Jewish Law and Practice in the Medieval Islamic World

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

The proposed panel explores the writings of three medieval authors – two Jewish and one Muslim – who drew upon Islamic religious and legal categories as they considered Jewish law and ritual observance in a way that would be coherent and meaningful to their contemporaries.

David Zvi Kalman’s paper deals with the earliest of the authors, the medieval Muslim historiographer Mutahhar Ibn Tahir al-Maqdisi (10th c.), focusing on the neutral and systematic description of Jewish practice in his KITAB AL-BAD‘ WA-L-TA’RIKH. Al-Maqdisi’s dispassionate portrayal of Jewish law—a rarity in the extant Islamic literary sources—was deeply affected by his Islamic legal training, resulting in a fascinating account of Jewish practice as it was understood by a classically trained Muslim jurist. Of particular interest are those instances in which al-Maqdisi’s reliance upon an Islamic legal-conceptual system yields surprising or erroneous conclusions about halakhic subjects.

The other two papers consider similar efforts but from the opposite direction, examining how Jewish writers employed concepts and terminology from the Islamic tradition in order to illuminate Jewish topics. Marc Herman’s paper investigates Maimonides’ use of Arabic legal terminology in his BOOK OF THE COMMANDMENTS in order to tackle the central challenge that he confronted in composing that work, namely how to conceptualize and articulate distinctions between the various commandments. This philological study will not only resolve a number of enduring riddles posed by the BOOK OF THE COMMANDMENTS, it will also help place Maimonides in conversation with contemporaneous Islamic legal theory.

Arnold Franklin’s paper deals with a commentary on the prayer liturgy by David ben Joshua Maimuni (d. ca. 1415), the last of Maimonides’ descendants to occupy the office of NAGID in Egypt. Like several members of the Maimonidean dynasty, Maimuni was also a proponent of a form of Jewish pietism that drew freely and extensively from Sufi mysticism. Maimuni’s work on the liturgy, part of a larger commentary on his ancestor’s MISHNEH TORAH, offers mystical and philosophical understandings of both the act of prayer and the text of the prayerbook. Franklin’s paper considers the commentary from three vantage points: its relationship to the corpus of Maimonidean texts, its appropriation of ideas and terminology from the Sufi mystical tradition, and its relevance for understanding the importance of prayer in the pietism of the Egyptian HASIDIM generally.

Each paper treats an Arabic or Judeo-Arabic writer who drew upon his larger cultural context. Together, these papers demonstrate the degree to which intellectual interlocutors from outside the author’s community, mentioned or unmentioned, left an indelible impact on his ideas. In his own way, each author profoundly benefited from his larger world.

Sub Unit

• Sephardi/Mizrahi Studies

Chair

• Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman, Vanderbilt University

Individual Presentations

• A "Fiqh" Description of Halakhah: Al-Maqdisi's Attempt to Understand Jewish Law - David Zvi Kalman, University of Pennsylvania

• Three Arabic Terms in Maimonides’ BOOK OF THE COMMANDMENTS - Marc Herman, University of Pennsylvania

• David ben Joshua Maimuni’s Commentary on the Liturgy: Preliminary Observations - Arnold Franklin, Queens College, CUNY