Iberian Jewish Literature: Between al-Andalus and Christian Europe

NOTES

Notes Introduction 1. Judah Halevi, Kitab al-radd wa al-dalil fi al-din al-dhalil (al-kitab al-khazari), ed. David H. Baneth and Haggai Ben-Shammai (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1977), 169 (Book 4:17). Judah Ibn Tibbon translates al-tagharrub as gerut. At ¤rst glance, one might think that the translator has transformed Abraham’s action from “emigration” to “conversion”; however, gerut appropriately captures the connotation of accepting the burden of becoming a stranger. 2. Ibid., 228 (Book 5:23). 3. I refrain from translating the Hebrew term Sefarad with “Spain,” “Iberia,” or “al-Andalus.” This is explained further below. 4. Also, in a letter to David of Narbonne, Halevi states: “All I ask of God . . . [is] that He proclaim my freedom from slavery, ¤nd me a place of rest, and exile [or estrange] me to the place of living waters” (emphasis mine), Diwan, 1:225. 5. Je¤m Schirmann, Ha-shirah ha-"ivrit bi-sefarad u-be-provans, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: Dvir; Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1954–60), 1:489. (These volumes are herein abbreviated HHSP.) 6. See Franz Rosenthal, “The Stranger in Medieval Islam,” Arabica 44 (1997): 35–75; the treatise attributed to al-Jahiz, “Risala fi al-hanin ila al-awtan,” in Rasa#il al-Jahiz, ed. "A. S. Harun (Cairo: Maktabat al-khanji, 1964–79), 2:380–412; Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s Adab al-ghuraba#, ed. S. D. al-Munajjid (Beirut: Dar al-kitab al-jadid, 1972), this book has been translated into English by Patricia Crone and Shmuel Moreh, The Book of Strangers: Medieval Arabic Graf¤ti on the Theme of Nostalgia (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2000); Wadad Qadi, “Dislocation and Nostalgia : Al-hanin ila l-awtan, Expressions of Alienation in Early Arabic Literature,” in Myths, Historical Archetypes and Symbolic Figures in Arabic Literature, ed. Angelika Neuwirth et al. (Stuttgart: Steiner [in Komm], 1999), 3–31; Mark R. Cohen re®ects upon the use of the term gharib in connection with the “foreign poor” in Genizah letters, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 72–77. 7. Moses Ibn Ezra, Kitab al-muhadara wa al-mudhakara, ed. A. S. Halkin (Jerusalem : Mekize Nirdamim, 1975), 2, 4. 8. Ibid., 66. 9. Dates of Islamic history in Iberia generally follow Mahmoud Makki, “The Political History of al-Andalus (92/711–897/1492),” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 3–87; some of these dates are marked slightly differently in other scholarly works. 10. Jews and Muslims remained highly integrated, most often in business but also, as some fatwas indicate, in residential areas; see Ibrahim al-Qadiri Butshish, Mabahith fi al-tarikh al-ijtima"i li-l-maghrib wa al-andalus khilal "asr al-murabitin (Beirut: Dar al-tali"a li-l-tiba"a wa al-nashr, 1998), 95. Although Jewish merchants remained active during the ¤rst half of the twelfth century, the arrival of the Al215 moravids seems to have reduced their commercial opportunities; see Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 93. On the interpenetration of Muslims and Jews in urban society amid a growing segregationist ideology, see the well-known market regulations of Ibn "Abdun (Seville, early twelfth century): English translation by Bernard Lewis in Olivia Remie Constable, ed., Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim and Jewish Sources (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 175–79. The only evidence for the physical persecution of Jews during the Almoravid period recounts the storming of Jewish homes in Cordoba in 1134–35, leading to a number of deaths and the seizure of property; a similar attack may have affected the Jews of Granada twenty days later. Jewish safety was thus no more compromised than during the Ta#ifa period, which witnessed the more extreme massacre of Granadan Jewry in 1066. The Cordoba attack is mentioned by Mark R. Cohen, “Persecution, Response, and Collective Memory: The Jews of Islam in the Classical Period,” in The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society, and Identity, ed. Daniel Frank (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 147 n. 6. Butshish, Mabahith fi al-tarikh, 101, mentions the Cordoba attack and also the incident in Granada, relying upon an anonymous source. 11. There was no noteworthy decline in intellectual activity during the Almoravid period; Isaac Alfasi, Judah Halevi, Joseph Ibn Saddiq, Solomon Ibn Saqbel, Abraham Ibn Ezra, and Moses Maimonides were all active (or...