Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World

Maurice Eisenbeth was the grand rabbi of Algeria from the early 1930s until his death in 1958. Apart from his official duties, he was a highly regarded and prolific historian and chronicler of North African Jewry. His first studies, appearing in the early 1930s, combined historical and demographic data to trace the changing fortunes of the Jewish community of Algiers.In his capacity as grand rabbi, Eisenbeth was a popular social and political figure, reportedly enjoying the full support of the Jewish community, especially during the years of the Vichy r…

The Elbaz (or al-Bāz) family of Morocco traced its roots to Iberia. It produced numerous Sephardi intellectuals, rabbinic jurists ( dayyanim), poets, and religious functionaries in Tarundant, Fez, and Sefrou from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.Moses ben Maimon Elbaz (known also as Rambam Elbaz) was an intellectual and commentator in Tarundant during the sixteenth century. He was a Spanish exile who journeyed as far as the Sous province in order to escape persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. He was known primarily for his Hekhal ha-Qodesh (The Holy Sanctuary; Amsterdam…

Moses ben Maimon Elbaz (al-Bāz), also known by his Hebrew acronym as Rambam Elbaz, was a noted rabbi and kabbalist of the late sixteenth century in Morocco (see also Elbaz Family). He lived in Tarudant, in the Darʿa (Draa) region, but famine and plague made him a wanderer from place to place. He headed  a group of kabbalists, the most famous of whom were Judah ben Ḥanin (Ḥunayn), who went to Algeria, Isaac ben Abraham ha-Kohen, and Jacob ben Isaac Ifargan, who frequently cited and praised him.Elbaz’s major work was his detailed commentary on Jewish prayer, Heykhal ha-Qodesh (The Holy Sanctu…

Samuel ben Judah Elbaz was born in Sefrou, Morocco, in 1790 and died there in 1844. He was a payṭan and the scion of a distinguished Sephardi family of rabbinical scholars and poets, among them Amram Elbaz and Raphael Moses Elbaz. His compositions have not yet been published and are extant in manuscript in the possession of his family and in various libraries. Some of his songs were copied into manuscripts, e.g., Jewish Theological Seminary (New York) no. 3182, and Ben-Zvi Institute no. 2155.Among the poetic works of Samuel Elbaz is Noʿam Siaḥ (Heb. Pleasantness of Speech), a collection of …

Eldad ha-Dani (Eldad the Danite) was a quasi-messianic adventurer who turned up in Qayrawān, Ifrīqiya (present-day Tunisia), apparently in 883, claiming to belong to the ancient Israelite tribe of Dan (hence “ha-Dani”). The name Eldad is scarcely found at this time; tribal identities had disappeared a thousand years earlier; and Dan was in any case one of the so-called Ten Lost Tribes taken away in the eighth century B.C.E. and disappearing from history. Thus, both name and affiliation can safely be regarded as inventions. So too the assertions that he …

Eleazar, whose full name remains unknown, was the leader of the Jewish community of Faraḥābād (Pers. Abode of Joy) during the reign of Shah ʿAbbās I (1587–1629). The town, built by the shah as a winter retreat on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, was inhabited by people the shah forcibly relocated from elsewhere, primarily Georgia, which he invaded twice (1614–1615 and 1616–1617). Eleazar and his community were among the “colonists.” According to the Judeo-Persian chronicle Kitāb-i Anusī  (The Book of a Forced Convert) by Bābāī ibn Luṭf, they appear to have been favo…

Eleazar (Elʿazar) ben Ḥalfon ha-Kohen came to the attention of modern scholars as a poet separate and distinct from other poets named Elʿazar ha-Kohen only with the publication in 1954 of five of his poems discovered by Alexander Scheiber among the leaves and fragments of the Kaufmann Geniza Collection (see Cairo Geniza). Since then a total of twenty-two poems by Eleazar, most of them complete, have been discovered and published by Scheiber,  Jefim (Ḥayyim) Schirmann, and Ezra Fleisher from the remnants of four MSS: (1) Kaufmann MS…

Eleazar ben Jacob ha-Bavli, known as Eleazar the Gnostic, lived in Baghdad in the first half of the thirteenth century. He was a productive poet during the years before the Mongol invasion, but only recently has scholarly interest in his oeuvre revived. Eleazar’s impressive poetic output consisted of more than four hundred secular compositions, with a striking preponderance of panegyrics, laments, epigrams, and homonymic poems. Other genres, such as gnomic aphorisms and girdle poems, are virtual…

Eleazar (Lālehzar) Ḥayyim ben Rabbi Mullah Elijah, the learned son of a great Iranian rabbi who was active in Hamadan between 1840 and 1860, was himself a rabbi and dayyan (Heb. religious judge), and apparently a haughty and controversial figure. Only one of his works has so far come to light, a short Judeo-Persian treatise (ca. 23 pages in ms. JTS 1455) entitled Ḥovot Rafa’el (Heb. The Duties of Raphael). The treatise is an introduction to Judah ben Eleazar’s philosophical work Ḥovot Yehuda (Heb. The Duties of Judah) and, in fact, is the only known source that refers to Ḥovot Yehuda. In it El…

l’Égypte Contemporaine (periodical, Egypt), Levi, Isaac G. l’Égypte Industrielle (periodical, Egypt), Levi, Isaac G.Ehrenpreis, Marcus (Mordechai), Kalef (Kalev), YehoshuaEibenschutz, David Solomon, Romania (Ottoman) ​Eidels, Samuel, Elbaz FamilyEinfeld, D., AustraliaEisenbeth, Maurice, Algeria, Algiers, Eisenbeth, MauriceEisenstadt, Samuel, Academic Study of Islamicate Jewry El Amaneser (supplement to Şalom, Turkey), Istanbul, Nasi, Gad, Şarhon, Karen Gerşon El Amigo del Pueblo (newspaper, Serbia), Belgrade El Avenir (The Future, periodical, Salonica), …

Isaac Moses Israel El-Eini, businessman and poet, was born in Khartoum in 1921 into a prominent family of Sudan’s small Jewish community. Isaac’s father, Moses, a merchant and trader, was born in Suez to a family of Jewish Kurdish origin. Moses owned and ran a general stores and was president of the Jewish Community of the Sudan during the 1930s and 1940s, often being invited for government consultations, especially on matters concerning World War II. Isaac’s mother, Rosa Haïs, was born in Cairo…

Odette El-Eini née Judith Benjamin Arav, painter and author, was born in Cairo in 1925. Her father, Benjamin Arav, was born in Zagazig, Egypt, to a family originating from Hebron and was one of the leading horologists in Egypt. Her mother, Marie Fedida, was born in Meknes, Morocco. Odette attended Abram Btesh Jewish Community School and the Lycée Franco-Égyptien in Heliopolis, and the Lycée Français in Cairo. She excelled at literature, mathematics, and drawing. She was a school friend of the pa…

see MusicNorman A. Stillman

Habībullah Elghanian (Elqāniān),  was a major industrialist and factory owner in Iran prior to the Revolution of 1979. With his brothers, he built one of the country’s largest and most successful, diversified manufacturing conglomerates. Born in 1911 in Tehran, Elghanian was educated in the Alliance Israélite Universelle school and after graduation managed a hotel on Ferdowsī Boulevard that belonged to his uncle Hajjī ʿAzīz Elghanian. Later he became the manager of several shops on Lālehzar Street tha…

see Ḥananel ben ḤushielMichael G. Wechsler

Elhanan ben Shemariah ben Elhanan, a member of a leading Fustat family, began to play a major role in the community during the lifetime of his father, Shemariah ben Elḥanan, who prepared him for a position of leadership. Both father and son apparently spent some time at the Pumbedita Yeshiva in Babylonia, where they were designated by the gaon to be the leaders of the Babylonian congregation (Heb. qahal) in Fustat and responsible for contacts with the yeshiva. When Shemarya died in 1011, Elhanan was in Damascus in the course of a wide-ranging tour of the Jewish …

Elijah ben Abraham was a Karaite scholar, historian, and author in the eleventh to twelfth century. According to a questionable tradition, he lived in Palestine, but little is known of his life and works. The only known text attributed to him is a composition entitled Ḥilluq ha-Qara’im veha-Rabbanim (The Division of the Karaites and the Rabbanites, ed. Pinsker, 1860). This work provides a historical overview of Rabbanite-Karaite relations and an elementary explanation of the dissent between them. According to Elijah ben Abraham, as a result of this dissent Isr…

Elijah ben Baruch ben Solomon ben Abraham Yerushalmi (ca. 1620–before 1712) was a Karaite author, copyist, and communal leader born in Istanbul. Like other Turkish and Crimean sectarians, he studied both Karaite and Rabbanite Hebrew texts. In his youth, he traveled to Jerusalem, garnering the honorific Yerushalmi (Jerusalemite), and there copied old sectarian manuscripts. He subsequently emigrated to the Crimea, where he resided for several decades before making a final pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1696. O…

Elijah ben Ḥayyim (ca. 1530–ca. 1610), known by the acronym Ra’anaḥ, was a halakhic authority of the Romaniot community. Originally from Adrianople (Edirne), he moved to Istanbul sometime between 1565 and 1575, and rose to become its chief rabbi. Ra’anaḥ carried on a wide correspondence with his rabbinic peers and wrote numerous responsa. He regularly delivered sermons, which have yielded a great deal of written homiletic material, and also produced commentaries on most of the tractates of the Talmud. Unfortunat…

Elijah ben Solomon ha-Kohen was gaon of the Palestinian yeshiva from 1062 till his death in 1083. His father, Solomon, had served as gaon for barely one year, in 1025, and Elijah’s elder brother, Joseph, was av beit din of the yeshiva during the gaonate of Daniel ben Azariah. After Joseph’s death in 1053, Elijah took over as av bet din, and he succeeded to the gaonate on the death of Daniel ben Azariah in 1062.The period during which Elijah held office was a time of severe crisis in Palestine. Between 1071 and 1073 the Seljuks wrested the country from the Fatimids, remaining in control un…

Elijah ben Zechariah was a very popular jurist of Palestinian ancestry in the Egyptian town of Fustat. In 1228, following the death of Samuel ben Jacob, the need for a communal judge arose in Alexandria. The town notables looked locally for a suitable replacement. When the favored candidate, Abū ʿAlī ben Ḥanīkh, turned out to be unsuitable, it was proposed, as a compromise, to appoint Elijah ben Zechariah to serve with Abū ʿAlī. Elijah would hold the title of dayyan, act as the town’s judge in practice, and receive the position’s salary, while Abū ʿAlī would be titular com…

Elisha ben Samuel, the Iranian Jewish poet active in the latter half of the seventeenth century, was a versatile author inspired by the Jewish poets of medieval Spain and his Iranian Jewish predecessors. He wrote Judeo-Persian narrative verse, Hebrew religious poetry, and Judeo-Persian prose and verse commentaries on liturgical poems. His pen-name, Rāghib (Jud. Pers. The desirous one), which appears in his narrative compositions, has mystical connotations. No definitive information has been found re…

El Jadida on the Atlantic coast of Morocco was a fishing village and port known as Māzīghan to medieval Arab geographers. In 1514 the town was conquered by the Portuguese, who called it Mazagan (Port. Mazagão). It remained under Portuguese control until 1769, playing a secondary role in Portuguese Morocco until nearby Azemmour was abandoned in 1541. Jewish families expelled from Spain, such as the Cabeça family, settled in Mazagan and entered into the service of the Saʿdi rulers of Marrakesh. Isaac Cabeça lived in Mazagan as a Jew in 1537, and other well-known Jewish famil…

Rabbi David ben Nissim Elkaim (185?–1940) was a poet and maskil in Essaouira (Mogador) who influenced Hebrew poetry and Jewish cultural traditions in Morocco with his creativity, his innovative and diverse themes, and the cultural activities he initiated. He was associated with the Hebrew Haskala (Enlightenment) movement, which was established in Essaouira at the end of the nineteenth century around the figure of Yiṣhaq ben Ya‘ish Halevi, a bookseller and journalist. Following in his footsteps, Elkaim contributed as a poet to the tradition of shir yedidot (songs of friendship) and ba…

Samy Elmaghribi (El Maghriby, El Maghribi), né Salomon Amzellag, was born in 1922 in the Moroccan town of Safi. In 1926 his family moved to Rabat, where he became interested in music while still quite young. By the time he was seven he had  taught himself to play the oud.  In later years he studied Andalusian music at the Conservatoire de Casablanca as well as with the leading masters of the time.Elmaghribi’s complex repertoire typified the multiplicity of styles and genres commanded by Maghrebi Jewish musicians of his generation. He sang Hebrew piyyuṭim (liturgical poems), traditiona…

The Elmaleh (al-Māliḥ) family originated in Iberia, but after the expulsion fled to Italy, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. Its earliest noteworthy member was Abraham ben Judah Elmalik, who settled in Pesaro, Italy, in 1551, coming there from Salonica, or perhaps directly from Spain. He wrote Liqquṭe Shikhḥa u-Feʾa (Gleanings, Forgotten Sheaves, and the Corner [of the Field]; Ferrara, 1556), a kabbalistic interpretation of talmudic texts.1. Ottoman Empire  Several members of the family appeared in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. One of the earliest was Moses b…

Edmond Amran El Maleh was born in 1917 in the town of Safi into a merchant family originally from Essaouira. His mother tongue is Moroccan Arabic, but he writes in French. El Maleh began his career as a journalist and a pro-independence activist in the then-clandestine Moroccan Communist Party. In 1955 after King Hassan II was reinstated and Morocco became independent, he moved to France, where he ceased his political activities and instead became a cultural critic and professor. In 1999, after the death of his wife, Marie-Cecile Dufour El Maleh, a French scholar of the works of W…

Gad Elmaleh was born in Casablanca, Morocco on April 19, 1971.  Having been expelled from several French schools at home, at the age of 16, he went to study at the École Maïmonide in  Montreal, Quebec.  He was inspired and encouraged to pursue his passion for the stage while still in school, and played in a Judeo-Arabic adaptation in of Moliere’s Le Malade imaginaire for La Quinzaine Sepharade, an annual cultural event in Montreal.  At 21, he decided to embrace theater studies in Paris.  After graduating from the prestigious Cours Florent drama school, he s…

El Meseret (The Joy) was a Ladino newspaper published in Izmir from 1897 to 1922. Aleksander Ben Giat was its editor-in-chief. Until 1900, its owner and director was a Muslim, Mehmet Hulussi. In its first issue, Ben Ghiat expressed his hope that the paper would serve as an interpreter between the Jewish community and the Ottoman authorities. In order to promote this program, El Meseret printed its first page in Turkish for some time. A regular issue had eight pages. The paper was closed by censors between the end of 1899 and mid-May 1900.Initially a weekly, El Meseret later became a dai…

El Nuvelista /Le Nouvelliste was a newspaper published in Izmir from 1890 to 1922 by Yakov Algranti. Printed entirely in French in its early years, it soon changed over to Ladino, with small sections in French. At different times, the paper appeared weekly, bi-weekly, and five times a week, and ranged in size between four and eight pages. El Nuvelista regularly took a critical stance on communal issues and in consequence was closed down many times. In 1896, a group of rabbis in Izmir placed it under a ban. In 1902, the brothers Hizkia and Gad Franco joined the paper, the latter as edito…

El Progresso, also known as  Yosef Daʿat (Increase of Knowledge) was a Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish bimonthly, published in Edirne (Adrianople) from March to December 1888 by Rabbi Abraham Danon, an exponent of the Haskala. The first Jewish periodical to appear in Edirne, it reflected Danon’s lifelong effort to synthesize traditional learning with modern ideas. The paper was sponsored by the Ḥevrat Shoḥare Tushiyya (Society of the Proponents of Wisdom), also called Doreshe ha-Haskala (Seekers of Enlightenment), which he founded in 1879. It was printed both in Judeo-Sp…

El Telegrafo (The Telegraph) was a “political, commercial, and literary” newspaper in Judeo-Spanish published by the Gabbai family in Istanbul from 1878 to 1931 as a continuation of El Jurnal Israelit (1860–1873) and El Nasional (1873–1878) Its manager and editor-in-chief was Isaac Gabbai (d. 1931), son of Ezekiel Gabbai II (1825–1898), and great-grandson of Baghdadli Ezekiel Gabbai (d. 1826?). Initially, Marco Mayorcas was manager of the paper. By the mid-1890s, Joseph Gabbai , another of Ezekiel Gabbai’s sons, had assumed ownership of El Telegrafo, while Henri Dalmedico figure…

As the longest-running Ladino periodical published in Istanbul, El Tiempo was perhaps the best-known Judeo-Spanish newspaper of its day. Published from 1872 to 1930, it ranged in length from four to twelve pages at different stages and appeared between two and six times a week. Its management was initially headed by Isaac Haim Carmona; other editors were Mercado Fresco, J. Shaki, Sami Alcabetz, and Moise Dalmedico. After 1894, the paper was run almost single-handedly by David Fresco, who later described himself as its “director-administrator-accountant-secretary” and …

Until the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish children in Morocco were educated in traditional one-room schools where pupils of all ages were taught together and memorization of texts was the sole pedagogical method. The situation began to change in 1862, when the Alliance Israélite Universelle opened Morocco’s first modern Jewish school. By 1912, when the Alliance had twenty-five schools in thirteen towns with more than five thousand students, a new school system began, named Em Habanim, that was more specifically Jewish and Moroccan in its orientation and curriculum.The new sch…

Makhlūf ben Isaac Emsellem (1837–1928) was a North African kabbalist and alchemist. Of French nationality, he may have been born in Oran, but his family moved to Fez when he was a child, and except for a short period in Tangier, that is where he spent most of his life and was initiated into the Kabbala. Having taught himself the Arabic script at the age of fourteen, Emsellem began to read and collect Arabic works on alchemy and to associate with Muslim practitioners of the art, which was still much in vogue in Fez in his time. He acquired the necess…