Historical Studies

This Notice presents the first detailed description of Ms. Istanbul, Köprülü Library, Mehmed Âsım Bey 1 bis, a composite Christian-Arabic manuscript hitherto known only through a minimal catalogue entry. The codex consists of numerous fragmentary units copied by different hands and brought together without a codicological plan. Its contents include multiple independent Arabic New Testament witnesses—three distinct Gospel manuscripts, fragments of Acts, Pauline Epistles, and the Minor General Epistles, in addition to a lectionary for the fourth week of Len—as well as Christian Arabic doctrinal, legal, and canonical texts, including a previously unknown textual witness to Aḥkām al-ʿAtīqa, Kitāb al-Hudā, and a canon law collection attributed to Michael of Damietta. A detailed analysis of the script, layout, chapter division systems, marginalia, and paratextual features demonstrates that the volume is an ad hoc aggregation rather than a deliberate miscellany. All identifiable Gospel witnesses belong to the Arabic Vulgate tradition (family K), though they preserve divergent chaptering systems and paratextual practices. This Notice further reconstructs the manuscript’s modern provenance through waqf stamps and ownership marks, situating its binding in the first half of the eighteenth century and its later transmission into the Köprülü Library via Mehmed Âsım Bey. Beyond its textual contents, the manuscript offers important evidence for the circulation, fragmentation, and reassembly of Christian Arabic books in the Ottoman period and for the precarious survival of Christian Arabic materials within Islamic library collections.

The following conversation focuses on Scholar of Islam, Victim of the Holocaust: The Tragic Story of Hedwig Klein (De Gruyter, 2026), a new book by Sabine Schmidtke, Professor of Near Eastern and Islamic Studies in the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies. The book narrates the fascinating, powerful, and yet immensely tragic story of the life and career of Hedwig Klein, an exceptionally talented and potentially path-paving German Jewish scholar of Islam with a focus on Ibāḍī knowledge traditions. Klein was killed during the Holocaust in 1942 at the age of thirty-one. In this book, Schmidtke performs three tasks simultaneously: providing an intimate social and intellectual history of German Orientalism and Islamic Studies at the cusp of and during Nazi Germany, presenting a finely grained analysis of Klein’s life and her intellectual contributions to Islamic Studies, and correcting some popular and dominant misconceptions about Klein’s role in the writing and compilation of the equally well-known and controversial scholar Hans Wehr’s widely used Arabic dictionary. In many ways, the book brings together two prominent threads of Schmidtke’s recent scholarship: her work on Shī‘ī, Zaydī, and Ibāḍī knowledge traditions centered on the excavation and production of critical editions of previously lesser-known Arabic manuscripts and her long-running project of offering an in-depth intellectual genealogy of the German Orientalist tradition in Islamic Studies. Ultimately, the book not only restores a critical, silenced voice and expert of Islam but also reorients our prevailing conceptions of Orientalism while showcasing the impact of the Holocaust on the study of Islam today. In what follows, questions are posed to Schmidtke by SherAli K. Tareen, Patricia Crone Member (2024–25) in the School of Historical Studies, who is himself an expert in Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia.

This article offers a contribution to the study of polemics between Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages. It presents an annotated translation of the extant fragments of a reply by an unknown Jew to the polemical tract Ifḥām al-Yahūd in which the mathematician Samawʾal al-Maghribī (d. 570/1175), who converted to Islam in 558/1163, virulently attacks his former religion. Samawʾal'stract had a significant impact both on later Muslim polemicists and on Jewish thinkers, who defended their religion against his strictures. The unique manuscript of the anonymous refutation, written in Judaeo-Arabic, is part of the Firkovitch collection kept at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. It is included in a codex that also contains an incomplete version, in the same hand, of Samawʾal al-Maghribī's tract. While the codex can be tentatively dated to the fourteenth century and was presumably written in Egypt, we cannot know with any degree of certainty when and where the refutation itself was composed, nor whether the unknown author had access to a complete copy of Samawʾal's work. Although at times the author quotes Ifḥām al-Yahūd verbatim, paraphrases and indirect references to Samawʾal's arguments are more common. In order to contextualize the unknown author's counterarguments, we provide a running commentary, including quotations of the passages from Ifḥām al-Yahūd that are being refuted.

Classic Essays on Jews in Early Modern Europe (Routledege, 2023): Designed for both students and seasoned scholars, this volume provides an innovative guide to the study of the Jewish past from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. It makes available seventeen contributions, published between 1904 and 1984, which are veritable landmarks in the scholarship on Jewish history in early modern Europe but have so far remained little accessible. Many are here translated into English for the first time, while all but one are not currently available in English online. The editors’ introduction situates these classic essays in relation to the growing perception that the early modern period in Jewish history possesses its own distinctive features and identity. Accompanied by a rich bibliography, the volume highlights the many changes that the academic study of this vital phase of the Jewish past has undergone during the last hundred and twenty years.

MS Riyadh, Maktabat Malik Fahd al-Waṭaniyya 748 is a multitext volume copied by al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Ibn Abī l-ʿAshīra in 552/1157 in Ṣaʿda. It consists of doctrinal texts by Zaydī and Muʿtazilī authors, invariably Iranian. The codex is the only known extant witness of all but two of the tracts it includes (the exceptions being Ismāʿīl b. ʿAlī b. Ismāʿīl al-Farrazādhī’s K. Taʿlīq al-Tabṣira and Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Dāʿī al-Ḥasanī’s K. Ḥaqāʾiq al-aʿrāḍ wa-aḥwālihā wa-sharḥihā), and two of its tracts, K. al-Nasīm fī l-uṣūl by one Abū Jaʿfar and K. Muhaj al-ʿulūm by Muʿādh b. Abī l-Khayr al-Hamadhānī, are not even attested in the relevant biobibliographical sources. This study includes critical editions of the doctrinal tracts included in the majmūʿa as well as an additional tract preserved in a related codex that was apparently also copied by Ibn Abī l-ʿAshīra (MS Milan, Ambrosiana, ar. E 462). The edited tracts include Abū l-Faḍl al-ʿAbbās Ibn Sharwīn’s K. al-Wujūh allatī taʿẓumu ʿalayhā l-ṭāʿāt ʿinda llāh, his K. al-Yāqūta, and his Ḥaqāʾiq al-ashyāʾ, ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadhānī’s Ḥudūd al-alfāẓ, Ibn al-Dāʿī’s K. Ḥaqāʾiq al-aʿrāḍ wa-aḥwālihā wa-sharḥihā, the extant part of the K. al-Nasīm fī l-uṣūl, K. Muhaj al-ʿulūm, by Muʿādh b. Abī l-Khayr al-Hamadhānī, fragments of two theological summae by unidentified Zaydī scholars, and collections of doctrinal definitions of uncertain authorship.

On Tuesday, September 17, 2024, a team of librarians from the American University in Cairo (AUC) arrived at the al-Khanji Bookstore in downtown Cairo to oversee the transfer of a rare archive documenting the al-Khanji family's role in the cultural life of the region for nearly a century. This transfer was the result of a cooperation between AUC and five North American academic institutions—the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ; Princeton University; New York University; the University of Michigan; and the College of Charleston—to purchase the archive, preserve it, and make it available to researchers. The al-Khanji archive consists of several thousand documents of various types produced by the well-known Syrian-Egyptian al-Khanji family of booksellers and publishers. Completely unique as the only known surviving archive of a manuscript seller in the region, the archive documents the book-selling and publishing business established by Muhammad Amin al-Khanji after immigrating to Cairo from Aleppo in the 1890s to the 1960s, when the business was run by his sons Sami Amin (d. 1966) and Najib (d. 1980). An exceptionally rich source, the archive promises to open numerous new lines of research into print history, manuscript studies, and Muslim and Orientalist intellectual networks in the first half of the twentieth century. ...

Over the past decade or two, the formation, provenance, and history of manuscript collections around the world has become a focus of scholarly attention. This trend has prompted numerous studies of the Jerusalem-born cosmopolitan Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951), arguably the most important seller of Islamic manuscripts to Western collectors and libraries during the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. One area that has not been studied is Yahuda's assistants, whom he employed over the years to write descriptions of the manuscripts in his possession. No attempt has been made to identify the individuals who worked for Yahuda at different times or to distinguish between the various languages (Arabic, German, English, French) and hands in which the extant catalog slips were written. It appears that Yahuda employed a number of Egyptian and German scholars over the years, some of whom worked for him longer than others. Among them were Hans Kindermann (1902–1979) and Hans Ludwig Gottschalk (1904–1981). The surviving evidence of their respective work for Yahuda is discussed in this study, as is the unsuccessful attempt of Hedwig Klein (1911–1942) to enter into Yahuda’s service in 1938.

This list aims to provide an overview of Abraham Shalom Yahuda’s (1877–1951) academic work and its reception. There are certainly gaps at this point, and I would be grateful for any additional titles missing from the list in its current form.