Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World

seeNorman A. Stillman

    1.   The Qurʾān and Its ExegesisThe Muslim polemic against Judaism and its adherents is a phenomenon as old as Islam, and the Qurʾān was its very first source. Its sūras, especially the ones from the period of Muḥammad’s preaching in Medina (622–632 C.E.), proffer the following arguments among others: unlike the Christians, the Jews are hostile to the Prophet and the Muslims; the cumbersome Jewish laws, especially the dietary laws, were a punishment from God for the Jews’ disobedience, but are now lifted by the new dispe…

Elie I. Politi was a prominent Egyptian businessman and entrepreneur who was active in Jewish and Zionist causes in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Chio, Greece in 1900, Politi arrived in Egypt with his family in 1906. He attended the Menasce High Schoolin Alexandria and then studied law at the French School of Law in Cairo.Politi began his career as a junior clerk in a trading firm, but advanced very quickly and became one of Egypt’s most successful businessmen, an important figure in the stock market, and an entrepreneur in the fields of real estate, insurance, banking, and jo…

1. Medieval PeriodPolygamy, the marriage of a man to more than one wife, was legal in Middle Eastern, North African, and Spanish Jewish communities throughout the Middle Ages. The legal basis for this practice lay in biblical and talmudic law (e.g., B.T. Yevamot 65a; Maimonides, Yad, Ishut 14:3). Rabbinic authorities in Western Europe, as early as the tenth century. promulgated the famous taqqana (legal enactment) known as the ḥerem de-rabbenu Gershom, which prohibited a man from marrying an additional wife (unless permitted on exceptional grounds by a court of on…

Pa‘amone Zahav (Golden Bells, Raphael Anqāwa), Anqāwa (Al-Naqawa), RaphaelPablo Christiani (apostate), Samuel ben David pabuç (leather slippers), Clothing, Jewelry and Make-upPacha Sitbon, Joseph de, Monastir (Tunisia)Pacifici, Josef, Gibraltarpacifists, Jewish, in Tunisia, Smadja, Mardochée ​Pact of ‘Umar, Clothing, Jewelry and Make-up, Funerary, Burial, and Mourning Practices, Damascus, Interfaith Relations, Izmir, Ottoman Empire, Syria, Syria, Ghiyār, Maghīli, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm al- Almohad non-recognition of, Almohads enforcement of   in Egypt, E…

Palestine Discount Bank seeIsrael Discount Bank (Banq Diskonṭ) Palestine (Haddad), Francophone Maghrebi Jewish LiteraturePalestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA), Levi, Shabbetai ​Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), France masterminding Munich terrorist attack (1972), Romano, Joseph in Tunis, TunisiaPalestinian Authority, school textbooks of, antisemitism in, Anti-Judaism/Antisemitism/Anti-Zionism Palestinian Costume and Jewelry (Kalfon-Stillman), Stillman, Yedida KalfonPalestinian Talmud  differences with Babylonian Talmud, Iraq resp…

Patras (Greece), Greece (pre-1824) anti-Jewish violence in, Greece (pre-1824) conquest of, Navpaktos (İnebahtı, Lepanto) Jewish community in, Morea   avot ben din (heads of Jewish courts), Av Bet Din in the Ottoman Empire  communal disputes, Morea  congregations, Morea  fleeing to Navpaktos, Navpaktos (İnebahtı, Lepanto)  in Greek War of Independence, Morea  and Jews from Mistra, Morea  merchants/businessmen, Navpaktos (İnebahtı, Lepanto)  migration from, Vital, David Ben Solomon Ha-Rofe  in Ottoman-Venetian wars, Morea  rabbinical emissaries in, Morea  …

Pessah, Moshe, VolosPessaḥ, Simon, Larissa (Yenishehir-i Fenari), Trikala (Terhala)Petaḥ Tiqva, Jewish community in, dayyanim (judges), Yosef, OvadiaPetahiah of Regensburg, Benjamin ben Jonah of Tudela, Hilla, Mosul, David ben Zakkay II, Petahiah of Regensburg on exilarchate/exilarchs, Exilarch and Exilarchate, Exilarch and Exilarchate, David ben Samuel on geonim of Palestinian academy, Ezra ben Abraham ben Mazhir on Ibn al-Dastūr, Iraq, Ibn al-Dastūr, Samuel ben ʿAlī on Jews   in Damascus, Damascus  in Iraq, Baghdad, Iraq, Iraq, Baghdad  in Iraq and Iran, Iran/…

pilgrimage sites  Dammuh synagogue (Egypt), Ibn Kaspi on, Ibn Kaspi, Joseph in Egypt, Mahalla al-Kubra, Mahalla al-Kubra Ghrība synagogue (Jerba, Tunisia), Ghriba Synagogues, Ḥara Ṣeghira in Iran, tomb of Daniel, Zoroastrians, (Jewish relations with) in Iraq   Mosul, Mosul  tomb of Ezekiel, Hilla, Ezekiel's Tomb (al-Kifl) to shrines of saints seeshrines of marabouts/saints for women, Hatchuel, Sol (Lalla Solika)Pilosof, Behor, Edirne (Adrianople)Pimienta, Abraham, Pimienta, AbrahamPimienta, Moses, Pimienta, Abrahampimps, Jewish, ProstitutionPines, Jehiel …

​poetry  allegorical styles of, Ibn Mar Saul, Levi ben Isaac, Abi Zimra, Isaac Mandil ben Abraham Arabic   handbooks on, Bible Exegesis   hijā’ (invective poetry), Hijā' (Heb. neʿaṣa)  influence of    on Aleppan/Syrian liturgical music, Aleppo, Pizmon (-im), Pizmonim books   on Andalusian-Hebrew poetry, Dunash ben Labraṭ ha-Levi, Ibn Qapron, Isaac, Ibn Sarūq, Menahem ben Jacob, Kharja, Kharja  by Jews, Literature, Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew Poetry in the Medieval Islamic World, Ben Solomon, Zechariah ha-Rofeh, Ibn al-Muʿallim, Solomon (Abū Ayyūb)  love, influences on He…

Portugal Synagogue (Izmir), IzmirPortugal synagogue (Monastir), Monastir (Bitola, Manastir)Portugal Yaḥiyya congregation, Kalai, Mordechai Ben SolomonPortuguese Synagogue (Amsterdam), design/layout of, Synagogues in the Islamic WorldPorty, Jospeh, Sudan poseqim (halakhic decisors), Ibn Migash, Joseph on, Ibn Migash, Joseph ha-Levi ben Me’irpossessions, of women in marriage, Ketubbapostal routes, in Palestine, PalestinePostel, Guilliaume, Basola, Moses Pour Sacha (For Sacha, Alexandre Arcady), Cinema, French, North African Jewish Actors and Characters in Pour u…

protest movements, Black Panthers, Black PanthersProtestantism  interests in Hebrew Bible of, Azankot, Saʿadya missionary activities of   Jews targeted by, Christian Missionaries and Missionary Schools  in Ottoman empire, Christian Missionary Schools in the Ottoman Empire He proti stadiodromia tou hellinikou proletariatou (The First Stages of the Hellenic Proletariat, Avraam Benaroya), Benaroya, Avraamproto-Esther scroll (Qumran), Judeo-Persian languageproto-Zionism  of Judah ha-Levi, Al-Andalus, Zionism Among Sephardi/Mizraḥi Jewry in North Africa, Zion…

1. OriginsThe Jews who found themselves part of the vast and newly established Islamic empire of the seventh century had already laid the foundations of their prayer customs and synagogal liturgy. In the course of the previous six centuries they had moved the focus of their religious activity from the Temple they had lost into the domestic, intellectual, and liturgical centers they had developed by way of replacement. In those centers, they had laid down rules for the recitation of the Shemaʿ and the ʿ Amida, with their constituent and attendant benedictions, the Qiddush and Havdala that …

Samuel Primo (Cairo, ca. 1635 or 1640–Edirne, 1705 or 1708) was a rabbinical scholar who served as a scribe to the false messiah Shabbetay Ṣevi (1626–1676) and remained a secret adherent to Sabbateanism in his later life, Born in Cairo in either 1635 or 1640, Primo was one of the brightest pupils in the yeshiva of Judah Sharaf. He moved to Jerusalem around 1662 and  represented the city’s Jewish community in a lawsuit against Judah ben David Ḥabillo (d. 1661) to obtain the funds collected in Izmir by his father. When Shabbetay Ṣevi arrived in the city in June 1665, Pr…

Printing began in Germany in 1445. Hebrew letters and words were sometimes inserted in books printed in Latin script, but since printing was the exclusive right of Christian guilds, Jews could not engage in printing until it spread outside Germany. The first dated Hebrew book was printed in Italy in 1475. From there Hebrew printing spread to Spain and Portugal, and through Jews from those three countries to the Ottoman Empire and Morocco. In fact, Jewish printers of Hebrew books pioneered printing in the Islamic world. In some areas Hebrew printing was long the only pr…

The Egyptian Pro-Palestina Committee was founded in Alexandria in August 1918 by a group of Alexandrian Jewish notables sympathetic to the Zionist movement. The president of the committee was Baron Felix de Menasce; the vice-presidents were Joseph Elie (Bey) Picciotto and Victor Naggiar.      Between 1918 and 1927, the committee raised the sum of 13,000 Egyptian pounds for the restoration of the Land of Israel and transferred the money to various projects and Jewish institutions in Palestine. Although the committee defined itself as hu…

Although prostitution has existed in every age, prostitution was apparently a rare phenomenon among the Jews of the Islamic world prior to modern times except in periods of great socioeconomic decline and the breakdown of communal discipline.1. The Middle AgesReferences to prostitution are extremely rare in the Cairo Geniza documents and in most medieval sources, and in many cases it is impossible to distinguish whether the reference is to professional prostitution or to licentious behavior, since Heb. zenut/Ar. z inā' refer to illicit sex in general. In more than one inst…

The protector of the Jews was an administrative official in Qajar Iran (see Iran/Persia) at least from the early 1860s. Sometimes called amīn al-raʿāya (agent or trustee of non-Muslim subjects), a protector was assigned to other religious minorities as well, but it is not always clear whether one protector was assigned to all the minorities in a given place, or whether there were separate protectors for each of the local minorities. The purpose of providing protection to a minority in this way appears to have been not only for th…

1. Ottoman Empire“Protégé” is the imprecise term often found in Western diplomatic sources from the seventeenth century onwards to designate non-Muslim individuals who had an official connection to a European embassy or consulate in the Ottoman Empire that entitled them to some of the privileges codified in the Capitulations. In the nineteenth century, the term was also applied to groups, such as the Jews, after Great Britain proclaimed itself their protector throughout the Middle East.Original CategoriesStrictly speaking, the category of “protégé” was limited to dragomans (int…

1. Judeo-ArabicAs in many traditional cultures, Arabic-speaking Jews drew upon a rich lexicon of proverbs, maxims, and aphorisms in both oral and written expression. These gnomic expressions, in addition to being original creations, derived from a variety of sources. The specifically Jewish sources included biblical and rabbinic literature, and the principal non-Jewish source was the local Arab milieu. Specifically Muslim dicta from the Qur’an and ḥadīth rarely entered Judeo-Arabic usage. Rather,…