The Transformation of Jewish Literature in Arabic in the Islamicate World

Project Information

MAJLIS

Grant agreement ID: 101002243

DOI

10.3030/101002243

EC signature date 18 December 2020

Start date 1 September 2021

End date 31 August 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 994 000,00

EU contribution

€ 1 994 000,00

Coordinated by

LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAET MUENCHEN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - MAJLIS (The Transformation of Jewish Literature in Arabic in the Islamicate World)

Reporting period: 2024-09-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In pre-modern times, an estimated ninety percent of the Jewish population lived under Muslim hegemony. Over the centuries, these Jews not only adopted the Arabic language for most forms of spoken and written communication, but also integrated concepts and techniques from their intellectual environment, resulting in one of the most extraordinary periods of literary creativity in all of Jewish history. Despite its importance, however, Judaeo-Arabic literature has been under-researched until very recently, due to inaccessible sources, disparate scholarly traditions and political antagonism. The overall aim of MAJLIS is to explore comprehensively for the first time the fundamental way in which the adoption of Arabic transformed Jewish literature from the 9th to the 11th century. The project focuses on the Arabic literature of the Qaraites, a Jewish intellectual movement whose religious and scholarly center, the Academy of Jerusalem, played a catalytic role in these transformation processes. It will proceed by applying state-of-the-art digital tools to analyze manuscripts produced in the Academy with the aim of (1) tracing changes in Jewish literature and contrasting them to rabbinic literary models, especially with regard to how the texts were composed, produced, authored, and organized into a knowledge framework; (2) identifying the dominant scholars and analyzing their geographical origins, professional networks and institutional integration; and (3) comparing the Academy and its literature to non-Jewish literature and non-Jewish institutions of the time. By bringing together unique expertise covering Judaic as well as Islamic studies at a time when the sources have become available to an unprecedented degree, MAJLIS will not only fundamentally add to our understanding of the history of Jewish literature, but also demonstrate that Jewish heritage in the Near East is of transcommunal and transnational importance.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The initial task of the first funding phase was to search for and assemble a comprehensive corpus of primary sources that shaped the concrete intellectual environment of the Academy and could, with some confidence, be attributed to it. This task was completed successfully in the following three steps.
First, we identified the relevant manuscript collections: (1) the Firkovitch Collection, housed in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg; (2) the Shapira Collection, located in the British Library; (3) the collection of manuscripts in the Qaraite Synagogue in Cairo; and (4) the Tischendorf collections of Jewish manuscripts, partially housed in Leipzig and St. Petersburg Second, we compiled existing catalogue descriptions and combined them with data from the initially identified manuscript collections, aggregating metadata that described approximately 20,000 Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts.
This metadata underwent rigorous authority control through MAJLIS, was standardized, and revised based on recent research literature, ensuring that MAJLIS now possesses the most accurate descriptions of Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts currently known. Third, using this refined data, we sifted through the corpus of manuscripts to identify those pertinent to our project.
Another goal of the first funding phase was to craft a scholarly portrait of the agents responsible for transforming the form and thematic paradigms of Jewish literature. This objective also explored how transregional networks influenced these scholars' outputs and shaped the literature they produced. We utilized several types of sources for this analysis: first, the manuscripts identified as relevant (as detailed above); second, extensive responsa authored by some scholars from the Academy, which facilitate an in-depth examination of transregional networks and third, stand-alone documentary sources, such as those from the Cairo Genizah.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

215 manuscripts show certain evidence that they belonged to the Qaraite Academy of Jerusalem, based on colophons, dedication notes, or the presence of autographs from authors active there. 1,166 manuscripts contain confident evidence of their association with the Academy, based on paleographic and codicological observations. Thirty-four individuals have been confirmed to have an affiliation with the Academy, most as teaching personnel. Approximately eighty literary works produced at the Academy were identified. These works will serve as the basis for further research directions in the second funding phase, such as the development of disciplines of knowledge, compositional structures of these texts, and comparisons with non-Jewish works.
All data have been imported into manuForma, the project's repository, which is a novel infrastructure developed within the project. This system allows for the creation and maintenance of the following entities: manuscripts, persons (i.e. the scholars of the Dār al-ʿilm), literary works (composed there), places, and relationships (teacher-student, family relations, and the relations between works and manuscripts, such as attested copies). The records are encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. Its structure is threefold: a data-import interface that automatically converts data to TEI format (previously nonexistent), the storage of data on GitHub, and a display interface currently used by project members to manage their research data. Ultimately, at the project's conclusion, this will be transformed into an open-access Digital Handbook of Jewish Authors Writing in Arabic. The database includes transcriptions and translations of relevant sources, such as colophons and dedication notes.