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Anqāwa (Al-Naqawa), Raphael
(422 words)
Raphael ben Mordechai Anqāwa (Raphaël Encaoua and also Ankaoua in the usual French transcription) was a leading Moroccan halakhic authority. The scion of a distinguished Sephardi rabbinical family, he was born in Salé in 1848. He was a pupil of Issachar Assaraf, the chief rabbi of Salé, whose daughter he married. At the relatively young age of thirty-two, he was appointed
dayyan in Salé. His reputation for judicial acumen spread his name throughout Morocco. In 1910, he published his collection of responsa
Qarne Reʾem (The Horns of the Buffalo) in Jerusalem, which enhanced his …
Wargla
(450 words)
Wargla (Warglān; Fr. Ouargla) is an oasis town in the Algerian Sahara located 659 kilometers (410 miles) southeast of Algiers. It was once an important way-station on the caravan route to Timbuktu and West Africa. Nothing is known about the town before the Islamic period. The Muslims of medieval Wargla were adherents of the Kharijite Ibāḍī sect, which was generally tolerant of Jews. The Jewish community in Wargla during the Middle Ages was apparently a Karaite center and is noted as such by Abraham ibn Ezraand Abraham Ibn Da’ud. In his commentary on Exodus 12:11, Ibn Ezra ment…
Duwayk, Jacob Saul
(13 words)
see Duwayk (Dweck, Dwek, Duek, Douek, Doweck, Dowek) FamilyNorman A. Stillman
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…
Proverbs
(2,708 words)
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,…
Date:
2015-09-03
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…
Abū ʾl-Barakāt al-Baghdādī
(2,198 words)
1. LifeAbū ʾl-Barakāt Hibat Allāh ibn Malkā al-Baghdādī al-Baladī was a physician and philosopher in twelfth-century Iraq. His contemporaries dubbed him “the Singular One of the Age” (Ar.
awḥad al-zamān), and some claimed that as a philosopher he had attained the level of Aristotle himself. Born in Balad, near Mosul, around 1077, Abūʾl-Barakāt was one of the foremost Jewish intellectuals of his time. Under his Hebrew name, Baruch ben Melekh, he wrote Bible and Talmud commentaries in Judeo-Arabic, including commentaries on the Book of Ecclesiastes and on tractate Soṭ…