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Ahmed Ashkar - Palestinian researcher July 1, 2022
The Arab-Hebrew manuscripts, that is, those written and composed by the Jews who lived in the regions that are known today as the Arab world, are part of the culture of the Arab nation, which inherits and incubates it. This language is written in Arabic and its various dialects, in Aramaic script, or in the letter used by contemporary Hebrew. Israeli literature is known as Jewish-Arabic and foreign literature is known as Middle Arabic.
In the beginning, the Jews used the vowels of the Arabic language, and with the development of Hebrew grammar and morphology in the tenth century, according to the Tabarani pen, the writing of the vowels changed to that which was adopted in the Hebrew language. In the twentieth century, in the midst of the Zionist project, some Jewish linguists tried to consider it an independent language from Arabic, so they built for it a method of grammar, morphology, and writing closer to the Hebrew language. But whoever is fluent in the Arabic and Hebrew languages discovers that they do not stand up to the methods of language criticism, so the researcher realizes that he is faced with an Arabic language, whether it is standard morphological or interspersed with some colloquial dialects. It can be said that their attempt is part of constructing a Jewish narrative separate from the civilization of the region and the peoples to whom they actually belong.
It can be said that the most famous and important person on this topic is General Dr. Yehoshua Blau (1919-2020 AD), who devoted his intellectual effort to this topic and published dozens of articles and books in Hebrew and English. Blau was Sadat's translator during his visit to Jerusalem in 1977 AD.
Its origin and history
After the Islamic conquests in the seventh century AD, Arabic gradually replaced Aramaic as the spoken and written language of the Jews in the conquered lands from Babylon (Iraq) to the Maghreb. In the ninth century, Arabic became the official language in Islamic and Arab countries and regions, “and it also penetrated the holiest pillars of Jewish culture: Jewish law, the [biblical] interpretation, and even the grammar of the Hebrew language” (1). As the centers of political and cultural gravity moved to these regions, the Arab-Hebrew centers of gravity moved to them, beginning with Baghdad (Babylon in that literature) in the tenth century, then to Andalusia at the end of the third and fourteenth centuries AD - in the same way as the topics of Arab culture.
In the last half century, it has been revealed to scholars and researchers in Arabic-Hebrew that it arose in two parallel and different contexts at the same time, namely the phonetic method that adopted writing as words were pronounced in the colloquial language, and writing disappeared in it in the tenth century; And the standard method according to the Arabic grammatical and morphological rules that dominated Jewish writing until the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the Jewish-Arab conflict.
The Jews considered their language sacred and had its own religious status among them (like Muslims), and they were prohibited from using its words, terms, and letters for anything other than religious matters. Therefore, the question arises: Why did the Jews receive Arabic, even if it was sister to ancient Hebrew in terms of the roots of words and its morphological structure? Regarding these reasons, Jewish researchers provide several reasons, namely: The phenomenon of adopting a foreign language as a new cultural language was not strange to Jews and other different religious and ethnic sects, such as their move from Assyrian to Aramaic and then Hebrew. The readers, who had withdrawn from formal (rabbinic) Judaism, used Arabic, and to argue with them necessitated the use of Arabic; A desire by Jewish jurists and rabbis to communicate with their popular base in the language they are fluent in, which is Arabic, and to establish rabbinic Judaism among all Jews in contrast to other separatist tendencies such as the Karaites (2).
These reasons are very general and not convincing enough for the Jews to move from writing in their sacred language to another sacred language, which is Arabic. Therefore, we can add the following: The emergence of Islam and its spread among different groups and peoples constituted a special challenge to Judaism and the Jews who believed that Islam evolved from Judaism, or that it was a new version of it, so they began to embrace Islam in groups and individually, the most famous of whom is Ka’b al-Ahbar; Therefore, their jurists and rabbis had no choice but to borrow the Islamic religious cognitive system (as if it were Jewish) to discourage them from embracing the new religion.
Whoever today looks at a panoramic view of Arab families in some Arab countries finds Muslim, Christian and Jewish families who still acknowledge that their roots are in another religion, such as Shawat in Tunisia, Adas in Aleppo, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and Palestine, Matar, Qiyam and Abu Ayyash in Palestine, Abu Al-Afia in Palestine and Egypt. ..and the list is long. The sectarian religious situation was fluid in the Arab societies that practice Islam and was not stabilized except by modern colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which used sectarianism as its pawns. We can also add another reason, which is the inability of the (religious) Hebrew language, which contains 22 letters compared to 28 letters in Arabic, and the former’s dictionary lacks words, terms, and concepts of advanced life outside the determinants of Judaism, such as secular literature and other sciences. Jews wrote about 90% of their aforementioned production until the nineteenth century in Arabic-Hebrew (3).
Topics of Arabic-Hebrew manuscripts
Archives, museums, public and personal libraries around the world are full of Arabic-Hebrew records of the period we are talking about. Whether these blogs were just neglected manuscripts, or some scholars extended their efforts to investigate or transfer them to the Arabic script. However, most of it is still trapped in Arabic-Hebrew, that is, it is still written in Hebrew letters, as I indicated. Therefore, it must be revealed through investigation, research, publication, and translation from its original language as part of gathering together the history and civilization of the nation, which has become fragmented and dispersed by many of its sons and enemies.
It is widely believed that these manuscripts are of a purely Jewish religious nature, but this belief is far from correct, if we review their index, even if briefly. It is true that religion constitutes its foundation, but over time the Jews became involved in their Arab societies and wrote in this language on other worldly topics. Among the most important of these blogs - literature, we mention the “Translation of the Torah” by Saadia Jaon bin Yusuf Al-Fayoumi (tenth century), which was completed and explained by a solid academic method by Idris Abiza in 2010 AD. As for Rabbi Yantob ben Haim Al-Cohen, he translated it into Arabic in 2015 AD in a very limited version for the use of believers and researchers who have overcome the problem of translation.
It can be said: Reading and studying this book gives us a very clear idea of the disagreement and differences not only between the translations of Christian sects, but also the difference between Judaism and Christianity in a form that the majority of researchers in this field do not know, as the translator moved away to the point of breaking with Christian concepts, but he used and borrowed concepts. Many Islamic. The Jewish jurist Moses ben Maimon (the twelfth century) also wrote the book “The Meaning of the Perplexed” in Arabic-Hebrew, which is the most important book in Jewish theology and still holds a great place in Jewish thought. It was completed between 1186 AD and 1190 AD. He is the only author who wrote it down in Arabic - Hebrew and Arabic language and letters. Hussein Atay, who published this book in 1993, believes that Ibn Maimon was greatly influenced by Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and the Mu’tazilites (4). As for Yair Shiffman, he says: Ibn Maimon quoted and was influenced in “Semantics” by three people in succession: Aristotle, Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Sina (5).
Ibn Maimonides also established the thirteen principles that he made the foundation of the Jewish religion and the pillars of faith in it. He formulated them along the lines of the principles of faith in Islam, and included in them some Islamic principles of faith, which were not known in Judaism before, and in them he argues against Christianity and Islam through the approach of Abu Hamid. Al-Ghazali. It can be said: He is Ghazali’s method and approach. He is the one who introduced the unity of God into Judaism, since Tanakhic Judaism is polytheistic. “The Rambam [Maimonides] is the greatest figure in religious-faith knowledge of God in Judaism from the fathers and prophets onward; This is his greatness, and this is the secret of his privacy.”
From this perspective, it must be said: “His special place in the history of Judaism is not determined as a philosopher, but rather as a great believer, for his faith is manifested in the worship of [the One] God” (6). If it were not for Ibn Maimon and his use of Islamic theology to develop Judaism, the latter would not have survived as it is today (7). Abu al-Walid Marwan ibn Jinnah - called in Hebrew “Rabbi John” (990-1055 AD), who was well-versed in Sibawayh’s grammatical theory - also wrote several books on grammar, such as: Al-Lum’a, Rasā’il al-Rāfaq, and Rasā’il al-Tashwir (8), which are considered introductions and foundations of grammar. The Hebrew language is still used today. Some of them also wrote works in Arabic literature. For example, the Arab-Jewish poet and theorist Moses Ibn Ezra (1060-1139 AD) wrote the book “Lecture and Study” on the philosophy of poetry, which was considered the most important book on the philosophy of poetry after Plato’s “Book of Poetry.”
Saving Arab blogs from loss
They also transferred some (pure) Arabic blogs to Arabic-Hebrew, which preserved many Arabic blogs from being lost, just as they did with some of Ibn Rushd’s blogs, transferring them to Arabic-Hebrew and preserving them when the hostility of the regime and its intellectuals to it intensified. The Tunisian researcher Abdelkader Ben Shahida had recovered it in Arabic after making tremendous efforts in understanding the Arabic-Hebrew text and translating some terms written by the Jews in Hebrew (9).
There are thousands of poems of a religious nature. It can be said that these manuscripts contain worldly poetry on flirtation, praise, horsemanship, wine, and other topics. Because Judaism, under whose ideological and legal commitment the Jews lived, does not permit writing on these topics. Nor did the Jews have a high temporal authority that had its own knights and horses to write about.
These blogs reveal to us knowledge and topics that we do not know, and they can illuminate for us some spots and angles in the life and thought of the Jews. For example, “The Yemenite Message” by Ibn Maimon explains to us the position of the Almohads towards the Jews in the Maghreb. This would contribute to the development of this branch of research, and give us an idea closer to the truth about the reality of the Jews (and others) and the relationship of the Arab-Islamic state and regimes at that time with the other religious components that lived in its shadow and under the roof of the culture and religion of the Islamic state.
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