A "Fiqh" Description of Halakhah: Al-Maqdisi's Attempt to Understand Jewish Law

• In Event: Jewish Law and Practice in the Medieval Islamic World

Abstract

The KITAB AL-BAD' WA-L-TA'RIKH of al-Maqdisi, a 10th-century historiographer
about whom we know practically nothing, contains a short but surprisingly rich
description of Jewish religious praxis. Previously translated by Camilla Adang but never
thoroughly investigated, this description is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, it
is one of only two or three medieval Islamic texts which purport to describe Jewish
practice both neutrally and systematically; by contrast, polemical accounts of Jewish
activities and discussions of heretical Jewish beliefs are significantly more common.
Second, al-Maqdisi seems to know not just what Jews do, but why they do it; that is, he
provides us with Jewish legal concepts and not just ethnographic jottings.
What is most striking about the text, however, is that al-Maqdisi’s perception of
halakhah is heavily affected by his Islamic legal training. Not only does he highlight
practices that would be of interest to Muslim jurists, but the description itself is
ordered like a medieval Islamic code— an order foreign to Jewish legal codes. On
several occasions, al-Maqdisi projects onto Judaism concepts which exist only in
Islamic law, leading him to make several false claims. Furthermore, al-Maqdisi, whose
knowledge of Hebrew was most likely limited, frequently uses quotations from HADITH
as substitutes for imagined Hebrew counterparts, some of which did exist and some of
which did not.
The result, marvellously, is a decent description of Jewish practice as seen
through a Muslim jurist’s eyes. Legal institutions which Judaism and Islam share have
the potential to be over-correlated, while concepts or rituals unique to one or the other
are sometimes incorrectly correlated — or ignored all together. This description, along
with a similar but shorter description in al-Ya’qubi’s universal history, highlights some
of the ways in which medieval Islamic jurists understood all religious legal systems to
be structured. This, in turn, is a useful platform from which to consider how law existed
in culture in the medieval Islamicate world.

author

• David Zvi Kalman, University of Pennsylvania