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see SyriaMeira Polliack

David ben Abraham al-Fāsī was a Karaite lexicographer and exegete in the mid-tenth century. His most famous work, Kitāb Jāmiʿ al-Alfāẓ, was the first Hebrew-Arabic dictionary of the Hebrew Bible. Although al-Fāsī or his family probably came from the city of Fez in Morocco, as suggested by his cognomen, he appears to have spent part of his life in Jerusalem, where he is believed to have composed his monumental dictionary sometime in the first half of the tenth century. He is not mentioned in Ibn al-Hītī’s chronicle of Karaite scholars, but there is other evidence connecting him to the Karaite …

see Dhimma Meira Polliack

1. Judeo-Arabic (Ninth to Thirteenth Century)In ancient and medieval times, Jews translated the Hebrew Bible into their spoken tongues, such as Greek, Aramaic, and Arabic (as well as many other languages and vernaculars employed in specific periods and places). Unlike the various degrees of prohibition regarding scriptural translation in Islamic (as well as Christian) medieval lore and theology, there was no halakhic or theological prohibition of scriptural translation per se among the Jews, although ther…

1. General Survey and History of DiscoverySource"Geniza" is a convenient one-word title to describe an extensive and unique collection of medieval manuscripts, mainly in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and Aramaic, and usually written on vellum and paper, that has illuminated virtually every aspect of life in and around the eastern Mediterranean areas of the Islamic world a thousand years ago. The collection, consisting of well in excess of 200,000 items (written on almost half a million folios) was amassed in …