Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World

The maʿamad (Heb. assembly; rendered in Latin characters by western Sephardi communities as mahamad) was an executive council that managed the secular affairs of many Jewish congregations in the Ottoman Empire and other parts of the Sephardi Diaspora. Usually made up of seven members (the so-called seven best men of the city; Heb. shivʿat ṭove ha-ʿir), although some councils were smaller, it functioned alongside the community’s spiritual leadership. Tax-paying members of the congregation elected aldermen (Heb. parnasim, sing. parnas) at public gatherings in a fairly democ…

Henri Maarek was born in Tunis in 1893. His father, Messod(1861–1941), was one of the best and most talented modern Hebrew scholars of the Tunisian Haskala (Hebrew Enlightenment) and the editor of the Judeo-Arabic newspapers al-Bustān (1888–1906) and al-Naḥla (1892–1895). Maarek was educated at a kuttāb (Jewish elementary school), the Alliance Israélite Universelle school, and a yeshiva. Upon completing his education, he became a teacher in the Alliance school. Between 1930 and 1934, Maarek was a member of a committee charged with improving education in the Jewish community. His experience at the Alliance school, combined with his background in Hebrew, made  Maarek a forceful advocate of Zionist ideas and the teaching of Hebrew. In 1920 he founded the Zionist newspaper La Voix Juive , which appeared until 1921. He was elected twice to the Jewish Conseil de la Communauté, once in the 1920s and again in the 1950s. In addition to his other activities, he was custodian of the Jewish Library, which had more th…

Enrico Macias (né Gaston Ghrenassia) is perhaps the best-known Jewish musician from North Africa. Born in Constantine, Algeria, on December 11, 1938 into a highly musical family, he began playing the guitar at a very young age. At fifteen, Macias played guitar in the famed orchestra of Raymond Leyris (known as Cheikh Raymond), in which his father, Sylvain Ghrenassia, was a violinist. He was not, however, encouraged to pursue music full-time, and instead became a teacher to young, primarily Muslim students in Aïn Frain.  In 1961 Raymond Leyris was brutally murdered, and in the …

Born in Marrakesh in the 1760s, Meʾir ben Abraham Cohen Macnin (Maqnīn; Mor. Ar. goldfinch) settled in Essaouira (Mogador) in the 1770s or early 1780s. He soon rose to prominence in the port as a merchant and key intermediary for the governor of Essaouira. In the winter of 1799 to 1800, he set sail for England during an outbreak of bubonic plague, leaving behind his wife whom he had recently married. This was the beginning of a long sojourn in London, during which Macnin joined the elite Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, also known as the Bevis Marks Synagogue, eve…

see Spain Norman A. Stillman

mThe term mafṭirim designates both a special repertoire of pizmonim (hymns), or paraliturgical sung poetry, from the Ottoman Turkish Jewish tradition, and the choir of male singers that performs them. The tradition of singing poems modeled on the court traditions of Ottoman music originated in Edirne (Adrianople) in the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it spread to Izmir, Istanbul, and other Ottoman cities. The genre of mafṭirim stems from medieval Spanish and Levantine Jewish sung poetry. Religious poems were collected and publishe…

Maggid Mesharim (The Announcer of Truth), edited by Rabbi Shelomo Twena, was one of a number of newspapers in Judeo-Arabic and/or Hebrew published by Baghdadi Jews in India during the second half of the nineteenth century. It appeared weekly in Calcutta from 1890 to 1900. Like its predecessors, it carried local news of Jewish communities in India, announcements of births, deaths, and marriages, shipping news and schedules, and worldwide Jewish news. Twena’s reportage focused heavily, however, on the hardships of Jews in Baghdad, such as persecution by the Ottoman authorities and outbreaks of plague. Maggid Mesharim also emphasized literature and culture, for which Twena created a s…

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Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Maghīlī (ca. 1440–ca. 1503) was a Muslim preacher,  activist, and jurist born and educated in Tlemcen. Moving to the fortified oasis town of Tamantit in the Touat region of west-central Algeria some 764 kilometers (475 miles) south of Tlemcen, he also journeyed throughout the Sahara and to West Africa as an adviser to local rulers. He wrote twenty-six works, most of them concerning Islamic theology and law. His Aḥkām Ahl al-Dhimma (Laws Relating to the People of the Dhimma) treats the subject of Jewish-Muslim relations; it may or may not have been identical to another work attributed to him entitled Risāla fī ʾl-Yahūd (Epistle on the Jew…

see Algeria;Morocco; Libya; Tunisia Daniel Schroeter

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A town in the Nile Delta prominently featured in documents from the Cairo Geniza, Mahalla al-Kubra (Ar. al-Maḥalla al-Kubrā) hosted a significant Jewish community until the late nineteenth century. The Jewish businesses and residents of al-Maḥalla were located in the Khōkhat al-Yahūd quarter (see Jewish Quarters). Its many silk weavers and dyers gave Mahalla al-Kubra a role in the silk industry at least as strong as that of the predominant Egyptian Jewish community in neighboring Fustat (Ar. Al-Fusṭāṭ). A query submitted to Maimonides mentions a partnership between owners of …

Maḥḍar al-Shuhūd f ῑ Radd al-Yahūd (Ar. The Court forRefuting the Jews) is a polemic against Judaism written by Ḥājj Bābā Qazvīnī Yazdī in the city of Yazd during the month of Ramaḍān 1797. The author's father, Muḥammad Ismāʿīl, was a Jewish convert to Islam. The author, apparently not a Muslim from birth, organized meetings (Ar. majālis) with Jews in addition to writing Maḥḍar al-Shuhūd. The book is a major source of anti-Jewish contentions rooted in early Sunnī and Shīʿī writings. It criticizes the concept of the Oral Law, but its main target is the Hebrew Bible. It uses the Hebrew Bible to prove the supremacy of Islam, and to foretell Muḥammad's rise and the twelve imāms of Shīʿī history (Gen. 17:20). At the same time it holds that the fulfillment of the Torah's…

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Maḥmūd Shah was a Ghilzāy Afghan chieftain who invaded Iran in 1722, and besieged Isfahan, the capital, for seven months (March–October 1722).  The city was subjected to terrible famine and suffering that caused the death of approximately eighty thousand people,  many of starvation. The effect of the siege on the city’s Jewish community is described briefly but movingly in Kitāb-i Sar-Guzasht-i Kāshān dar Bāb-i ʿIbrī va Goyimi-yi Sānī (The Book of Events in Kashan Concerning the Jews; Their Second Conversion), the Judeo-Persian chronicle of Bābāī ibn Far…

Maimon (Ar. Maymūn) ben Joseph ha-Dayyan (ca. 1110–ca. 1166), the father of Moses Maimonides, was a disciple of  Joseph ha-Levi ben Meʾir ibn Migash, with whom he studied in Lucena. Maimon served as a rabbi and jurist in Cordova until the Almohad conquest. He was a scion of an important Sephardi family of al-Andalus documented as far back as the beginning of the tenth century. Almost all of his forebears were judges (Heb. dayyanim) and communal leaders: The sources trace the family line back for seven generations from Maimon’s father, Joseph the sage. Joseph’s father was Isaac ha-dayyan, Isaac’s father was Joseph ha-dayyan, his father was Obadiah ha-dayyan, his father was Solomon ha-dayyan, his father was Joseph the sage, his father was Isaac ha-dayyan, and his father was Joseph ha-dayyan in the late tenth century. In 1145 to 1146, Ibn Ḥamdīn, the governor…

Abraham (Abū ʾl-Munā Ibrāhīm) ben Moses ben Maymon (1186–1237), the only son of Moses Maimonides, was born in Fustat, Egypt. As a child he was meek and humble, with excellent virtues—sharp intelligence and a kind nature. His father devoted loving care to his education, and he was clearly a person of enormous erudition in both Jewish and secular, scientific literature. In 1204, at the age of only seventeen or eighteen, he was appointed leader (Ar. raʾīs al-yahūd; Heb. nagid ) of the Jewish community in Egypt upon the death of his father. In part, perhaps, because of his you…

David ben Abraham Maimonides (1222–1300) was the leader of Egyptian Jewry and a grandson of Moses Maimonides. Following the demise of his father in 1237, David was appointed head of Egyptian Jewry (Heb. nagid; Ar. raʾīs al-Yahūd) at a tender age. Deposed, possibly because of his youth, and restored in 1225, he remained in office for several decades. An able communal leader and scholar, possibly also a physician, he was reputedly the author of a collection of Judeo-Arabic sermons on the weekly portions of the Torah, as well as a Ju…

Joshua ben Abraham Maimonides (Maymūnī) was the third son of Abraham ben David Maimonides. He inherited the office of nagid in Egypt either directly from his father or from his older brother Moses. According to the sixteenth-century Jewish chronicler Joseph Sambari, he was born in 1310 and died in 1355. Very little is known about his personal life other than the fact that he was a renowned and respected scholar. A letter to him from Hebron in the Cairo Geniza offers condolences on the death of his older brother Obadiah and laments the unfortunate state of the Hebron commu…