The Jews In Egypt And In Palestine Under The Fatimid Caliphs A Contribution To Their Political And Communal History Based Chiefly On Genizah Material

Author : Jacob Mann
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781330235751
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (357 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine Under the Fāṭimid Caliphs, Vol. 1 written by Jacob Mann and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine Under the Fāṭimid Caliphs, Vol. 1: A Contribution to Their Political and Communal History Based Chiefly on Genizah Material Hitherto Unpublished 'The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief corner-stone.' A feeling similar to that of the Psalmist takes hold of one who explores the remarkable literary finds brought to light from the obscurity of the Cairo Genizah. Documents and letters, poems and compositions in Hebrew and Arabic, which the contemporaries preserved for some time after perusal and then regarded as useless, assigning them to the lumber-room of a synagogue only out of sheer piety, become now the foundation upon which the history of the Jews in Egypt and in Palestine, from 950 C. E. and onwards, is to be based. The attempt is made here to reconstruct the life of these Jewries from the beginning of the Fatimid reign in Egypt(969 C. E.) till about the time of Maimonides, who died at the end of the year 1204 C. E. A large number of Genizah fragments, still unpublished, form the basis of this work. No claim is put forward of having exhausted all the available material. As with the nation of Israel, so with its literature - 'scattered and separated among the peoples'. Thus it came about that the Genizah Mss. found their way into numerous libraries, public and private, on both hemispheres. Even those Genizah Collections to which I have had access - and they were the most important - could not be completely explored. The task of examining the many thousands of fragments and extracting all the historical data they contain, requires many years of labour, and cannot be undertaken by one person. But how appropriate is the saying of the Rabbis: 'The work is not for thee alone to finish; but thou art not free to desist from it.' My chief aim was to produce a skeleton of the contemporary history of the Egyptian and the Palestinian Jewries. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.