Medieval Jewish-Muslim Encounters, Judeo-arabic manuscripts regarding Islam, Polemics of Jewish Authors against Islam

(שימו לב - ניתן להוריד את המאמר גם אם לא ניתן לקרוא אותו על המסך)


קריאה של מאות רבות של פיוטים שנכתבו על ידי יהודים שחיו במרחבים מוסלמים מאז ראשית האסלאם ועד היום, מראה תמונה חד משמעית של איבה קשה כלפי המסולמים וציפייה שהא-ל יקח מהם נקם. המעניין בדבר הוא שגם יהודים שחיו תחת 'מלכי חסד' - שליטים שהטיבו עם יהודים - שרו וכתבו פיוטים בגנות המוסלמים והאסלאם. המאמר מנסה לפצח את הסיבות העמוקות לכך.

The study of the Samaritan version of Saadya Gaon’s translation of the Pentateuch (the tafsīr), mainly based on MS London BL OR7562, shows that a Saadyan version in Arabic Characters was adopted by the Samaritans and adapted to the Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch. The transmission of this version in MS London BL OR7562 continued after the early Samaritan Arabic translation of the Pentateuch and perhaps also its later revision had already been created, since many of their translations were preserved in MS BL OR7562, mixed with its Saadyan basic text. As MS London BL OR7562 also contains numerous words and phrases paralleled only in Christian Arabic translations of the Pentateuch and Saadyan adaptations, mainly related to the Peshitta tradition, it is reasonable to assume that these were the sources of this Samaritan Saadyan version and possibly also of the other Samaritan Arabic translations. The Samaritan version of Saadya’s translation of the Pentateuch also reveals some parallels to tenth- and eleventh-century Karaite translations and it contains prominent Aramaic and Islamic vocabulary, unfamiliar in other versions of Saadya’s tafsīr.

Despite mutual taboos against exogamy, memoirs and similar materials written by Jews from Yemen contain a number of anecdotes describing love affairs and sexual encounters between Muslims and Jews prior to the mass migration of the vast majority of Yemen's Jews to Israel in 1949-50. These stories associate these liaisons with vulnerability, poverty, and marginalization. In them, sex and conversion to Islam are intrinsically connected, yet this interreligious intimacy leads not to resolution but to ongoing identity crises that persist beyond the community's realignment with a majority-Jewish society. The staging of the anecdotes in rural areas where shariʿa norms held only nominal sway, in watering places and hostels where strangers might interact, and at dusk, when identity is difficult to discern, heightened their ambiguity.

One of the best reviews of my book "Narratives of Tampering in the Earliest Commentaries on the Qur'an" (Brill, 2011) is by Cornell University professor David S. Powers. A good review seeks to thoroughly understand the work under consideration, to summarize it well, to acknowledge any virtues, and to clearly indicate mistakes and shortcomings. It seeks to be fair and balanced, and veers toward neither flattery nor personal attack. Authors whose books are reviewed in respected journals need to first of all be very thankful that other scholars take the time and trouble to read their works carefully and write helpful evaluations.

The immensity of the corpus and diversity of genres of Classical New Persian in Judeo-Persian garb is remarkable, comprising a wide-ranging multitude of genres from translations of the Tanakh and rabbinic works to chronicles, lexicographies, religious poetry, translations of medieval Hebrew poems, and a large corpus of non-Jewish Classical Persian literature transcribed in Hebrew script. Yet, Judeo-Persian literary corpora remain incompletely catalogued as well as unsatisfactorily studied. While detailed studies of the genres of Judeo-Persian literature-in-transcription, as well as comparisons with literature in the common Perso-Arabic script, are still desiderata, this article aims to undertake a preliminary survey of the extant Judeo-Persian versions of the Dīvān of Šams od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ of Shiraz (d. 792/1390) and address some contextual aspects of its popularity among Iranian Jewry.

In his Epistle to Yemen, Moses Maimonides answers an anonymous Jewish apostate's polemical claims about the truth of Islam. This apostate challenged the Yemenite Jews by presenting quotes from the Torah that Muslims considered proof of the future advent of Islam and Muḥammad (dalā'il). The identity of the apostate, however, has been disputed by researchers. This article proposes that the apostate Maimonides had in mind was Samaw'al al-Maghribī, the Jewish convert who authored Ifḥām al-Yahūd. The reasoning is based on unique characteristics of Samaw'al's tract that distinguish it from other polemical works. Samaw'al discussed the dalā'il with much greater sophistication than any earlier polemicist and used an advanced manner of presentation, in response to which Maimonides provided well-conceived refutations. This combination of Samaw'al's sophisticated polemical arguments and Maimonides's replies demonstrates that the two appear to be matched.

The Muslim scholar Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAlī al-Maqrīzī (1364–1442 CE) devoted attention to Jewish festivals several times in his works, including once in al-Khabar ʿan al-Bashar fī Ansāb al-ʿArab wa-Nasab Sayyid al-Bashar. In this source, in which he describes seven (actually eight) Jewish festivals, it is clear that he relied on Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī (1272–1332 CE). Yet there are several significant differences between al-Maqrīzī’s account and al-Nuwayrī’s; this article will examine them.

המלומד המוסלמי תקי אלדין אחמד בן עלי אלמקריזי (1364–1442 לסה"נ) נדרש למועדי ישראל בעבודותיו כמה פעמים, ואחת מהן היא בחיבורו "אלכַ'בַּר עַן אלבַּשַר פִי אנְסַאבּ אלעַרַבּ וַנַסַבּ סַיִּד אלבַּשַר". בתיאור זה מופיעה סקירה של שבעה (כפי שנראה, למעשה שמונה) חגים יהודיים, ומדבריו ניכר כי הסתמך על אחמד בן עבד אלוהאב אלנוירי (1272–1332 לסה"נ). עם זאת, יש כמה הבדלים בין דברי אלמקריזי לדברי אלנוירי, ובמאמר זה אעמוד עליהם.

Reference:
Wehe dieser sündigen Gemeinde, die nicht weiß, ob ihr Gutes oder Böses widerfährt‘: Jesaja, ein alttestamentlicher Prophet und seine Botschaft in der islamischen Tradition, in: Transmission and Interpretation of the Book of Isaiah in the Context of Intra- and Interreligious Debates, ed. Peter Gemeinhardt and Florian Wilk, (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, 280), Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2016, S. 393-431

One of the most frequent arguments in Islamic polemical writings is that allusions to Muḥammad exist in the Bible but were obliterated by the Jews in what Muslim polemicists call taḥrīf—falsification. One verse in particular, Deut. 33:2, is so commonly treated by these polemicists as to occur literally or in paraphrase in almost every anti-Jewish Islamic tract. The last of three place names that appear in this verse, Paran, Muslim polemicists claim, refers to Muḥammad and to Mecca and Islam. In this article, a review of the treatment of Deut. 33:2 in four Midrashic and two Targumic sources raises the possibility that the Paran–Muḥammad/Mecca/Islam nexus owes its origins to the Muslim polemicists’ appropriation of Jewish sources that either predate Islam or, perhaps, coincided with the dawn of Islam.

Jewish sources commonly refer to Muslims as “Ishmaelites” and to Islamdom as “the Kingdom of Ishmael” due to an alleged biblical genealogy that both Jews and Muslims accept. Other classic Jewish sources, however, associate pre-Islamic Arabs as well as Muslims with two other biblical nations, Ammon and Moab, even when, and even though, the “standard” appellations are at hand. The Ammon and Moab nexus is mentioned in academic literature but without much elaboration. This article investigates several Jewish mentions of the nexus – most of Hispano-Jewish provenance – and proposes five explanations for its use.

Résumé
Les sources juives qualifient généralement les musulmans d’Ismaélites et le domaine de l’Islam en tant que “royaume d’Ismaël”, et ce au nom de généalogies bibliques reconnues autant par les juifs que les musulmans. D’autres sources juives classiques, cependant, rattachent les Arabes préislamiques ainsi que les musulmans à deux autres nations mentionnées dans la Bible, Ammon et Moab, et ce indépendamment de leur traditionnelle appellation d’Ismaélites. Jusqu’à présent, le lien avec Ammon et Moab n’a été que sommairement évoqué dans la littérature scientifique. La présente étude examine plusieurs sources juives, pour la plupart d’origine hispanique, évoquant un pareil lien.

This article presents a description and analysis of a Persian translation and commentary of the Qurʾān, entitled Tafsīr-i munīr, by Abū Naṣr al-Ḥaddādī (d. after 400/1009), the earliest exegetical work in Persian whose author can be identified. A manuscript of this multivolume work housed in the Topkapı Palace Museum of Istanbul offers an important historical testament to the calligraphic development of Persian exegetical writing and the manners in which scholars and authorities sought creative ways to visually balance the sacred Arabic text of the Qurʾān with vernacular exegetic material. The manuscript also reveals a good deal about Qurʾānic book art, as well as the development of Persian commentaries and translations, thus offering further insight into the history of the Qurʾān across the frontiers of Central Asia and Khurasan.

The Ḥôṯam Toḵnît or Seal-ring of Proportion described in Ezekiel 28:12-13, is considered as an archetype of magic rings. Its pattern with three rows and-three columns based on the simplest magic square, which was described as a child-bearing charm since its first literary appearances in the woks of Jābir ibn Hayyān (fl. c. 721– c. 815) and al-Ghazālī (1058–1111). This connection with the female reproductivity makes this signet a precursor of a series of literary examples, like the Draupnir and the Andvaranaut of the Edda and their modern literary interpretations in the works of de la Motte-Fouque, Richard Wagner and J.R.R. Tolkien, who connected it with the invisibility ring mentioned in Plato's Politeia 359d-360b and also with the seal of Solomon (mentioned first in Josephus Flavius, Antiquitates Judaicae 8, 46-49, and in the Testamentum Solomonis, elaborated in Jewish, Islamic and Christian traditions), which gives power over the spiritual beings. They were not pioneers at all, because from the late Antiquity there were several author (e.g. Josephus Flavius, ibn Ezra, Eleazar of Worms, Pliny, the Church Fathers, Marsilio Ficino, H.C. Agrippa, Éliphas Lévi, the various writers of the Antique and medieval lapidaries, kabbalistic works, astro magical tracts and beau-letters, including the Welsh and French Arthurian romans and the Arabian Nights) who provide for this the necessary theological, philosophical as well as literary draw matters. The main aim of this study, which is written in an exceptional form as a last will of a fictional Kabbalist, is to demonstrate a concept of the Ḥôṯam Toḵnît as the Šegal described in Psalm 45, and its erroneous literary interpretations.

Vol. 1 (A–C): “Aaron ben ʿAmram”; “Aaron Ḥakīmān”; “Aghmātī, Zechariah ben Judah”; “Alī ben Sulaymān”; “Bar Satya, Joseph ben Jacob”; “Baradānī, Joseph al-”; “Baradānī, Naḥum al-”; “Ben Berechiah Family”; “Ben Yijū, Abraham.”

Vol. 2 (D–I): “Daniel ben Eleazar b. Hibat Allāh”; “Daniel ben Ḥasday”; “Daniel ben Samuel ibn Abī ʾl-Rabīʿ ha-Kohen”; “David ben Boaz”; “Dunash (Abū Sahl) ben Tamīm”; “Eleazar ben Ḥalfon ha-Kohen”; “Ḥananel ben Ḥushiel”; “Ḥananel ben Samuel”; “Ḥushiel ben Elḥanan”; “Ibn al-Barqūlī Family”; “Ibn al-Majjānī Family”; “Ibn al-Shūwaykh, Isaac ben Israel”; “Ibn Bundar, Ḥasan, Abū ʿAlī (Japheth)”; “Ibn Jāmiʿ, Samuel ben Jacob”; “Ibn Sughmār Family.”

Vol. 3 (J–O): “Japheth (Abū ʿAlī Ḥasan) ben Eli"; “Jeshua ben Elijah ha-Levi”; “Josiah ben Jesse”; “Judah ben Eli (ʿAllān)”; “Judah ben Joseph of Qayrawān”; “Kohen Ṣedeq ben Joseph Gaon”; “Levi (Abū Saʿīd) ben Japheth”; “Nathan ben Ḥananiah.”

Vol. 4 (P–Z): “Salmon ben Jeroham (Sulaym ibn Ruḥaym)”; “Shabīb ben Jacob”; “Tanḥum ben Joseph ha-Yerushalmi”; “Wahb ibn Yaʿīsh al-Raqqī.”

The aim of this paper was to comparatively analyze some
(Proto)Indo-European and Oromo-Cush phonological, lexical and
grammatical items and roots. It was triggered by competing
debates and models on (Proto-)Indo-European ((P-)IE) origin, one
of which is the Ancient Model pointing to Africa. (P-)IE and closest
relatives, Eurasiatic and Anatolian, data was collected from the
literature. Pertinent Oromo corpora and native speaker data were
collected. They were subjected to the Comparative Model analysis.
Quite intriguing results showing significant level of resemblance,
both in form and meaning, and implications emerged.

The present article attempts to take stock of the different definitions and connotations of the concept of religious »polemic« in order to encourage a more interdisciplinary debate on this topic. It argues that the interdisciplinary research fields engaging with religious polemics could generate important historical perspectives on current conflict cultures, and appear to be on the verge of an expansion of the horizon towards the global, connecting an extant, highly active research field on religious encounter in the Euro-Mediterranean area to the study of Asia and Africa. To be able to realize an integrative perspective and to write a comparative and entangled history of religious polemics, it seems necessary to reflect on the differences and gaps marking the overlapping research fields. The article therefore offers a brief historiographical sketch concerning the concept of »polemics«, and then offers a pre liminary list of constituents or dimensions of the polemical which have been highlighted in the different research fields. In a concluding section, case studies from the accompanying contributions in this volume furnish examples on possible further perspectives, with an emphasis on non-traditional approaches cutting across established research fields.

Building on medieval claims, modern scholars have long asserted that Saadia ben Joseph Gaon depicted the Oral Torah and extra-biblical institutions as rooted in divine authority primarily, if not exclusively, in order to parry Karaite claims. This essay argues that focus on Karaism obscures a cross-cultural factor that helped shape Saadia’s claims, namely, that Muslim jurists prior to and contemporaneous with Saadia likewise jettisoned non-prophetic elements of religious law and attempted to root Islamic law solely in prophetic dictates. This article traces Saadia’s emphasis on prophetic authority in his claims about the scope of revelation, his depiction of the role of the rabbis, and his portrayal of extra-biblical institutions. It underscores that contemporary Islamic depictions of religious law were decisive in Saadia’s presentations of the sources of Jewish law Full text at http://muse.jhu.edu/article/703673.

The 11th century Karaite Abu al-Faraj Harun reveals  his broad reading practices via the way he employs the Arabic term majaz, "non-literal usage." In this paper I examine his uses and applications of the term in his biblical exegesis and demonstrate their ties to a broad variety of genres of Arabic literature. Eleventh-century Karaites like Abu al-Faraj Harun had gone well beyond the circumscribed literary world of tenth-century Karaite scholars, and

The Jewish-Muslim polemics is as old as Islam. Many quranic verses challenge the Jews and Jewish ideas. From the ninth century onward, adherents of both faiths in the Near East (but not only) produced polemical and apologetic literature—though much more was produced from the Islamic perspective than from the Jewish. Interreligious debates continued throughout the medieval era and up to modern times—though my discussion here extends only from the rise of Islam to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492.

In his al-Khiṭaṭ, al-Maqrīzī devotes a full chapter to the Jews’ falsification of canon writings, as alleged in Islamic sources. His account, focusing on the development of the Jewish Oral Law, is unique among Muslim scholars in its length and complexity. In this article, al-Maqrīzī’s presentation is deconstructed into ten stages, their sources of inspiration are suggested, and an attempt to understand the entire passage, its purpose, and its tendencies is made. The inquiry shows that al-Maqrīzī called on an eclectic range of sources from the Torah to Moses Maimonides and including Rabbinic and Karaite ideas and Qurʾānic verses. Al-Maqrīzī does not claim that the Torah was falsified, recognizes a pre-falsification version of the Mishnah as being of divine origin, but depicts the Talmud as men’s opinions placed in Allāh’s mouth. Thus he takes an in-between position on the Oral Law, with Rabbanites and Karaites on the opposing flanks.

Résumé
Dans son ouvrage al-Khiṭaṭ, al-Maqrīzī consacre un chapitre entier à la falsification des écrits canoniques par les juifs, autrement développée dans les écrits islamiques. Centrée sur le développement de la loi orale juive, sa contribution est unique tant par sa longueur que par sa complexité. Le présent article décompose l’argumentation d’al-Maqrīzī en dix points, s’interroge sur ses sources d’information, et tente de la comprendre dans son ensemble et d’élucider les objectifs de l’auteur. L’étude montre qu’ al-Maqrīzī  s’appuie sur un vaste ensemble de sources, de la Torah à Moïse Maimonide, et qu’il intègre nombre de notions propres au monde Rabbinique, Karaïte ainsi que certains versets coraniques. Il en ressort qu’al-Maqrīzī ne prétend pas que la Torah est une source falsifiée, et qu’il reconnait l’existence d’une version originelle, et non-falsifiée, de la Mishnah comme étant d’origine divine. Cependant, il considère le Talmud comme étant tout au plus un recueil d'opinions énoncées au nom d’Allāh. En cela, il adopte une position intermédiaire sur la loi orale entre les tenants de l’approche Rabbinique et Karaïte.

Key words: al-Maqrīzī, al-Khiṭaṭ, Mishnah, Talmud, Jewish Oral Law

The article discusses the attitude towards Christians, Muslims, and the “foreign sciences” based on one of the only extant polemical texts written in Early Judeo-Persian—a passage from an unpublished commentary on story of Ḥannah preserved in the National Library of Russia (RNL Yevr.-Arab. I 4608). In addition, the article attempts to define the relation of this commentary to the broader intellectual environment of the medieval Jewish world. A close examination of this passage reveals a possible connection to Karaite exegetical work written in Judeo-Arabic during the tenth century, particularly those of Yefet ben ʿEli. Therefore, the article may serve as a case study of intellectual contact and transmission of knowledge between different Jewish groups in the Islamicate world.

"Saadia Gaon (892–942ce) viewed himself not only as a pedagogue and scholar, but also as the chief steward of his people’s religious health and interrelated constitutional ethos—that special scholar who is raised up by God “in every generation … to instruct and teach the people, that by his hand they might succeed in all of their affairs.” This self-perception is especially pronounced in Saadia’s commentary on Esther, which he construes as a specific paradigm of the manner in which Jewish life is to be lived amidst and in interaction with a dominant Gentile population. In his introduction Saadia didactically (and dialectically) unpacks the paradigmatic utility of the book by presenting seven “guidelines” (tadābīr) which are required for the socio-spiritual health of any ethnos (Arab. umma) “when abased beneath the population of the dominant powers”—which steps he subsequently applies to the situation of Israel in the book of Esther and around which, moreover, he organizes that book’s unfolding narrative structure. In the present article we briefly survey these seven “guidelines” and the manner in which they are “unpacked” by Saadia in the body of his commentary, focusing our attention on selected passages that reveal something of the realia—both psychological and practical—attending Jewish-Gentile conviviality, and Saadia’s approach thereto, in a tenth-century Islamicate milieu."

La figura del sabio cordobés Maimónides y la extensa obra que compuso se han convertido en una fuente inagotable de estudio. Sus escritos médicos, aquellos más personales en forma epistolar y su producción filosófica y legal no han cesado de ser analizados desde muy diferentes perspectivas, lo que revierte en la aparición constante nuevos estudios, conclusiones y resultados en torno a ellos. En estas páginas nos cen- traremos en ofrecer un seguimiento de sus obras filosóficas y de jurisprudencia rabínica a través de las ediciones, traducciones y estudios destacados hasta la fecha con el obje- tivo de procurar un punto de partida para futuras investigaciones sobre ellas.
Palabras clave: Moisés ben Maimón; Edad Media; ética; halajá; documentos lega- les; estudios.
Philosophical and Rabbinical Jurisprudency Works of Maimonides: An Over- view through their Editions and Translations.–The figure of the Cordovan wise Maimonides and the extensive work he composed have become an inexhaustible source of study. His medical writings, those more personal in epistolary form and his philo- sophical and legal production have not stopped being analyzed from very different perspectives, which reverts in the constant appearance of new studies, conclusions and results around them. In these pages we will focus on offering a follow-up of his philo- sophical and rabbinic jurisprudence works through the editions, translations and studies highlighted to date in order to provide a starting point for future research on them.

Maʿaśeh Mehmeṭ is a polemical story against Islam written by a seventeenth or eighteenth-century Italian Jew. Reinvestigation of this text reveals that it has aspects that have not been discussed in the academic literature thus far. The article suggests possible sources of inspiration for the author, discusses the hidden polemic in the text, and offers a possible motive for writing it. A critical edition of Maʿaśeh Mehmeṭ appears in an appendix to the article.

ʿAlī b. Aḥmad b. Ḥazm devoted much of his oeuvre to polemics against Jews and Judaism. In so doing, he often based his case on what he said were Jewish sources — which, he insisted, the Jews had falsified and fabricated. How familiar was he with these sources, and how did he acquire this familiarity? The article investigates a series of references to Jewish sources by Ibn Ḥazm, attempts to determine their origin — possibly the Talmuds and other post-Biblical works that contain Midrash — analyses his treatment of them, and ventures several hypotheses about the roots of his familiarity. While scholarship to date provides no unequivocal proof of the correctness of these hypotheses, Ibn Ḥazm’s recourse to Jewish sources in his polemical writings is evidently the result of thorough research on his part.

To Saadia Gaon (882–942) belongs the distinction of having composed the first known personalized and programmatic Jewish commentary on the book of Esther. His more significant innovations in this commentary, which we shall briefly survey, include his treatment of various exegetical cruxes, his literary-thematic analysis and structuring of the biblical book (as well as his commentary thereon), his elucidative references to contemporary socio-religious and vocational realia, and his polemical appropriation of various exegetical topics.

Dozens of fragments of ketubbot written according to the previously unknown custom of Medieval Eretz Israel survived in the Cairo Geniza. The 67 items edited in Jewish Marriage in Palestine (1980–1) originated in Eretz Israel, in Egypt and especially in Lebanon or Syria. The current study contains editions of nine newly identified fragments. These include one compete formulary and eight large and small fragments of authentic contracts. One contains an unknown version of the clause for mutual divorce rights cited in the Palestinian Talmud, as well as other ancient formulae. At least one fragment served a mixed Rabbanite-Karaite couple. The Head of the Yeshiva (Gaon) of Eretz Israel, Elijah ha-Kohen, penned one. Most items are datable to the eleventh century, and their main language is Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. The weddings took place in Tyre or Damascus and one in some place in Eretz Israel.