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Ghriba Synagogues
(540 words)
Ghrība (Coll. Ar. wondrous, unique) is the name given to seven supposedly ancient synagogues in Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria which are considered to be holy places and have become pilgrimage sites. The most famous of the Ghrība synagogues is the one in the village of Dighet near Hara Seghira on the island of Jerba. The others are located in Yefren and Mʿanin (actually between Mʿanin and al-Qsir) in the Jebel Nafusa region of Libya, in Le Kef in southern Tunisia and Ariana on the northeastern coast, and in Bône (Būna) and Biskra in Algeria. Many of the Ghrība shrines are in places that …
Women
(20 words)
see Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah; Clothing, Jewelry and Make-up; Education; Life Cycle Practices; Marriage; Prostitution; Polygyny; VeilingNorman A. Stillman
Academic Study of Islamicate Jewry
(12,715 words)
Prior to the second half of the twentieth century, much of the research devoted to the Jews of the Islamic world followed in the paths established by the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars of the nineteenth century and dealt with the history, literature, and thought of the medieval period. Judeo-Arabic civilization was one of the major foci of Wissenschaft scholarship, as too were aspects of Hispanic Jewish history and culture—but only for the classical Islamic Middle Ages (ca. 850–1250) in the…
Date:
2014-09-03
Tiferet Yisrael School (Ar. al-Madrasa al-Waṭaniyya al-Isrā'īliyya)
(378 words)
The Tiferet Yisrael (Glory of Israel) School in Beirut, known in Arabic as al-Madrasa al-Waṭaniyya al-Isrā'īliyya (The Jewish National School), was established by Ḥakham Zakī Cohen and his son Salīm in 1874. It was one of the first and more successful indigenous attempts to create a modern Jewish religious school in the Arab world. Due to financial difficulties, the school closed after one year, but it reopened as a boarding school in 1878 and attracted students from Damascus, Aleppo, Jaffa, and even as far away as Istanbul and Izmir. By 18…
Amram ben Diwan
(453 words)
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…
Romanelli, Samuel
(581 words)
Samuel Romanelli was born in Mantua on September 19, 1757. Little is known about his youth, but clearly he had a superb Jewish and secular education in the Italian Jewish tradition. An accomplished linguist, he was fluent in ten languages. He was a poet, playwright, and translator of European literature into Hebrew. In 1786, while returning home to Italy from London, he was stranded in Gibraltar (see Gibraltar) and, strapped for funds, accepted an offer to accompany a merchant on a business trip to Morocco. Losing his passport, Roman…
Rassemblement Mondial du Judaïsme Marocain
(14 words)
see Zionism in the Maghreb to be combinedNorman A. Stillman
Barukh, Marco
(392 words)
Marco (Joseph Marcou) Barukh, an early apostle of pre-Herzlian Zionism in the Muslim world, was born in Constantinople in 1872. He studied at several European universities and because of his involvement in radical student groups was under police surveillance for much of his brief adult life. His involvement with Jewish nationalism began in 1893 when he joined the Kadimah student association in Vienna. The following year he was in Algeria, where he tried to propagate the Jewish national idea among the rapidly assimilating Algerian Jews. He published a short-lived journal,
Le Juge, bu…
Sacred Grottoes, Pools, and Trees
(22 words)
See Pilgrimages and Pilgrimage Rituals, Saints' Tombs (Modern Period), Saints' Tombs Venerated by Jews and MuslimsNorman A. Stillman
Kāhina, al-
(406 words)
Al-Kāhina (Ar. the sorceress) was the name given by the Arabs to the leader of the Berber Jerāwa tribe in the Aurès Mountains region of the Central Maghreb (present-day Algeria). The name reflected the fact that she was an ecstatic who prophesied and performed divinations. Al-Kāhina led the resistance against the Muslim Arab invaders after the fall of Byzantine Carthage in 692/93 to Ḥassān ibn al-Nuʿmān. She inflicted a major defeat on him and drove his forces out of Ifrīqiya (modern Tunisia) almost to Tripoli. For several years, she held sway over a lar…
Executive Editor's Introduction
(4,090 words)
Why an Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World?Until the middle of the twentieth century, over a million Jews lived in the Islamic world, some 800,000 of them in the Arab countries. Some of these Jewish communities were very ancient, as in Iraq and Iran, where there had been a Jewish presence since the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century B.C.E. In most other Middle Eastern and North African countries, there had been Jews since Greco-Roman times, long before th…
Tlemcen
(2,071 words)
Tlemcen (Ar. Tilimsān) is a city in western Algeria situated 138 kilometers (86 miles) southwest of Oran, 91 kilometers (56 miles) west of Sidi Bel Abbès, and 63 kilometers (40 miles) east of Oujda across the Moroccan border. Nourished by springs and called Pomaria (city of orchards) in Roman times, Tlemcen lies at the crossroads of major east-west and north-south trade routes. Although Arab historians state that Judaizing Berber tribes lived in the area at the time of the Islamic conquests, there is no evidence for a Jewish presence in Tlemcen at that time. 1. Middle Ages to the Almoh…
Ibn Mishʿal, Aaron
(324 words)
According to a legend still current in Morocco, Aaron ibn Mishʿal was a rich Jew who became the ruler over the Muslims living in the Taza region of east-central Morocco early in the second half of the seventeenth century. As tribute Ibn Mishʿal took Muslim maidens into his harem each year until the sharif Mawlāy Rashīd, the founder of the Alawid dynasty (r. 1666–1672), went to his residence disguised as a maiden, killed him to avenge the honor of Muslim maidenhood, and took his wealth.This foundation legend of the Alawid dynasty has been analyzed in detail by the French scholar Pierre de Ceniv…
Sephardi Impact on Islamicate Jewry
(2,331 words)
1. Demographic ImpactThe arrival of Sephardim in the Islamic world following the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497 marked a veritable watershed in the history of the Jews of the Muslim world. Many of the exiles sought a refuge in the Islamic kingdoms of the Maghreb, in Mamluk Egypt and the Levant, and in the expanding Ottoman Empire, which within a generation would take over all of the Middle East and North Africa from Persia to Morocco. The Iberian refugees infused new vitality—de…
Ibn ʿAṭāʾ, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm (Abraham ben Nathan)
(462 words)
Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm Ibn ʿAṭāʾ (Abraham ben Nathan) was leader of Qayrawanese Jewry in the first third of the eleventh century. He was a member of a wealthy elite that included the Ben Berekhiah, Tahertī, and Ibn al-Majjānī families. His father, Nathan, may have been a communal official, although this is not clear. He was a major supporter of the academy (
bet
midrash) in Qayrawan and was also a generous contributor to the Babylonian yeshivot, particularly to the Sura yeshiva, the renewal of which he helped to finance. Ibn ʿAṭāʾ served as court physician to the Zirid amirs Bādis (r. 996–10…
Ibn Gikatilla/Ibn Jikatilla
(21 words)
See Ibn Chiquitilla, Isaac (fl. 10th Century) , and Ibn Chiquitilla, Moses ben Samuel ha-Kohen (11th century)Norman A. Stillman
Sefrou
(2,015 words)
1. General Description and History Sefrou is a large town in north-central Morocco that had over thirty thousand inhabitants at the end of the twentieth century. It is located at an altitude of 850 meters (2,790 feet) in the foothills of the Middle Atlas just above the Sais plain only 30 kilometers (18 miles) south of Fez. The town is situated in a green, picturesque setting surrounded by gardens and fruit orchards (most notably cherry) that give it an oasislike aspect. The area is watered by seve…
Egyptian Riots (1945, 1947)
(387 words)
Mass demonstrations against Zionism were called for November 2, 1945 (Balfour Declaration Day) in the major cities of Egypt by several Egyptian nationalist and Islamist groups, such Miṣr al-Fatāt, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Young Men’s Muslim Association. A report by the British police commissioner of Cairo written three days before the demonstrations noted “considerable ill-feeling . . . against Jews,” but stated that security precautions in place alleviated any cause for concern. Events proved othe…
Baḥuṣim
(360 words)
Baḥuṣim (Heb. outsiders), or sometimes
baḥūṣiyya, a slightly arabized variant of the Hebrew, was the name Jewish townsfolk gave to the semi-nomadic, tent-dwelling Jews who lived in
duwwārs, or small encampments, in the area extending from the region around Jerid and Le Kef in western Tunisia to the province of Constantine across the border in Algeria, where they could be found between Suq-el-Ahras and Tébessa and in the southern oases. Muslims referred to them as
Yahūd al-cArab (Ar. Bedouin Jews).The
baḥuṣim were often allied with or under the protection of larger Arab tribal confed…
Judeo-Arabic - History and Linguistic Description
(3,583 words)
Of all the Jewish literary and spoken vernaculars of the post-talmudic period (Yiddish, Jewish Neo-Aramaic, Ladino, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Tat, Judeo-Berber, Judeo-Provençal, to mention only some of the better known), Judeo-Arabic holds a place of special significance. It has had the longest recorded history—nearly fourteen hundred years. It has had the widest geographical diffusion, extending across three continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe) during the Middle Ages. Until early moder…
Date:
2014-09-03
LISCA (La Ligue Internationale Scolaire contre l'Antisémitisme)
(16 words)
see LICA (La Ligue Internationale contre l'Antisémitisme Allemand)Norman A. Stillman
Stillman, Yedida Kalfon
(865 words)
Yedida Kalfon Stillman (née Messodi Khalfon-Poney), world-renowned scholar of Islamic and Jewish culture, was born in the mellah of Fez, Morocco, on April 8, 1946. At age five, she immigrated to Israel with her large family, spending the first two years in a transit camp (
maʿabara) tent. The family hebraicized her name to Yedida. She grew up in the overcrowded, prefabricated housing of the Katamonim section of Jerusalem, a neighborhood overwhelmingly populated by Jews from Arab countries. There she developed her talent for languages, picking up more than a s…
Seleqṣeya
(344 words)
In mid-1951, the young and struggling State of Israel adopted a policy of selective immigration (Heb.
seleqṣiya) that placed severe restrictions upon poor Moroccan Jews who were unable to pay their for their own immigration, had no family breadwinner accompanying them, or had a family member in need of medical care. Under the new policy, the Jewish Agency accepted for ʿ
aliya only families accompanied by a healthy breadwinner between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. The policy also applied to Jews from Tunisia, albeit to a lesser extent.There were two primary rationales for th…
Muqaddam
(833 words)
The Arabic title
muqaddam (lit. person placed at the head, i.e., appointee) was used in various parts of the Islamic world from the Middle Ages up to early modern times for the designated head of the Jewish community in a city or country. The functions of the office differed with time and place. Originally, it included religious and temporal leadership, but in later times it was exclusively temporal. In the Maghreb, it was often synonymous with the titles nagid,
shaykh al-yahūd, and
qāʾid al-Yahūd.1. Middle AgesIn the documents from the Cairo Geniza, the term
muqaddam is fluid and app…
Kalfon, Shalom
(461 words)
Shalom Kalfon (né Shalom Kalfon-Poney) was born in Sefrou, Morocco in 1927. He attended the Em Habanim schools in Sefrou and Fez and thereafter the Hebrew Teachers Seminar in Casablanca. He became a Zionist youth counselor and was active in clandestine Aliya (ʿAliya Bet – see Zionism Among Sephardi/Mizraḥi Jewry). In 1947, he attempted clandestine immigration to Palestine on the ship Yehuda ha-Levi which was intercepted by the British navy and was interned in Cyprus for three months. In 1948, he…
Duwayk, Avraham Ezra
(13 words)
see Duwayk (Dweck, Dwek, Duek, Douek, Doweck, Dowek) FamilyNorman A. Stillman
Prostitution
(1,748 words)
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…
Editorial Board
(1,598 words)
Stillman, Norman A.is the Schusterman/Josey Professor of Judaic History at the University of Oklahoma, and is an internationally recognized authority on the history and culture of the Islamic world and on Sephardi and Oriental Jewry. Professor Stillman received his BA (magna cum laude) and PhD in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is the author of seven books and numerous articles in several languages. His next…
Muḥammad Riḍā('ῑ) “Jadῑd al-Islam”
(11 words)
see Iqāmat al-Shuhūd fῑ Radd al-YahūdNorman A. Stillman
Ibn Yuli, Elijah ha-Levi
(482 words)
Elijah ha-Levi, born in the late 1730s or early 1740s, belonged to a distinguished Moroccan family of merchants, scholars and court Jews, and he himself was one of the most powerful Jewish retainers (Ar.
aṣḥāb al-sulṭān) of the Alawid sultan Sīdī Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh (r. 1757–1790). His father, Judah, was a prosperous merchant in Rabat-Salé and
shaykh (nagid) of its Jewish community. Like his father, Elijah was one of the so-called sultan's merchants (Ar.
tujjār
al-sulṭān), not only conducting business on the ruler’s behalf, but also acting as an intermediary with foreign consuls…
