1. Typology of Kurdish Jewish Names Some Kurdish Jewish proper names were borrowings from local and neighboring ethnic groups, such as Dárweš, Xodéda (Persian-Kurdish), Xā́tun (Turkish), Ḥábib, Ná'im, Ṣabrī́ya, and Zakī́ya (Arabic). Arabic names, especially for females, became more common in recent times, probably due to the greater frequency of contacts with the Arabic-speaking Jews of Mosul and Baghdad. However, the majority of Kurdish Jews had Hebrew names, which, as in other Near Eastern Jewish co…

The Jewish denominations within the Ottoman Empire—Romaniots, Mustaʿribūn, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Karaites—all had their own distinctive naming practices, but the differences between them were more pronounced in the earlier period, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, than later. Starting in the seventeenth century, Italian (and later some French) Jews, collectively known as francos , began to settle in the empire. Their naming practices were not much different from those of Jews already living in the empire, but their family names, as …

Music is the field of cultural productivity in which Jews and the peoples of Islam (Arabs, Persians, Turks, Berbers, Kurds, Tajiks, Afghans, etc.) converged in the closest and most prolific manner. Jews have played a major role as composers and performers of music, mostly in urban genres, since the inception of Islam and throughout its vast territorial domains, under the Arab, Persian, and Ottoman empires as well as in the modern nation-states that emerged from them. At the same time, the musica…

Houda Ezra Ebrahim Noono (Ar. Hudā ʿIzrā Ibrāhīm Nūnū), born September 7, 1964, is a Bahraini diplomat and civic leader. In July 2008, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa (Ḥamad bin ʿĪsā Āl Khalīfa) appointed her Bahrain’s ambassador to the United States. As such, she became the first Jewish ambassador of any Arab country. She is also the first female Bahraini ambassador to the United States, and only the third female Bahraini ambassador to any country. In 2006, the king  appointed Noono to Bahrain’s Shura Council, the upper house of the National Assembly, where she ser…

Sara Ungar (1849–1911), an educator of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) school network, had the unusual distinction of being born in Bonn, Germany, whereas many of her colleagues hailed from France. She attended the Institut Bischoffsheim, one of the AIU teacher-training schools for women in Paris, where she earned the diploma of brevet supérieur (teaching certification granted after four years at a normal school). In 1882, she founded the AIU School for Girls in Tunis and continued as its principal through 1887. In this capacity she emphasized the teachi…

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ( née Pierrepont, 1689–1762), the daughter of an English aristocrat, was the author of a series of letters which, although they do not deal exclusively with the Ottoman Empire, are known as the “Turkish [Embassy] Letters.” They instantly became famous, particularly because of their first-hand descriptions of female Ottoman high society. Lady Mary wrote the letters during and after her stay in Istanbul, where she had accompanied her husband, Edward Wortley-Montagu, the British ambassador to the sultan’s court from 1716 to 1718. During her lif…

Like all Jews, Jewish women obtained Turkish citizenship in 1923 with the establishment of the Turkish Republic. In 1934, they were granted full political rights along with all other Turkish women, including the right to vote and the right to run for elective office, among others.Education of Jewish girls and women had already begun in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, especially with the spread of Alliance Israélite Universelle schools in the 1860s. By the early twentieth century, girls were being taught Turkish, French, math, as we…

1. Medieval PeriodGaonic responsa and Cairo Geniza documents alike allude to the fact that Jews living in Islamic lands in the medieval period owned slaves and engaged in the slave trade. Male and female slaves were identified by different terms— ṣabī or ghulām (Ar. boy) for males, and jāriya or waṣīfa (Ar. maid) for females—and were generally assigned different functions in the household economy. The concentration of Jewish economic life in crafts and trade rather than agricultural production meant that male slaves were often entrusted with du…

Esther Weinstein, president of the Cairo Jewish Community from1996 to 2002, was born Esther Chaki to a Greek father and an Egyptian mother in Cairo, on July 14, 1910. She lived there until her death on October 4, 2004.In August 1996, members of the community staged what one Egyptian journalist called a “palace revolt,” overturning the all-male board headed by Emile Rousseauand replacing it with one that more closely resembled the demographic make-up of the city’s aging, largely female Jewish population. The reform was engineered by Carmen Weinstein, the elder of Weinstein’s two …

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, as was common in other traditional communities, Jewish girls and women had no opportunity to obtain a formal education.As a result, the life experiences of most of them were limited to the realm of home and family. Girls usually spent their childhood years being trained by their mothers to be good wives and mothers. Once they reached the age of twelve, they were considered suitable for marriage, usually pre-arranged by their families years in advance. Nevertheless, many Jewish girls received some informal education at home by family me…

Yusuf Algazi, born in Istanbul in 1950, is a renowned Turkish poet. He graduated from the Lycée Saint Benoît in Istanbul and subsequently attended the Galatasaray University School of Chemical Engineering, graduating in 1972.      Algazi pioneered phonetic poetry in Turkey, and his poems reflect his interest both in Judaism and in gender relations. He frequently conducts discussions on Judaism at the Dostluk Youth Club, a Jewish social organization, and has organized “poem days” at the Atatürk Kültür Merkezi (AtatürkCultureCenter) in Istanbul. Algazi’s mo…

Carmen Weinstein, born in Cairo, Egypt, on October 10, 1931, became president of the Cairo Jewish Community in 2004. A longtime communal activist, Weinstein is best known for her efforts to conserve Egyptian Jewish artifacts and buildings. Her work on this issue began in 1975, when she launched a struggle on behalf of the Bassatine Cemetery, thought to be the world’s second-oldest Jewish cemetery (after the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem). In 1988, at a time when women still could not hold official positions on the community board, she was selected t…

The Jewish communities of Yemen did not have fixed rules for the selection of names. Commonly, the names for boys were picked by the father, while the names of girls were chosen by the mother, and occasionally the midwife or a female relative, such as a grandmother or an aunt. It was customary to name children after relatives or in harmony with events on the religious calendar around the time of birth. Thus, a girl born during or close to Sukkot was sometimes named Tiranja ( etrog), whereas a girl born close to Hanukka might be named Nissim (miracles). Raḥamim (mercy) was a popul…

Christianity  adopted by rulers of Ethiopia, Yemen baptism in, Romaniots (Bene Romania) conversion of Jews to, Kirmanshah  in Albania, Albania  forced, Demography   in Iran, Tehran   in Serbia, Serbia  in Spain, Calatayud, Saragossa, Valencia conversion of Muslims to, Toledo   see alsoMoriscos influences of   on Islam, Academic Study of Islamicate Jewry  on Jewish literature and thought, Ibn Paqūda, Baḥya (Abū Isḥāq) ben Joseph   Andalusian Jewish culture, Literature, Hebrew Prose (medieval), Literature, Hebrew Prose (medieval)   converso culture, Usque,…

Bella (Bilha) Banderly was born into a Hasidic family in the city of Safed in 1889. When she was still a child, her family moved to the Jewish colony of Metulla, where she attended a school supervised by the first Hebrew-speaking teachers in the Galilee. In 1912, she married Shimshon Banderly, a merchant and public figure from Haifa, in an arranged marriage. That same year, the couple moved to Paris and lived there until they returned to Haifa in 1920. Little is known about her life during this …

Juliette Smadja (Smaja) was born in Tunis in 1890 to Elise and Mardochée Smadja and became the first woman lawyer and the first Jewish female lawyer in Tunisia. Her great-grandfather, also Mardochée Smadja, served as chief rabbi of the community and her father was named in his honor, following Sephardi/Mizraḥi custom. Juliette grew up in a four-generation household, dominated by the senior Mardochée who conducted bi-weekly proceedings of the rabbinical court at home, observed first hand by Juliette.Both of Juliette’s parents briefly attended Alliance Israélite Universell…

The scant information available on Qasmūna bat Ismāʿīl comes from two Arabic sources: Nuzhāt al-julasā' fī ash‛ār al-nisā' (86-87), an anthology of women's poetry compiled by the fifteenth-century Egyptian scholar al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505), and Nafḥ al-Ṭī b (2: 356), a literary-historical compilation by the North African historian al-Maqqarī (d. 1626). The two accounts, while slightly different, probably both draw from Kitāb al-Mughrib fī Ḥulā l-Maghrib, by the thirteenth-century Andalusian littérateur Ibn Sa‛īd al-Maghribī (al-Suyūṭī explicitly acknowledges it as…

The Arbib family of Libya included wealthy communal leaders, public figures, entrepreneurs, industrialists, merchants, owners of real estate, publishers, and journalists, mainly in Tripoli, Zawiya, Tajura, Benghazi, and Barce, many of whom became Italian or British citizens under Ottoman rule (ending 1911). The Arbibs were active in introducing modern industry to Libya. In 1881, the family was the first to use a hydraulic press for processing esparto, a grass used in cordage, paper manufacture, and shoes. Eugenio Arbib (1847–1915) owned one of the four companies that pr…

As the longest-running Ladino periodical published in Istanbul, El Tiempo was perhaps the best-known Judeo-Spanish newspaper of its day. Published from 1872 to 1930, it ranged in length from four to twelve pages at different stages and appeared between two and six times a week. Its management was initially headed by Isaac Haim Carmona; other editors were Mercado Fresco, J. Shaki, Sami Alcabetz, and Moise Dalmedico. After 1894, the paper was run almost single-handedly by David Fresco, who later described himself as its “director-administrator-accountant-secretary” and …

Iraqi writer Malīḥa Isḥayyiq (Sehayek) was born in Baghdad 1925 and educated in state schools. She worked as a nurse in the Mīr Ilyās Jewish hospital and joined the Iraqi Communist Party. Between 1951 and 1954 she published various items on literary themes in the journal al-Dunyā (The World) in Damascus; among her publications were open letters to prominent writers at the time, such as the Egyptian poet and scholar Zakī Mubārak (1892–1952) and the Iraqi poet ʿAbd al-Qādir Rashīd al-Nāṣirī (1920–1965). She also wrote one letter to the great …