wounding several others. The Jews who retaliated in this way were members of the Misgeret (The Framework), a secret local s…

From Friday, August 3, to Monday, August 6, 1934, intermittent rioting occurred between Jews and Muslims in the city of Constantine in Algeria. The initial cause occurred on Friday night, when Elie Khalifa, a Jewish tailor and zouave (colonial soldier), insulted several Muslims who were washing in the mosque across from his home. Khalifa subsequently claimed that he had cursed the Muslims, their nudity, and Islam; the Muslim men claimed that he had urinated on them and against the wall of the mosque. As this discrepancy sugg…

According to the early Islamic historians Ibn Isḥāq and al-Wāqidī, Muḥammad struck an agreement with the inhabitants of Medina (originally Yathrib) shortly after he arrived there in 622. Many historians refer to this document as the Constitution of Medina. Ibn Isḥāq’s Sīra, or canonical biography of the Prophet, is the only historical source to preserve the text. In Ibn Isḥāq’s work, the document defines the relationship between three groups in Medina: the Muslim emigrants from Mecca who came to Medina in the first wave, Medinese converts to Islam, and some of the Jews of Medina.The ag…

Abdar, CarmellaPhD Among her main areas of expertise are folk art and material culture of Yemenite Jews, mainly rural communities. She has published several articles: “The dress code as an expression of ethno-religious status of the Jews”; “The Habbanic bride’s dress in 1950s in Israel—a bridge between past and present”; “The Yemenite jewelry and the myth of antiquity” She wrote the book Weaving a Story [Hebrew, 1999] about a village in Yemen and edited the book Maʾase Rokem: Dress and Jewelry in…

1. In the middle agesConversion to Islam by Jews in the Middle Ages must be examined in two different contexts. The first is conversion as an element of Islamization, the complex religious, social, and cultural changes that transformed societies of the Middle East, North Africa (see Maghreb), al-Andalus, and parts of Central Asia over the course of two to four centuries (or more in some areas). Second are records of individual Jews, known and unknown, who converted. Evidence for these is found in Muslim narrative sources and in Jewish and Muslim legal writing.Understanding the impact o…

Born in 1917 in Essaouira (Mogador), Morocco, David Corcos, the son of Jacob Corcos and Hanna Abulafia was the scion of a family tracing back its origin to thirteenth-century Spain. His forebears were tujjār al-sulṭān (sultan’s merchants) involved in Morocco’s foreign trade from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and were among the founders of Essaouira.  David Corcos followed in their footsteps, becoming a successful and respected merchant in Agadir from 1938, engaged in import-export in the south of the country, but at the same time keenly interested in the history of Moroccan…

The Corcos family of merchants, entrepreneurs, and community leaders attained great prominence in Morocco from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Originally from Spain and Portugal, the family settled in Morocco and Italy after the expulsion in 1492. The Moroccan branch of the family first established itself in Fez, but family members also settled in Tetouan, and Safi. It was in Marrakesh, the capital, that the Corcos family rose to prominence in the eighteenth century. Members of the family also …

Joshua (Ichoua, Yechoua, Josué) ben Ḥayyim Corcos (1832–1929) belonged to an important Moroccan Jewish family whose members who had been royal merchants (Ar. tujjār al-sulṭān ) for at least two centuries and remained closely connected to the palace and the highest officials after the dismantlement of the royal monopolies in 1856. His father, Ḥayyim, head of the Jewish community of Marrakesh and the ḥevrat gemilut ḥasadim, enjoyed a privileged status as financier of the sultan, vizier, and governor. Ḥayyim hosted Moses Montefiore when he visited Morocco in 1864 and helped hi…

Stella Corcos (1858–1948) was an educator and philanthropist in Morocco. She was born in the United States, where her parents, Abraham Duran and Rebecca Montefiore, had settled, but after her father’s death, she and her mother and the other children returned to England. There Stella became a teacher and married Moses Corcos, a prominent merchant from Morocco.      In 1884, soon after she arrived in Essaouira (Mogador) with her husband, Stella noticed that Christian missionaries were focusing on the town’s poor Jewish girls. Stella set out to counter …

The city of Cordova (Ar. Qurṭurba; Sp. Córdoba) is situated on the Guadalquivir River in southern Spain. From the origins of the settlement in Punic times through its establishment as a patriarchate and in the Visigothic period, there is no clear information, whether archaeological or textual, regarding a Jewish presence or activity in the city until the defeat of Roderick, the last Visigothic king. It was then, according to some Islamic chronicles (e.g., Akhbār Majmūʿa, p. 14), that the Jews were entrusted with the defense of the city after the Muslim conquest (711). Beyond their pr…

The composer and singer Moshe Cordova, the son of Rabbi Nissim Cordova, was born in Edirne in 1881 but grew up in Istanbul. He learned to play the oud and the piano as a child, and began to compose music at an early age, becoming a master of the classical Ottoman maqām . As a young man, parallel to his musical interests, he pursued a successful business career in the textile industry (hence his nickname “Kazmirci” from cashmere).In Istanbul, Cordova was associated with the Mafṭirim choir, as were Isaac Algazi from Izmir and other Turkish cantors. The music he composed for…

The Coriat were a family of scholars in Morocco that probably originated in Coria, Spain. The first known member was Abraham Coriat, rabbi in Marrakesh in the fifteenth century. Isaac (ca. 1580), probably his son, was a kabbalist, dayyan, and head of the Jewish community in Marrakesh. Isaac’s son, Abraham II, was nominated as rabbi in Tetuan. Abraham II’s son Judah (d. 1788) was a dayyan, and the author of many works, some of which published by his descendants in Tofaḥ Saviv, a collection of rabbinical decisions, and Nofesh Sapir (Pisa, 1812). Judah’s son Isaac (d. 1805), who settled i…

As throughout Diaspora history, there were Jews in the Islamic world from the Middle Ages up to and including the modern era who served as officials and retainers at the courts of Muslim rulers. They served in much the same capacities as their coreligionists who served at courts in medieval Western Europe and in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Central Europe as physicians, advisers, bankers, and purveyors of goods and services to the ruler. Like their European counterparts, they often acted as intermediaries (Eur. Heb. shtadlanim) with the authorities on behalf of their br…

Members of the Covo family were scholars and communal leaders in Salonica and Jerusalem for a period of three centuries. They are first mentioned in the seventeenth century. Rabbi Judah Covo (d. 1636) headed a communal delegation from Salonica that went to Istanbul in 1636 in hopes of improving the terms governing the annual gift to the sultan required of Salonica’s cloth manufacturers. Unfortunately, the government officials decided that what the delegation had brought was unsatisfactory in quantity and value, and as a result Judah Covo was executed. His son Elijah (ca. 1628–1688) w…

Raphael Asher Covo (1799– January 1874) was chief rabbi of Salonica, head of a yeshiva, and a sponsor of communal charity. The grandson of Rabbi Abraham Covo (d. 1792), he studied with his father and with Rabbi Isaac Barzilai. Covo was a rabbi in Salonica for over fifty years, during which time he founded the city’s Lishkat ha-Gazit Yeshiva. His halakhic decisions were oft-quoted by rabbis in many communities. By 1835, Covo was already a prominent dayyan (judge), and in 1849 he was appointed chief rabbi ( ḥakham bashi) of Salonica concurrently with Ḥanokh Saporta. In 1856, Sultan Abdülmecid…

On October 24, 1870, the Jews of Algeria, “native” subjects of France since the colonial conquest in 1830, were collectively made full French citizens by a decree of the republican Government of National Defense that succeeded Napoleon III’s Second Empire after the Franco-Prussian War. Algerian Jewry was the first of many Jewish communities in North Africa and the Middle East to undergo this profound change and the only indigenous group to be incorporated en bloc. The grant of citizenship was the last step in the emancipation of Algerian Jewry under French colonial r…

Crete is an island in the Mediterranean 96 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of the Peloponnesus that had a Jewish community from the Hellenistic period to World War II. The island, called Iqrītish by medieval Arabs, was captured from the Byzantines in 827 by a band of Andalusian Muslims under Abū Ḥafs ʿUmar al-Ballūṭī, who established a dynasty that remained in power until the island was retaken by Nicephorus Phocas in 961. Crete is mentioned in Cairo Geniza documents as an important exporter of cheese. There are documents mentioning Egyptian Jewish women marryi…

The first Sephardi Jew to set foot on the island of Cuba, and indeed in America, was the converso Luis de Torres, the interpreter of Columbus, in 1492. There is little information about the presence of crypto-Jews on the island during the colonial period, but at least fifteen persons were sent from Havana to stand trial in Cartagena for secretly practicing Judaism. During the nineteenth century a few Sephardi Jews from Curaçao and other Caribbean islands settled in Cuba, but the admission of Jews was officially prohibited until the end of Spanish rule in …

Jacob ben Meʾir Culi (Ḥulli) (ca. 1689–1732) was the author of the Meʿam Loʿez (Heb. From a People of Strange Language - see Ps. 114:1), an encyclopedic anthology of Bible commentary in Judeo-Spanish that made Jewish tradition available in the vernacular to a broad audience of Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire. Culi was born in Ottoman Palestine around 1689 and went to Istanbul in order to publish some of the writings of his maternal grandfather, Moses ibn Ḥabib of Salonica. In Istanbul, he studied under Judah Rosanes, who appointed him a dayyan (judge) on the rabbinical court. On compl…

Henri Curiel was born in Cairo on September 13, 1914 to a wealthy banking family of Italian nationality that traced its roots in Egypt to the early nineteenth century. He was assassinated in Paris on May 4, 1978 and is buried at Père Lachaise in Paris. His assassins have never been identified.In 1935, at the age of twenty-one, Curiel sought and obtained Egyptian citizenship. A militant Marxist, he regularly presided over political and intellectual discussions at his stationery and bookstore in Cairo, Le Rond Point, and was the mentor to a considerable number of Egyptian activists.In 1939,…

Israel ben Me’ir di Curiel was an important but little-known talmudist and preacher. Born sometime before 1500, he  studied in the academy of Joseph Fasi in Edirne (Adrianople). Early on Curiel had his own academy, students, and followers. He moved to Safed after 1538, and there was one of four scholars ordained by Jacob Berav, the other three being Joseph Caro, Moses de Ṭrani (also known as Mabiṭ), and Abraham Shalom. The biographies and writings of Caro and de Ṭrani are well known; those of Curiel and Shalom less so. Curiel was devoted to the study of Jewish la…