Sabine Schmidtke

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.

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.

Among the responsa collections by al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā that still remain to be edited are the Jawābāt al-masāʾil al-Sallāriyya, which consist of responsa to eight questions most of which revolve around issues related to the subtleties of kalām. On the basis of the two earliest witnesses of this text, MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Petermann II [Pm.] 169 and MS Mashhad, Āstān-i quds 1448, an edition has been prepared.

This paper presents an annotated edition of the extant epistolary exchange between Wladimir Ivanow and Paul Kraus during the years 1934 through 1939, with an additional final letter in 1943. The letters not only provide new insights into the scholarly biographies of both scholars but also shed some new light on an early stage of Ismaʿili studies.

This paper revolves around a hitherto unknown heresiography from northern Iran, Asās al-maqālāt fī qamʿ al-jahālāt, which is preserved in a unique manuscript contained in a majmūʿa (Ms. Tehran, Majlis 10727). In the introduction, we describe the multitext codex, one of the few extant codices testifying to the continuous presence of Zaydism in northern Iran beyond the sixth/twelfth century. Additionally, we discuss two alternative tentative identifications of the author of Asās al-maqālāt, Abū Muḍar Shurayḥ b. al-Muʾayyad al-Muʾayyadī al-Shurayḥī and Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shurayḥī al-Muʾayyadī. While the latter is entirely unknown, Abū Muḍar is renowned for his Asrār al-Ziyādāt, and we attempt to situate him more precisely in the chronology of Zaydī scholarship. Finally, we provide an editio princeps of Asās al-maqālāt fī qamʿ al-jahālāt.

The arrival of large numbers of Yemeni manuscripts in European libraries towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century was a sensation that was enthusiastically received by the scholarly world. One of the principal reasons for this enthusiastic reception was the upsurge of South Arabian studies in Europe since the first half of the nineteenth century, together with the hope that the new material would fill some of the gaps in the literary sources on the history and geography of southern Arabia, especially during the pre-Islamic period. The most significant such lacuna was the missing volumes 1 through 7 and 9 of al-Hamdānī’s Iklīl. The two most important collections of Yemeni manuscripts that arrived in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been gathered by Eduard Glaser and Giuseppe Caprotti, respectively, and their collections were sold to Berlin, London, and Vienna (Glaser) and to Munich, Milan, and the Vatican (Caprotti). The collections included some new material on South Arabian history (including volumes 1, 2, and 6 of the Iklīl), but they also opened up entirely new vistas and laid the foundation for the new discipline of Zaydi studies. Unlike South Arabian studies, the study of Zaydism had a slow start, with initially only a few scholars being interested in this entirely new field. Moreover, the scholarly exploration of the respective subcollections depended on the availability of catalogues. The early history of the Caprotti collection is intimately linked to Eugenio Griffini. Caprotti had dispatched nearly his entire manuscript collection of some 1,600 codices to Griffini, who kept it in his apartment in Milan until 1909, when the collection was donated to the Ambrosiana Library. Griffini was also the first and, for a long time, the only scholar to study the collection and prepare studies as well as catalogues of it. The process of his engagement with the material can be reconstructed on the basis of the Griffini archive, the whereabouts of which were for decades uncertain. This study outlines the discovery of the Griffini archive in the Biblioteca Comunale Centrale Palazzo Sormani in Milan and provides an initial overview of its contents, including Griffini’s epistolary exchanges with some ninety-nine correspondents, his descriptions of some of the Ethiopic manuscripts of the Ambrosiana, and, most importantly, his schedario, containing his extensive notes on all manuscripts of series A of the Caprotti collection. The large corpus of so far unexplored material promises to provide new insights into the network of Islamicists and Arabists at the turn of the twentieth century and the nascent phase of Zaydi studies in Europe.

Departing from a collective manuscript copied partly in the hand of the renowned Yemenī scholar ʿAbd Allāh b. Zayd al-ʿAnsī (d. 667/1268) and partly in the hand of his nephew, Muḥammad b. Aʿsad, that contains three works concerned with Qurʾānic passages taken to support ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and the ahl al-bayt and pro-ʿAlid traditions culled from of Sunnī ḥadīth collections, the reception of the Kitāb al-ʿUmda of the Twelver Shīʿī author Ibn al-Biṭrīq al-Ḥillī (d. 600/1203–1204 or 601/1204–1205)—one of three works contained in the codex—among the Zaydīs of Yemen is analyzed in detail. It is shown that this work, together with Ibn al-Maghāzilī’s (d. 483/1090) Manāqib ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, were the principal available sources for the Zaydīs of Yemen up until the time of the Imām al-Manṣūr bi-llāh (d. 614/1217) for the Sunnī canonical ḥadīth collections.

In 1984, David Thomas Gochenour completed a study titled “The Penetration of Zaydi Islam into Early Medieval Yemen,” which was submitted as a doctoral dissertation to Harvard University in May 1984. It was followed by Gochenour’s study, “A Revised Bibliography of Medieval Yemeni History in light of Recent Publications and Discoveries,” published in volume 63 (1986) of Der Islam. Both publications constituted important landmarks in the scholarly exploration of Zaydism at the time—Gochenour’s doctoral dissertation was a first attempt to write a social history of Yemeni Zaydism during the medieval period, and his 1986 article provided a first comprehensive overview of the relevant historical sources, Sunni, Zaydi, and Ismāʿīlī, and the publication activities in Yemen at the time. Having spent a fair amount of time in Yemen himself, Gochenour was involved in direct conversation with some of the leading Yemeni historians at the time and he had access to some of the public and private libraries. During the preparation of his studies, Gochenour assembled a remarkable collection of manuscript surrogates, in microfilm as well as on paper. On 31 March 2022, D. Thomas Gochenour visited the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton NJ and donated at this occasion his collection to the library of the IAS. In doing so, he wishes to make the material accessible to scholarship. To facilitate this, I am presenting here an annotated list of the holdings of David Thomas Gochenour Collection, which can be accessed through the Historical Studies–Social Science Library of the Institute for Advanced Study. The material may be consulted by scholars by appointment in the Library. Selected items that are not accessible in digital form elsewhere, will also be digitized and made accessible through the Zaydi Manuscript Tradition Project (ZMT) that is jointly curated by the Institute for Advanced Study and Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML).

Sabine Schmidtke, bu çalışmada Ebû Bekr el-Bâkillânî’nin en kapsamlı kelâm eseri Hidâyetü’l-müsterşidîn’in iki yazmasını tanıtmaktadır. Daha önce Daniel Gimaret tarafından Fes ve Kahire’deki yazmaları tanıtılan eserin bu makalede ele alınan yazmaları ise St. Petersburg ve Taşkent’te bulunmaktadır. Schmidtke, söz konusu yazmalardan hareketle Hidâye’nin biçim ve muhtevasına yönelik çıkarımlarda bulunmaktadır. Makalede ayrıca St. Petersburg ve Taşkent yazmalarında geçen Bâkillânî’nin kelâm ve fıkıh usulü alanlarında kaleme aldığı eserlerin isimlerine ve daha erken dönem kelâm literatüründen yaptığı alıntılara işaret edilmektedir. Yazar, makalenin sonuna Fes ve Kahire yazmalarının kısa, St. Petersburg ve Taşkent yazmalarının ise detaylı içindekiler listelerine yer vermektedir.

The article presents an editio princeps of Masʾala fī anna ijmāʿ ahl al-bayt ḥujja by the fifth/eleventh-century Zaydī al-Muwaffaq bi-llāh al-Jurjānī, author of the K. al-Iḥāṭa fī ʿilm al-kalām and the K. al-Iʿtibār wa-salwat al-ʿārifīn, one of the earliest extant substantial discussions on the consensis of the family of the Prophet among the Zaydis.

In the course of the nineteenth century, “Oriental studies” evolved as an independent academic discipline. While these developments primarily involved scholars who identified as Christians, Jewish scholars, too, adopted a critical historical/philological approach towards the Jewish literary tradition and its history, an approach that became known as Wissenschaft des Judentums. Although the close relationship between the Wissenschaft des Judentums and Oriental studies is widely recognized, far more scholarship has been produced on the earlier periods—up until the final decades of the nineteenth century—than on later periods of the Wissenschaft des Judentums—up until 1933. This study focuses on the Jewish orientalists who were trained in Berlin, the leading center of Oriental studies in Germany, shortly before or during the first decade of the twentieth century, and who also attended one of the local Jewish seminaries, the Hochschule or the Rabbinerseminar, two institutions with a critical number of faculty with a solid training in Semitica and Arabica. Unlike their Jewish predecessors, they were often more inclined towards Islamica than Judaica and they often replaced the ideals of the Wissenschaft des Judentums with those of Zionism. Their career paths also differed from those of earlier Jewish orientalists. In order to redress the neglect of this period in scholarship, and to allow for a prosopographic analysis of educational and career patterns, of opportunities, choices, and decisions, the respective scholarly trajectories need to be reconstructed for as many individual cases as possible. Focusing on these understudied figures will not only lead to a deeper understanding of Wissenschaft des Judentums during these later periods, but will also allow for a better grasp of the role of Jewish scholars and their contribution to the field of Oriental studies during the first half of the twentieth century. With this purpose in mind, the second part of this paper is devoted to one of the representatives of the later generation of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Orientalist Eugen Mittwoch (d. 1942), who is credited with having initiated a new direction in Islamic studies within Orientalism.

MS Tehran, Malik 1650, includes not only one of the earliest witnesses of al-Miqdād b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad al-Ḥillī al-Suyūrī’s (d. 826/1422–23) al-Anwār al-jalāliyya fī sharḥ al-Fuṣūl al-naṣīriyya, completed in 852/1448, but also the quotation of a portion of the otherwise lost K. al-Minhāj, a theological summa by the early seventh/thirteenth-century Imāmī scholar Sālim b. Maḥfūṭ Ibn ʿUzayza (or ʿAzīza) that was popular among Imāmī scholars of al-Ḥilla up until the ninth/fifteenth century. The present study discusses the scarce available data about Sālim b. Maḥfūẓ and the reception of his K. al-Minhāj, and it includes an editio princeps of the work’s portion that is preserved in Ms. Tehran, Malik 1650.

The study of the interrelatedness of Islamic and Jewish intellectual history relies largely on the manuscript materials preserved in the various Genizah collections. The Firkovitch manuscripts in particular provide ample material for an analysis of the different patterns of reception/transmission/cross-pollination between Jewish and Muslim scholars, though the bulk of the relevant material still needs to be cataloged and studied. This essay discusses four cases, each exemplifying a different pattern, namely, Muʿtazilī kalām and its reception among the Karaites, the case of David ben Joshua Maimonides (d. 1415), the thirteenth-century Jewish philosopher Ibn Kammūna and his reception among Jews and Muslims, and an anonymous refutation by a Rabbanite Jew against the anti-Jewish polemical work Ifḥām al-yahūd by the twelfth-century Jewish convert to Islam Samawʾal al-Maghribī.

Die Bestände jemenitischer Bibliotheken gehören bis heute zu den am wenigsten erforschten, in vieler Hinsicht aber interessantesten Sammlungen arabischer Handschriften. Über Jahrhunderte wurde hier das Erbe eines nahezu beispiellosen (kultur)politischen Wissenstransfers bewahrt, der im ausgehenden 11. und im 12. Jahrhundert zwischen dem Norden Irans und dem Jemen stattfand ...