Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World

Almería (Ar. al-Mariyya) is a port city in southeastern Spain on a bay of the Mediterranean. The town was founded in 922 by the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III over a small settlement of fishermen and merchants known as Mariyyat Bajjāna because it was built near the preexisting village of Pechina (Ar. Bajjāna) about 10 kilometers (6 miles) to the north, on the left bank of the Andarax River. Almería became a center of the trade between al-Andalus and North Africa and from 922 was the arsenal of the caliph’s navy. During the period of the taifa kingdoms (Ar. mulūk al-ṭawā'if - "the party king…

The Almohads (Ar. al-muwaḥḥidūn, those who affirm the unity of God) were a reformist Berber sect from the Atlas region of southern Morocco who followed the teachings of the Mahdī Ibn Tūmart (d. 1130). They intensified the religious rigorism of the Almoravids and established an empire that extended at its height from al-Andalus to Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in the eastern Maghreb. The Almohad conquests were accompanied by massacres and widespread destruction documented in both Jewish and Islamic sources.The sectarian Almohads did not recognize the traditional Pact of ʿUm…

Solomon ben Jacob Almoli (Almuli) was probably born in Portugal before 1490 and died in Istanbul in 1542. He served as a dayyan, but it is unclear whether he was also a congregational rabbi; he seems not to have raised up students. Earning a meager livelihood as a physician, he lived in poverty and devoted himself to science and to popularizing science. He planned to compile an extensive general encyclopedia, but his fellow scholars in Istanbul rejected the idea. As a result he was only able to publish a brief prospectus for the encyclopedia in twenty-four pages, under the title Meʾassef le-…

The Almoravids (from Ar. al-murābiṭūn, men of the ribāṭ [military-religious stronghold]) were a Ṣanhāja Berber dynasty that conquered much of the western Maghreb (Morocco and western Algeria) and al-Andalus during the second half of the eleventh century. They had adopted a fundamentalist form of Mālikī Islam combined with Sufi mysticism and militant zeal. In 1063, the Almoravid amir Yūsuf ibn Tāshfīn (r. 1061–1106) founded the town of Marrakesh in southern Morocco as his capital, about 25 kilometers (16 miles) north of the older town of Aghmat, which had a sizable Jewish community. He f…

Isaac Almosnino was a physician and merchant born in Fez (ca. 1572) to a well-known family of Hispanic origin with many physicians and rabbis in its ranks. He was the grandson of Abraham Almosnino, physician of the Saʿdi (Saadian) sultan Mawlāy ʿAbd Allāh (r.1557-1574) and one of the rabbis who signed the taqqanot (communal ordinances) of Fez in 1554. Together with his brother Abraham, Isaac Almosnino participated in long-distance commerce along with his brother, visiting Italy, Egypt, Syria and Iran. Almosnino was taken prisoner by the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa (India) where…

Joseph ben Isaac Almosnino (1642–1689) was a noted rabbi of the late seventeenth century. Born in Salonica, Almosnino (the surname also appears as Almoshnino or Almoshnini) was the nephew of Rabbi Judah ben Samuel Lerma. He studied in Jerusalem at the Bet Yaʿaqov seminary of Israel Jacob ben Samuel Ḥagiz (1620–1674). In 1666, he went to Belgrade to continue his education under Simḥa ben Gershon ha-Kohen, the rabbi of the local community and the head of its seminary, as well as the author of Shemot ha-Giṭṭin. Shortly thereafter, Almosnino married his teacher’s daughter, Leah. She…

Moses Ben Barukh Almosnino (c.1518-1580), was a famous Salonican preacher, prolific author, and the earliest known Ladino writer in the Ottoman Empire. He served as the first rabbi of the congregation Lyvyat Hen founded by Gracia Nasi (1559).Aside from the sermons (partly lost), Almosnino’s Hebrew works include responsa (which survived as quotes in the works of his contemporaries), commentaries on the Five Scrolls (Yede Mosheh, 1572), a book on various aspects of the Torah and the liturgy (Tefillah le-Mosheh, 1563 ), supercommentaries on the Torah commentaries of Rashi and …

see Rūjī, Solomon and Menahem, alNorman A. Stillman

Moses ben Ḥayyim Alsheikh (Alshich, Alshekh), a prominent rabbinic scholar and author, was born in Edirne (Adrianople) around 1520. In his youth, Alsheikh studied under Joseph ben Samuel Taitatzak (ca. 1465–1546/50) and later under Joseph Caro (1488–1575). He then moved to Safed and, except for journeys abroad on behalf of the community, lived there for the rest of his life. Distinguished for his scholarship, he wrote dozens of halakhic works and commentaries on the Bible.Alsheikh was one of the select few to receive the ancient traditional ordination (Heb. semikha) revived by Jacob B…

Samuel Altabev was secretary general of the chief rabbinate of Turkey from 1909 to 1938. Born in Gallipoli in 1862, he taught French at the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools in Galata and Balat in Istanbul for about twenty-five years. He was also well versed in Hebrew and Talmud, and was often sought to deliver sermons and lectures in synagogues and communal organizations. An important community activist, in 1898 he was one of the chief supporters of the founding of the Or Ahayim Jewish Hospital in the Balat quarter of Istanbul. In 1909, Chief Rabbi Haïm Nahoum appointed him secre…

Jacques Altaras was born Jacomo Bartolomeo in Aleppo on December 8, 1786.  He was descended from a family of Spanish rabbis that had settled in Venice in the seventeenth century and then in Aleppo in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, where they joined the Francos community. In 1805 the family moved to Marseilles, where Jacques Altaras became a wealthy merchant and shipbuilder. An important communal leader, he was elected vice-president of the Jewish community of Marseilles in 1835, and president in 1849. He was associated with the reorga…

Yusuf Altıntaş, born in Istanbul in 1945, is the influential private civil secretary of the chief rabbinate in Turkey. Altıntaş attended the rabbinic seminary in Hasköy for his high school education. Subsequently, he went to the Grafik Hochschule in Stuttgart, Germany, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in graphic arts in 1967. After five years in Germany, Altıntaş moved to Florence, Italy, where he completed his higher education in typography by interning at Ciuli Imballaggi SPA. Upon his return to Istanbul, Altıntaş started his own printing and packaging company, and was it…

Born in Settat, Morocco, David Amar (1920–2000) was an important leader of the Moroccan Jewish community. As president of the Jewish community of Kenitra, the town where he began his career in business, he established ties with Moroccan nationalist circles, which helped him secure the position of secretary general of the Conseil des Communautés Israélites du Maroc (CCIM) after independence in 1956. During the difficult years between 1956 and 1967, he skillfully maneuvered to preserve the cohesion of the country’s Jewish communities amid massive …

Joseph (Jo) Amar (1933-2009) was born in Oujda, Morocco. He began his singing career while attending the yeshiva in Meknes. Moving on to Casablanca, he was invited to record for Columbia, marking the beginning of his rise to stardom. His repertoire already included a variety of genres beyond the Moroccan payṭanut (Heb. religious songs) he had learned in Meknes and current popular songs in Judeo-Arabic.Amar emigrated to Israel in 1956, by then well known to Moroccan Jews from his recordings. One of his first collaborations in Israel was with the Mizmor Shir Choir, founded by Yossef Be…

The town of Amasya in central Anatolia was the birthplace of the Greek historian Strabo (d. 24 B.C.E.). It was captured by the Ottomans in 1389 and made the capital of one of their three principal administrative districts (Turk. beylerbeylik). During the Ottoman period, the town was the seat of Ottoman princes and a stopping place on the Silk Road and other trade routes to the eastern and northeastern parts of the empire as well as to Iran and the Caucasus. It was also center for the manufacture of gold brocade, velvet, and silk fabrics.A group of Sephardi Jews settled in Amasya in the l…

Amatus Lusitanus (also Amato Lusitano or Ḥaviv ha-Sephardi) (1511–1568) was a noted Jewish physician and marrano  who achieved renown throughout Western Europe before fleeing antisemitic persecution to settle in the Ottoman Empire toward the end of his life. Born in 1511 in Castel-Branco, Portugal, to marrano parents who had survived severe persecution, he grew up with a knowledge of Jewish religion, culture, and tradition that remained with him throughout his life; he also learned Hebrew from his parents. In his works, he mentions two bro…

Muḥammad ibn Ḥusayn Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī (ca. 1547–1621), also known as Shaykh Bahāʾī, was one of the most respected Imāmī (Twelver Shīʿī) Ṣafavid theologians during the reign of Shah ʿAbbās I (1581–1629). Originally from Jabal ʿĀmila, Syria, he migrated to Iran in his youth. Thoroughly educated in medicine, mathematics, and literature in addition to Islamic law and theology, and imbued with Ṣūfī leanings, al-ʿĀmilī became shaykh al-Islām (supreme religious judge) of Isfahan for a while. He traveled extensively throughout Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine on his way to perform the ḥājj. …

Benjamin ben Mishaʾel, known by the pen name Amīnā (Pers. the faithful), was one of the most important Jewish poets of premodern Iran. A native of Kashan, he was born in 1672/73 and was alive as late as 1732/33. The only biographical information about him is provided by the poet himself in various works, namely, that he had seven children and was unhappily married. He witnessed the Afghan invasion of Iran, including his hometown, as described in the Judeo-Persian chronicle Kitāb-i Sar-Guzasht-i Kāshān dar bāb-i ʿibrī va goyimi-yi sānī (The Book of Events in Kashan Concerning…

Born in Baghdad in 1937, Eli Amir arrived in Israel with his family in 1950 during the mass immigration from Iraq and was sent, with other teenagers, to Kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Emek. He later found work in the office of the prime minister, becoming in turn Arab affairs adviser, deputy director general of the Ministry of Immigrant Affairs, and director general of the Youth Immigration Division of the Jewish Agency (Aliyat Ha-Noʿar), where he applied lessons from his own experience to help new adolescent arrivals.Amir's writing is characterizd by humor that helps lubricate the way fo…

see Atlas MountainsDaniel Schroeter

Amram ʿAmmar was born in Algiers in the second half of the eighteenth century and died in Livorno in the first half of the nineteenth century, probably in 1835. He was a rabbi and a teacher. In 1814 he left for Malta after failing to obtain an appointment as dayyan (religious judge) in his native city, apparently due to intra-communal political intrigues. In 1820 he settled in Livorno, where he was appointed as one of the city’s rabbis.He wrote expositions on the Torah that received rabbinic approval (Heb. haskama), a sign of the esteem in which he was held in the community. One responsum in his …

Amram ben Diwan is one of the best-known saints (Heb. ṣaddiqim) in the pantheon of Moroccan Jewish holy men. According to tradition, he was a rabbinical emissary (Heb. shadar or meshullaḥ) from Hebron, who arrived in Morocco with his son, Ḥayyim, sometime in the eighteenth century and took up residence in Fez. When Ḥayyim fell gravely ill, Rabbi Amram prayed, offering his life for that of his son, who miraculously recovered. Shortly thereafter, while on a visit to Ouezzane to collect funds for the religious institutions in Hebron, he fell ill and died and was buried in the nearby cemetery of As…

Amram ben Sheshna was gaon (Heb. head) of the academy of Sura in the second half of the ninth century. According to Sherira Gaon in his historical Epistle (Heb. Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon), Amram served as gaon in Sura after Naṭronay bar Hilay and before Naḥshon  bar Ṣadoq, a period of eighteen years. Sherira adds that Amram had a dispute with Naṭronay sometime before his accession and as a result left the academy to found his own school. He remained there until Naṭronay’s death, and then returned to Sura to become gaon. None of these details fits in with the Epistle’s chronological fra…

Mullah Joshua Amram was a teacher in the city of Herat in northwestern Afghanistan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In comparison with teachers from the Garjī family, he was a progressive educator. Aided by his teaching assistant, the blind musician Mullah Joseph Bakhchī, who played the harmonium, Mullah Amram had his classes memorize the favorite liturgical poems (Heb. piyyuṭim) of Afghan Jewry and used pictures (which he drew himself) to help them understand matters he was teaching. His classes, conducted in three languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo…

Amrus, known as Sūq al-Jumʿa (Ar. Friday Market), is situated on the Mediterranean coast 6 kilometers (slightly less than 4 miles) northeast of Tripoli in Libya. According to tradition, Jews from Gharian settled in Amrus in the sixteenth century, followed by refugees from Tunis in the eighteenth. In the twentieth century somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred Jews lived in Amrus, most of whom were merchants, moneylenders, and blacksmiths providing agricultural equipment and services to…

The artistic aspects of Jewish amulets from the lands of Islam, as is also true for their Muslim counterparts, can be discussed under two heads: amulets as articles of jewelry; and decorative and other designs appearing on amulets. The first category is closely associated with the origins of jewelry making, because in early times a primary function of personal bodily adornments was to protect the wearer. The Jews in the lands of Islam were not different in this respect from their neighbors, and much of the jewelry they produced or used was intended for symp…

Oro Anahory-Librowicz (b. 1948) is a professor at the Université de Montréal in Canada. A Moroccan-born author and professional storyteller,  she has written monographs and articles on Sephardic folk literature and is the founder-director of Gerineldo , a Moroccan Sephardic ensemble based in Montreal.Oro Anahory-Librowicz was born in Tetouan (Sp. Tetuán), Morocco, in 1948 into a traditional Sephardic family. She studied at the Université Paris–Nanterre (M.A.) and Columbia University in New York City, where she obtained a Ph.D. in Spanish…

ʿAnan ben David was active in Baghdad during the reign of the city’s founder, the second Abbasid caliph, al-Manṣūr (r. 754–775). Starting in the twelfth century, Karaite historiography held that ʿAnan was an Exilarch and credited him with founding the Karaite movement in IraqIraq/Babylonia and the Karaite community in Jerusalem. Prior to the twelfth century, however, Karaites made a definite distinction between themselves and ‘Anan. They described him as having founded the ʿAnanites (Heb. ʿ ananiyyim; Ar. al-ʿananiyya), one of the many religious sects in Babylonia and Pe…

The name Anatolia derives from the Greek anatolē (lit. (sun)rise), adapted into Turkish as anadolu (lit. full of motherliness). The Anatolian peninsula is the westernmost extremity of Asia, bordered by the Black Sea to the north, the Caucasus to the northeast, the Aegean Sea to the west, the Mediterranean to the south, Greater Syria (Upper Mesopotamia) to the southeast, and Transcaucasia and the Iranian plateau to the east. Also known as Asia Minor, the Anatolian peninsula has been the home of numerous civili…

Al-Andalus was the Arabic name throughout the Middle Ages for the Iberian Peninsula, including what is today both Spain and Portugal, although with the progress of the Reconquista, the name al-Andalus came to be limited to Muslim-ruled territory, which eventually was only the Nasrid kingdom of Granada. The name al-Andalus (Ar. al-Andalīsh) has been connected to the Vandals, who had given the name Vandalacia to the former Roman province of Baetica. Arabic-speaking Jews used the term, and Moses Maimonides, even years after he had immigrated to Egypt, wo…

The Angel family traces its origins back to medieval Spain. A Maestre Angel slaughtered kasher meat for conversos in Ciudad Real in the early 1480s. Following the expulsion of 1492, the Angel family was centered in Salonica and then spread to other communities throughout the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Some members went by the Hebrew surname Malakh or Malakhi (from Heb. mal’akh, angel). In the sixteenth century, Mordecai Angel was a rabbi in Rome. Because he was tall, handsome, and graceful, people referred to him as galante; this appellation was eventually adopted as a family sur…

Leon Victor Angel was born in Alexandria, Egypt on May 15, 1900, in a poor Jewish family of Greek descent. His parents, Victor Angelou and Olga Piperno, struggled to make a living. According to family lore, his father used to smuggle hashish along the Nile and Angel had to go to work from a young age. He married Esther Cohen, also born in Alexandria.  Angel had no prior stage or screen experience when he was discovered by famed filmmaker Togo Mizrahi in 1930. Mizrahi, an Egyptian-born Italian Jew, was one the founding fathers of Alexandrian cinema in the thi…

The Anisimov family was a family of Dagestani Mountain Jews active at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The “elder” of the family was R. Sherbet b. Nissim (mid-19th cent.–early 20th cent.), the rabbi of Temir-Khan-Shura, and thus one of the two chief rabbis of the Jews in Dagestan. R. Sherbet was the first Mountain Jew to study at the Volozhin Yeshiva (Etz Chaim Yeshiva) and he encouraged his son Eliyahu (see below) to pursue a modern education.In the late 1880s, R. Sherbet, R. Yehezkel/Hyzgyl Mishaelov/Mushailov, and a group of other Mountain …

The Anjuman-i Kalīmīān-i Tehrān (Pers. Jewish Association of Teheran) was a communal entity in Teheran that in cooperation with committees in other towns oversaw the interests and activities of Iranian Jewry. The AK developed in the 1940s out of the Va‘ad ha-Qehilla (Heb. Jewish Community Council), which was also known as the Ḥebra Israʾel, or Ḥebra.  It was headed by the Jewish representative in the Majlis (parliament). The other members were mostly powerful lobbyists whose fortunes gave them influence at the court and in the wealthier circles of t…

News of the Balfour declaration reached Iran at the end of 1917 and inspired the country’s Jewish community to undertake a series of Zionist-oriented activities. The surge of activism began with the founding in Tehran of Anjuman-i Taqhviyat-i Zabān-i ʿIbrī (Pers. The Association for Strengthening the Hebrew Language) under the leadership of Soleymān (Shelomo) Kohan Ṣedq. As indicated by its name, the new organization initially focused on promoting the Hebrew language. In 1919, it expanded its mission and changed its name to Anjuman-i Markazī-yi Tashkīlat-i Ṣiyyonīt-i Irān (AM…

Ankara is a central Anatolian town captured by the Ottomans around 1360 and made the capital of a sandjak (Turk. district) in the eyalet (Turk. province) of Anadolu (Anatolia). During the Ottoman period, the town was a trading center and was also known for its textile manufactures, particularly of angora wool (mohair) obtained from long-haired white goats.The small Jewish community of Ankara was joined in the late fifteenth century by an influx of Sephardim from Spain and Portugal. Even then, however, the Jewish community was fairly small. Between 15…

Annaba (Ar. ʿAnnāba), formerly Bône (Ar. Būna), is a city on the Mediterranean coast of eastern Algeria. As an urban center it goes back to Punic times. Known as Hippo Regius under the Romans, it was the home of St. Augustine. Jews apparently lived there in his lifetime, and he occasionally consulted with them on questions pertaining to the Hebrew text of Scripture.The medieval Arabic name of the town, Būna, derived from its Byzantine name, Hippona. Leo Africanus (1494–1554) mentions that the area was nicknamed Bilād al-ʿUnnāb (Ar. land of jujubes) because of the fruit grown in a…

Abraham ben Mordecai Anqāwa (al-Naqāwa), known by his Hebrew acronym as Rabbi Abba, was born in Salé, Morocco, in 1807 and died in Oran, Algeria, in 1891. He was a rabbi, jurist (Heb. dayyan), and editor of manuscripts.Anqāwa began his rabbinical studies at the seminary of Raphael Bibas in Salé, later serving there as a dayyan and making a name for himself as a strict legal decisor (Heb. poseq). In 1850, fearing for his personal safety after he brought a girl who had apostatized to Islam back into the Jewish fold, he moved to Algeria, and two years later he was appointed rabbi of the community o…

Ephraim ben Israel Anqāwa (fl. late 14th to early 15th century), known to his devotees simply as Rab (Heb. master), was a Sephardi rabbinical scholar, philosopher, and physician who became a leading saint in the Maghrebi Jewish pantheon of holy men (Heb. ṣaddiqim). His tomb in Tlemcen became an important site of pilgrimage (Ar. ziyāra). Ephraim was born in Toledo, where his family had lived since the twelfth century and had their own synagogue, established by his great-uncle Abraham ben Samuel, who was murdered in 1341. Ephraim’s father, Israel ha-Qadosh (Heb. the martyr), was the …

Raphael ben Mordechai Anqāwa (Raphaël Encaoua and also Ankaoua in the usual French transcription) was a leading Moroccan halakhic authority. The scion of a distinguished Sephardi rabbinical family, he was born in Salé in 1848. He was a pupil of Issachar Assaraf, the chief rabbi of Salé, whose daughter he married. At the relatively young age of thirty-two, he was appointed dayyan in Salé. His reputation for judicial acumen spread his name throughout Morocco. In 1910, he published his collection of responsa Qarne Reʾem (The Horns of the Buffalo) in Jerusalem, which enhanced his …

Born in Damascus in September 1873 to a family originally from Ain-Tab (now Gaziantep, Turkey), Abraham-Albert Antébi was a descendant of famous rabbis in Aleppo and Damascus. His grandfather Jacob Antébi was a protagonist in the Damascus Affair. His father was president of the Bet Din (rabbinical court) in Cairo. Through his mother he was related to the Catran and Totah families.Singled out by Isaac Astruc, the head of the Alliance Israélite Universelle school in Damascus, Antébi received a Salomon Goldschmidt scholarship to the École de Travail in Paris, a…

see Antebi (Antibi) Family (also Community Leaders)Daniel SchroeterBibliography,

According to a tradition of the ʿAntebi family, its roots go back to the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Some members of the family settled in the small town of ʿAyn-Ṭab (Good Source), known today as Gaziantep, in Turkey. Later, on moving from ʿAyn-Ṭab to Aleppo, the family was renamed ʿAntebi, and its original Spanish name was forgotten. The first known member of the family was Rabbi Raḥamim ʿAntebi (1554–1627). Succeeding generations produced many famous Torah scholars, rabbis, and leaders of the Jewish communities in Aleppo, Safed, and Tiberias.Rabbi Abraham ʿAntebi was born in 176…

Henriette Salomon Antébi was born in 1873 in the town of Château-Salins in the province of Lorraine, France, and died in 1954. With her sister, Lucie Salomon (Navon), she attended the Raucourt boarding school in Châlons-sur-Marne and went on to continue her education in Paris, graduating from the Collège Sévigné secondary school and L’Haÿ-les-Roses. Her studies culminated with the brevet supérieur, a teaching certificate granted after four years of study at a normal school. She and her sister began their educational careers at the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) School for…

see Polemics (general)Norman A. Stillman

1. Traditional anti-Judaism in the Islamic WorldA historical survey of Islamic attitudes toward and treatment of Jews must take into account the facts that Islam is (1) a religion with a corpus of doctrines, beliefs, and practices that have evolved over fourteen hundred years and have been subject to widely varying manifestations and interpretations; (2) a body politic, united at first, but becoming more divided over time; and (3) a civilization that despite local and regional differences has neverthe…

see MashhadNorman A. Stillman