Mardochée Naggiar, also known as Mordechai (Murdikhay) Ibn al-Najjar, was one of the few Jewish scholars from a Muslim land who actively contributed to the European orientalist scholarship of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Born in Tunisia, he lived in Paris from the last years of the eighteenth century until 1812, during which time he made his assistance available to many famous European scholars from France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden. Naggiar translated documents, co-authored dictionaries, and taught Berb…