Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World

Urmiya (Orumiyeh, Riżā'iye), a town in northwestern Iran, is the capital of the province of West Azerbaijan, adjacent to the Turkish border. Most of the town’s residents are Muslim Āzerī Turks and Kurds, with a sizable Christian-Assyrian (some Armenian) minority, and a small Jewish community that numbered about three hundred families in 1920. The town changed hands between Turkey, Russia, and Iran before, during, and immediately after World War I. The Jews suffered a great deal from pogroms perpetrated by the various armies and rebel forces during this period. Many began to emigrate, s…

There were crypto-Jews in Uruguay in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the first openly Jewish immigrants, predominantly Sephardim and Mizraḥim, arrived toward the end of the nineteenth century. In the period from 1905 to 1913, many settled in the Ciudad Vieja neighborhood of Montevideo, living in run-down conventillos (tenements). By 1918, three-quarters of the country’s Jewish population were from Islamic lands, mostly from the Ottoman Empire, but also including Egypt and and in a few isolated cases, Morocco. The majority were un…

Samuel Usque, in the mid-sixteenth century, was a noted marrano poet and the author of a classic work of Portuguese literature. He emigrated to the Ottoman Empire and lived in Safed and Istanbul. Few details of his life are known; he belonged to the distinguished Usque family, from the Spanish city of Huesca, and was born in Lisbon around the beginning of the sixteenth century. However, the persecution of marranos and Jews compelled him to settle in Ferrara by mid-life (perhaps the 1540s). He lived there at the same time as Amatus Lusitanu…

Solomon ben Abraham Usque, also known as Salusque Lusitano (ca. 1530–ca. 1596), was a Portuguese marrano author, playwright, printer, and Ottoman courtier during the second half of the sixteenth century. A member of the distinguished Usque family from Huesca, Spain, Solomon Usque was born in Portugal around 1530. His father, Abraham ben Solomon Usque, took the family to Ferrara in Italy in the 1540s because of the growing pressure upon marranos in Portugal. In Ferrara, Abraham (also known by his Christian name, Duarte Pinhel) set up a printing press th…

U-mi-Ṣur Devash (And with Honey Out of the Rock, Raphael Aaron Ben-Shim‘on), Ben-Shimʿon, David, Ben-Simeon, Raphael Aaron‘Ubayd Allāh al-Mahdī (Fatimid caliph, 909-934), Tunisia, Southern Italy and Bari, Mahdiyya, al- Uçurtmayi Vurmasinlar (Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite, film), Hubeş, Rozetal-‘Udhrī, MurciaUdovitch, Abraham, Academic Study of Islamicate Jewry Ufuq-i Binā (Horizon of Knowledge, newspaper, Tehran), Tehran, Sionit, Mojdeh Ughnīyāt li-Bilādī (Melodies to My Country, poetry collection, Sha‘shū‘a), Sha‘shū‘a, SalīmUkraine, Jews in, forced deportatio…