Judaeo Arabic Studies

Norman Golb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134399932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Théâtre

First Published in 1997. During the middle decades of this century, fundamental research on the Jews of medieval Arabic-speaking lands was carried out by relatively few scholars, whether in Israel or the Western countries. The author of this title sought to remedy this deficit in however small a measure by organizing a Conference on Judaeo-Arabic Studies at Chicago. The purpose of these papers, agreed upon in advance by the participants, was to draw as broad a picture as possible of the contemporary state of research on certain topics subsumed under the general rubric of medieval Jewish-Arabic studies.

1

THE EMERGENCE OF THE QAYRAWĀN JEWISH COMMUNITY AND ITS IMPORTANCE AS A MAGHREBI COMMUNITY

MENAHEM BEN-SASSON

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

During the last ten years I have devoted my studies to research in the Medieval North African communities—communities out of the Reshut area. The intention of this paper is to present some of the results, more than facts of the investigation; paying particular intention to the most important community in the Maghreb at the 9th to 11th centuries, i. e. Qayrawān.

A. Method

In the period with which this paper is concerned, the ninth through the eleventh centuries of the Common Era, the Jewish people’s leadership was marked by two outstanding phenomena; on the one hand the power wielded by the centers in Eretz Israel and Babylonia was still strong; on the other hand, however, the local communities in the Diaspora were beginning to rise to prominence. Our discussion revolves around the tension between these two phenomena.

Ifriqiya (modern-day Tunisia) had an important role to play in the unfolding of all the trends which took place in the Maghreb at that period, and foremost amongst its cities throughout this entire period was Qayrawān. Ifriqiya’s strategic location and the way the political balance of power was arranged in the region made the conditions more favorable there than in neighboring lands for the development of an urban, political culture. Qayrawān, because of its convenient location, remained the realm’s major city even when other capitals were declared, and most of Ifriqiya’s urban, military, political, economic, and social activity revolved around it.

Thus, if we wish to study the history of a minority group living in this region, whose way of life and social traditions made it dependent upon the existence of a stable government and an urban culture, from an early period, we will do well to choose Qayrawān as the subject of a research.

Any investigation into the rise to prominence of the local community, should not be limited to pinpointing ties between it and the Jewish centers, nor the community’s evaluation of itself in halakhic, legal terms. These two courses of investigation must, we believe, be supplemented by the study of the concrete, historic dimension of the community’s life. Such an approach has enabled us to gain an impression of the full breadth of the community’s independent activity, and to identify those realms in which it still remained dependent upon the central Jewish leadership.

Clarifying the relationships between the local Jewish society and its institutions in Qayrawān and between these and the Jewish centers, will help to shape our answer to the question of the relative independence of the Diaspora communities, in both chronological and topical terms. Our discussion will therefore be developed first and foremost to the community’s life and institutions, and it is from these that we shall draw the conclusions with regard to the community’s independence of or dependence upon the central Jewish leadership and its institutions.

Alongside this discussion, we shall have frequent recourse to the two main questions around which the study revolves: (1) the sources of authority upon which the local leadership was able to draw in its own place; and (2) the extent to which the local society and its institutions were independent of or dependent upon Jewish centers outside the Maghreb.

Three different degrees of dependence are suggested here to describe the ties between the community of Qayrawān and the Eastern centers: the official, the functional, and the deferential. The sub-questions to the main one will, therefore, be:

(a) Did the members of the local communities and their institutions have a legal or halakhic obligation to accept the authority of the centers, so that a failure to do so was tantamount to a breach of law?

(b) Alternatively, did they need the central leadership in the Mashreq to govern their daily lives? Would they, perhaps, have had some difficulties in administrating the communities without the aid of the centers, in that their decisions would lack authority or validity?

(c) The third degree of dependence suggested for the communities’ relationship with the Mashreq is the deferential—that is, they acknowledged the supremacy of the center without having any need at all to do so.

The question of the community’s dependence or independence thus concerns not only the relationship between the representatives of the community’s institutions and the Jewish centers; it also covers the faith in which the community’s individual members held their institutions, on the one hand, and the possibilities and restraints governing the institutions’ administration of the community’s affairs on the other. This goes back to the first question we raised regarding the local leaderships’ sources of authority. Earlier studies of the foundations upon which the Jewish community’s organization was based in the Middle Ages have already raised this latter question, which may be phrased as follows: did the Jews’ social organization in Qayrawān really become the basic cells of the community’s national life, able to provide the community’s members with all of their needs, in the absence of an alternative political entity?

B. The Society

Qayrawān was a rabbinic Jewish community, in which those who had dwelt in the region even before the Arab conquest were overshadowed by a rather large and socially influential population of later immigrants. The Jews were an urban population; they pursued a variety of occupations, but our evidence shows that involvement in international commerce was predominant among these. In portraying the structure of the families that made up this society, it comes out how characteristic it was of Jewish society in other Islamic countries, but that it had a few distinguishing marks which were also related to the economic life of its members.

They did, indeed, share these distinguishing factors with many other families in the lands of the southern Mediterranean, but the Qayrawān family was also marked by its unique contractual formulae and local customs, which, whatever the motives for their appearance, certainly had a potentially stabilizing effect on the mercantile families.

While examining three main areas within the community’s social life: the formation of the community; the economical activities of its members; and the family life—we meet with the problematic around which our discussion revolves, that is, the delineation of those trends which worked to undermine them. This problematic emerged primarily as we encountered those trends which tended to buttress the local leadership and its institutions and those which had the potential to undermine these institutions, and they were studied in the relation to the extent to which they actually fulfilled this potential.

In relation to the three areas into which we have divided our description of Qayrawān society, these potentially undermining trends may be defined as follows: In the course of the society’s formation, the potentially destabilizing factors were differences in customs between various segments of the population, and the dominance of that segment of the population whose members were not permanent residents of the region. In this connection, we found that precisely that authority wielded by the institutions of the central leadership in the east—in Babylonia, from where many of the more recent immigrants to the region had originated—encouraged the adoption of common customs and identification with that leadership’s local representatives, the heads of the local communal institutions. On the other hand, the immigrants from Babylonia had no assurance that the power exerted by the center from which they had come would help them gain positions of authority. There is a fair amount of evidence—relating precisely to those matters which might have led to splits within the community on account of the above-mentioned trends—to show that the local leadership proved capable of making the recognition of its authority a common factor amongst all the various sub-groups; the absence of any evidence of the existence of Karaism within the Qayrawān community before the end of the tenth century is particularly striking.

The unstable element in the population was also involved in international commerce. This intercourse brought with it a number of other potentially destabilizing forces as well—the wealthy merchants with their multiple connections amongst Jews abroad and non-Jews in their own country. An examination of these factors which helped to account for the success of this multi-faceted commercial activity shows, however, that those involved in international commerce and its accompanying phenomena were, in fact, highly dependent upon the Jewish institutions in general, and upon the various communal institutions in their own community and in others—in particular.

As we dwelt upon the function of the family in the community’s way of life, a similar picture emerged. The potentially destructive effect of certain trends was never realized, because there was no institutionalized alternative to the leadership which grew up within the framework of the extended family. Nor did the extended family itself become a leadership framework when one of its members took on a primary post in the community; the family would come to the aid of its leading member and benefitted from his status, but it did not itself become identified with the leadership. While the extended family framework did not interfere with and on occasion even supported the local institutions, the nuclear family always worked in their support, if only because of its frequent need of recourse to them.

Alongside the investigation of these potentially destabilizing factors, attention was paid to the social values which emerged from the activity in question, and from the priorities which Qayrawān’s Jewish society set for itself. A number of alternative factors that might have bestowed authority upon the leadership were suggested: that its members were autochthonous inhabitants of the area, that they had originated in the Babylonian centers of Jewish leadership, that they were wealthy or had prestigious family connections. All of these classes might have been good candidates to assume the leadership of the community, for they had strong sources of authority which were supported by the community’s values. These suggestions, however, were not supported by the evidence. The local leadership did, indeed, include emigrants from Babylonia, people of wealth and highly-placed families, but it was not their origination in these classes that was considered the direct source of their authority: those who wielded authority in the community took on other mantles while serving in the communal leadership, and people possessing none of the sources of authority proposed above, were able to attain leadership positions.

Those trends which might have worked to undermine the local leadership never became strong enough to do so, because of the frequent need of all segments of the community to have recourse to this leadership; those who turned to it most frequently, in fact, were precisely the most “promising” of its potential spoilers. This phenomenon worked indirectly to bolster the authority of the local leadership: the fact that this leadership was founded not upon those sources of authority which stood behind its potential underminers, but upon sources of authority which had their origin in the community’s set of values; and the fact that these latter sources of authority were adopted even by the potential underminers themselves, added greatly to the strength of the leadership, which drew its support from these sources of authority. Thus a study of these alternative sources of authority, and how they enabled the local communal institutions to assume the leadership of the community, is necessary.

C. Institutions

The institutions we have studied fall into two groups: those whose activities were entirely within the realm of the community, including the synagogue, the heqdesh and various charitable institutions; and those whose activities evolved out of their connections with the central leadership institutions abroad, including the Beit Midrash, the Beit Din and the Neggidut.

The synagogue was a central institution in Qayrawān’s communal life, but it cannot be said that it held a position of leadership. It may have represented “something of the Temple” within the communal framework, but it did not fulfill those same functions of leadership as had the Temple in Jerusalem and the institutions attached to it, before the great destruction. We propose, rather, to view it as a kind of looking-glass, brightening or dimming according to the state of the Jewish society it reflected, for all the various elements of that society were to be found there. It did not lead the community, but it had its own independent life, guided by halakhic sources and customs. As it pursued its independent course, its own “leaders” emerged, but their leadership role did not extend beyond the confines of the synagogue and its affairs. It may be concluded from this that attaining a prominent position in the synagogue did not necessarily endow one with the authority needed to attain a leadership role in the community at large.

On the other hand, the synagogue did hold a unique, central position in the city’s communal life, as the result of the proximity of those who did wield authority within the community and their need of recourse to it: the Beit Midrash which was in it or next to it, and the Beit Din, which required the gatherings of the whole community which took place there on various occasions, bestowed an aura of authority upon it. It may well be that the synagogue’s physical building symbolized the community’s leadership in an abstract way in the consciousness of its members, and even though the communal leaders did not draw their power from it, it was one of the more important arenas in which they appeared.

While the synagogue may not have fulfilled a leadership function, it did express, better than any of the community’s other authoritative institutions, the nature of the Jewish community—an organic whole whose individual members had responsibilities to one another which demanded their cooperative efforts—and the social and communal identification of those who took part in the services. It fulfilled the community’s needs, but it did not direct the course of its life.

Just as the community came to serve as the basic unit of the people’s national life, because of the difficulty of maintaining ties with the Jewish centers, so the Beit Midrash took the place of the central institutions of learning, on both the theoretical and practical levels. It was here that most of the vessels needed to preserve the communities’ treasured and authentic traditions of learning were kept. The Beit Midrash of Qayrawān does indeed seem to have been capable of fulfilling this function, for its own city and for members of other communities as well.

The compilation of the halakhic sources in the Beit Midrash aided the development of a local tradition of learning, and this led to the composition of halakhic treatises for the use of the students in the Qayrawān Beit Midrash.

The purpose of these compilations and treatises was, first of all, to assist the students of the Beit Midrash in their learning, but they also led further, towards independence for the local Beit Midrash. The awareness on the part of the teachers which led to the composition of these halakhic works was a significant step in the community’s emergence as an independent body, and even an alternative center. This awareness was, indeed, the preserve of an elite, and it did not extend to members of the community, but it created the conditions required for the community to be able to define itself as an independent unit capable of responding to most of the needs of its individual members, even those who were not aware of the fact that the community was gradually liberating itself from its ties with the Jewish center.

When we added our examination of the content of what was studied in the Beit Midrash to our awareness of the involvement of its leaders in the affairs of the local community, we were able to arrive at the following conclusions: (1) the ability of the sages attached to the Beit Midrash to study those sources for themselves helped advance them towards a situation in which they no longer had need of frequent consultations with the central authorities; (2) the rich and varied sources used by these Qayrawān sages attests to their high level of learning and to their ability to deal with the problems submitted to them on their own; (3) the involvement of the participants in the Beit Midrash in the affairs of the community stemmed from their areas of expertise in those areas of life to which the problems submitted for their solution related, and from their ability to deal with these problems; (4) the members of the community saw the authority wielded by the leaders of the Beit Midrash as stemming from their ability to interpret the circumstances of the community in halakhic terms and to discern how the requirements of the halakhah could be fulfilled in the community’s current situation. The authority possessed by these sages to govern the lives of both the individual and the community was thus practically absolute, and it was recognized as such both by the sages themselves and by the members of the community at large.

The authority of the Qayrawān Beit Midrash extended to other communities as well; this was partly owing to the city’s location in the heart of the Maghreb, its importance and the size of its population, but above all, because of the fame it had acquired on account of its unique system of learning, the expertise of its sages and the large number of halakhic texts in its collection. This authority was evident not only from a technical point of view—that is, from the fact that funds and questions on matters of halakhah were channelled through Qayrawān to be sent to Babylonia—but from the readiness of members of other communities to recognize the primacy of its Beit Midrash. The halakhic questions to be passed on were corrected there by Rabbi Ya‘kov ben Nissim ibn Sha‘ahīn, so that they would be well and clearly phrased when they reached the great sages in Babylonia. The regional sage, sitting in judgement, had the status of a high court for the surrounding communities.

The Beit Midrash of Qayrawān was recognized as a leading institution by the non-Jewish inhabitants of Al-Mahdiya as well, and even the regime and its functionaries seem to have recognized its importance. This recognition, however, did not make it into an alternative for the maintenance of continuous ties and massive support of the Babylonian center. Its primacy and importance stemmed, rather, from its high standard of study and the wealth of halakhic tradition it had compiled. Once this reputation had spread amongst the communities around the Mediterranean, students began to reach it, as individuals and in groups, from the surrounding communities. By now they were maintaining their multi-faceted system of ties with Babylonia—which was also controlled by Qayrawān—more as an honorary tribute to the primacy its sanctity still gave it, than out of a need to receive authoritative answers to their halakhic problems from there; and the day was not far off when these outlying communities would depend more on Qayrawān, their local center of learning, than upon the far-off centers to the east. The Babylonian sages, too, nurtured Qayrawān as an organizational center for the Maghreb, and this, too, helped to raise the stan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Opening Remarks of S.D. Goitein
• List of Contributors
• 1 The Emergence of the Qayrawān Jewish Community and its Importance as a Maghrebi Community
• 2 Jewish Thought in Iraq in the 10th Century
• 3 Judaeo-Arabic Thought in Spain and North Africa: Problems and Prospects
• 4 The Linguistic Status of Medieval Judaeo-Arabic
• 5 Popular Literature in Medieval Jewish Arabic
• 6 Jewish Communal Organization in Medieval Egypt: Research, Results and Prospects
• 7 Judaeo-Arabic Mystical Writings of the XIIIth–XIVth Centuries
• 8 Philosophy or Exegesis: Perennial Problems in the Study of Some Judaeo-Arabic Authors
• 9 Developments in Jewish Marriage and Family Law as Reflected in the Cairo Geniza Documents
• 10 The Babylonian Encounter and the Exilarchic House in the Light of Cairo Geniza Documents and Parallel Arab Sources
• 11 The Meaning of Terms Designating Love in Judaeo-Arabic Thought and Some Remarks on the Judaeo-Arabic Interpretation of Maimonides
• 12 Jewish Aristotelianism: Trends from the 12th through the 14th Centuries
• 13 Philosophy or Exegesis: Some Critical Comments
• 14 The Jews of the Islamic West in the Perspective of “La Longue Durée”
• 15 Jewish Polemics against Islam and Christianity in the Light of Judaeo-Arabic Texts
• Index