23

THE JEWISH-SUFI ENCOUNTER

IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Elisha Russ-Fishbane

The Jewish-Sufi encounter in historical perspective

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, Sufism exercised the single greatest external
impact on Jewish spirituality in the Islamic world. During this unique period, a wide vari-
ety of Jews from Iberia to North Africa to Egypt to Iraq and Iran exhibited an openness to
learn from the mystics of Islam. Even more remarkable, these Jews did not generally seek to
conceal this interest but justified it, defended it, and encouraged it within their respective
communities. Witnesses to this historic encounter between Judaism and Islam range from
complex spiritual and ethical treatises authored by the intellectual elite to letters attesting to
the piety of ordinary seekers. At its peak in thirteenth-century Egypt, Jewish pietism was
represented in every sector of society, from communal leaders and educated professionals
to poor craftsmen and unlettered devotees of all ages. Even after its eventual decline, the
Jewish-Sufi tradition lived on in individual pietists and, more importantly, made its mark on
the Jewish religion long after later readers could no longer recognize the Islamic origin of
key terms and teachings.
The phenomenon of Jewish-Sufi spirituality is all but inconceivable to Jews and Muslims
in the twenty-first century, whose primary association with one another is within the frame-
work of political conflict or religious polemic. The literary legacy of this movement has
been thoroughly eviscerated from cultural memory in both communities. Recovering and
retelling this story is a scholarly priority with the potential to foster curiosity in the past and
mutual respect in the present. By the same token, the significance of this historical encounter
must not be misrepresented as an example of interreligious cooperation. Jewish-Sufi piety
should not be mistaken for Jewish-Sufi relations. Even at its heyday, Jewish interest in Sufism
did not translate into close ties between religious leaders or laymen. Sufi literature attests to a
degree of hostility toward Jews and Judaism unmitigated by Jewish respect for its traditions.1
As a matter of fact, it is not clear that medieval Muslims, who lived in proximity to these
Jewish pietists, were even aware at the time that such circles existed. Not a single reference
to this Jewish movement has yet surfaced in Islamic literature that would indicate that these
Jews were even on the radar of their Muslim neighbors. This is most likely due to their mi-
nority status in Muslim society, a community that did not attract a great deal of interest in

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the majority population, beyond those select spheres of activity in which Jews were relatively
visible or during moments of political crisis.
The Jewish-Sufi encounter is of enduring historical significance for several reasons, each
of which will be the focus of our attention in the sections that follow. First and foremost, the
movement represents a unique moment in the history of religions, in which a rival religion
was valued as a spiritual resource. Jewish receptivity to other traditions is one thing. Openly
advocating this type of receptivity is quite another. Even as Jews lived as a discriminated mi-
nority in the medieval Islamic world and viewed the majority religion as a political and cul-
tural rival, Jewish pietists exhibited a willingness to engage positively and profoundly with
the inner world of Islam. How they made their case for religious receptivity to their fellow
Jews is one of the enduring legacies of the Jewish-Sufi encounter. This legacy is the subject of
section “Jewish paradigms of receptivity,” in which we take a close look at two outstanding
examples of this open religious posture: the first by the pioneer of Jewish engagement with
Sufism in the eleventh century, Ba ḥya ibn Paquda, and the second by the champion of a full-
blown pietist movement in the thirteenth century, Abraham b. Moses Maimonides.
In section “Piety, pietism, and the problem of origins,” we take a closer look at the origins
of Jewish-Sufi pietism. Ba ḥya’s adaptation of Sufi models was original in many respects and
set the tone for future works of Jewish ethics and spirituality. But was it, in fact, the first
meaningful engagement with Sufism in Jewish literature? A recent theory has questioned
this assumption, placing the origins of Jewish-Sufi piety well before Ba ḥya. We will revisit
the question of origins by exploring the broader phenomenon of piety within the context
of medieval Near Eastern society. This will allow us to assess what we may attribute to the
particular impact of Sufism as compared with the general culture of piety in the Near East.
Section “The decline of Jewish-Sufi pietism: one family’s story” considers the decline of
Jewish-Sufi pietism through the story of one family in fourteenth-century Egypt. It con-
siders how the attraction of Sufi mysticism threatened to drive a wedge between family
members and even lead to their conversion to Islam. The case of this one family reflects
the complex state of the Jewish-Sufi encounter in the fourteenth century, after several de-
cades of communal opposition and persecution. In the ultimate historical irony, the head of
Egyptian Jewry at the center of this family’s struggles with Sufism also doubled as a master
of Jewish-Sufi pietism, a Maimonidean descendant and author of the last great pietist treatise.

Jewish paradigms of receptivity

In the introduction to his landmark work of Jewish spiritual ethics, Kit āb al-hidāyah il ā farā’i ḍ
al-qul ūb, (“The Guide to the Duties of the Heart”) Ba ḥya ibn Paquda (eleventh-century
Saragossa) admitted that he would have much preferred to be able to read a treatise on Jewish
piety than to have had to write one himself.2 He described his quest for some precedent, an
earlier work that systematically explored the inner spiritual duties, only to discover that no
such work existed. Not that the material was lacking. He went to great lengths to prove that
biblical and rabbinic lore are in agreement that the external expectations of religion, what he
called “the duties of the limbs” ( farā’i ḍ al-jaw āriḥ), were meaningless without a correspond-
ing attention to the inner life, “the duties of the heart” ( farā’i ḍ al-qul ūb). What Ba ḥya lacked
was a treatise organizing these teachings into a coherent system. For this, he discovered a
fruitful model outside his tradition. Sufi mystical manuals were in circulation since the ninth
century and provided rich fodder for Ba ḥya’s literary project. When it came time to clarify
which sources he utilized in composing his book, Ba ḥya listed not specific books but the type
of works he drew upon for inspiration.

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I cite from the scriptures composed by the prophets and saints, followed by the teachings
transmitted by our ancestors as well as the saints and sages of every society about whom
we have a record…, such as anecdotes of the philosophers and the regimens and exemplary
deeds of the ascetics. This is in accordance with what our ancestors, of blessed memory,
have said (Bavli Sanhedrin 39b)…, “The upright ways [of the other nations] you have not
followed, while their corrupt ways you have followed.” They likewise said (Bavli Megillah
16a): “Anyone who speaks a word of wisdom, including among the nations of the world, is
called a sage.”3
Ba ḥya’s openness to gentile wisdom was virtually unprecedented in the Jewish tradition
he inherited. To be sure, he drew upon talmudic teachings receptive of gentile virtue and
wisdom, but these were little more than isolated maxims, hardly the basis for extensive en-
gagement with foreign traditions. Although Ba ḥya did not name his non-Jewish sources, the
effect was not lost on the discerning reader. In the fifth part of his Duties of the Heart, Ba ḥya
cited the following story:

It is told of one of the righteous who came upon a group of warriors returning from
victory after a great battle, who said to them, ‘You have returned victorious, praise be
to God, from the lesser battle (al-jih ād al-a ṣghar). Now prepare yourselves for the greater
battle (al-jih ād al-akbar)!’ They asked him, ‘What is the greater battle?’ He replied, ‘The
battle against the passions and their forces.’4

Students of Islamic tradition will immediately recognize the source of this anecdote in a
Ḥad īth cited in numerous Sufi sources. The sage whom Ba ḥya dubbed “one of the righteous”
was none other than the prophet Mu ḥammad in the original version.5 This is an example of
Ba ḥya’s praise of “the regimens and exemplary deeds of the ascetics,” an unmistakable nod to
the ideals of Sufi mysticism. Even his appeal to Jewish “prophets and saints” (al-anbiyā’ wa’l-
auliyā’) was a clever reuse of a ubiquitous Sufi expression invoking the ancient prophets and
later (Sufi) saints. His absorption of Sufi ideals, teachings, and expressions – some explicit,
others implicit – is ubiquitous in Ba ḥya’s pioneering work.
Ba ḥya’s influence on generations of Jewish spirituality has been second to none. Over the
years, the Duties of the Heart has been reprinted and translated countless times. Yet there is
no way to reconstruct Ba ḥya’s impact on his own generation in al-Andalus. No trace of an
Iberian pietist movement, or even small circles of disciples, have surfaced to indicate that the
spiritual revolution Ba ḥya envisioned for his fellow Jews materialized beyond the confines
of his book. In the century and a half following Ba ḥya, sporadic examples of Sufi-inflected
Jewish pietism surfaced between Iberia and North Africa.6 The next major chapter of the
Jewish-Sufi encounter did not crystallize until the late twelfth century in Egypt, the center
of newly energized Sufi renaissance encouraged and bankrolled by the Ayyubid government
of Salāḥ al-Dī n, better known in the Christian west as Saladin. In this highly charged reli-
gious environment, Sufi institutions were increasingly visible parts of the cultural landscape,
one the Jewish minority could not help but witness and absorb in one capacity or another.
For this phase of the Jewish-Sufi encounter, we have much more detailed information on
account of historical discoveries in the Cairo Genizah – from treatises composed by Jewish
pietists to letters and documents circulated between them. Not only does the Genizah bear
witness to Jewish pietist writings written in a Sufi key, it contains original Sufi classics in
Arabic, some in their original Arabic characters and others transcribed into Hebrew letters
for the benefit of a wider Jewish readership. The scribes, or those who hired them, had ready
access to the original texts, but someone determined that they were worth transcribing into

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Hebrew characters with the goal that they should reach a general Jewish audience beyond the
intellectual elite who could access them independently in the Islamic marketplace.
Some of these works were Sufi classics – including writings by Abū’l-Qā sim Qushayr ī
(d. 1072), Abū Ḥā mid al-Ghaz ā l ī (d. 1111), and Abū Ḥafs ‘Umar al-Suhraward ī (d. 1235) –
while other fragments attest to interest in the poetry of the mystic and martyr of Baghdad,
Ibn Manṣū r al-Ḥallāj (d. 922).7 Apart from Genizah fragments, numerous manuscripts con-
tain Hebrew transcriptions of Sufi works, most of which have never been published and are
largely unknown. Still more interesting are the citations of Sufi works (from technical man-
uals to divine love poetry) that appear in Jewish writings intended for an internal audience.
In short, the trail of Jewish interest in Sufi literature of all genres is quite long and will take
the work of many scholars to document, publish, and properly analyze. Interest was both
broad and deep and is one of our best clues as to the open religious posture exhibited by me-
dieval Jewish mystics during the height of the pietist movement in thirteenth-century Egypt.
Egyptian Jewish pietism appears to have evolved organically around the turn of the thir-
teenth century among small circles of ascetics before it coalesced into the broad and varie-
gated movement it would become only a few decades later. An early document identifies
two prominent brothers, Abraham and Joseph of Fustat, as leaders of the nascent movement.
The document, hailing from the first years of the thirteenth century, describes the regimen
of the pietists: “[T]hey arise [for vigils] at night and fast during the day as on the day of
atonement…”8
In one of his early ethical works, Moses Maimonides described the importance of the
golden mean between extremes, even as he acknowledged that some righteous men deliber-
ately incline away from the mean toward one of the extremes, “by fasting [during the day],
arising [for vigils] during the night, abstaining from eating meat and drinking wine, avoid-
ing marriage, wearing woolen garments (al- ṣūf ), dwelling in the mountains, and secluding
themselves in remote places.”9 Maimonides justified this exception as a mode of moral or
spiritual therapy intended only for select individuals on rare occasions. In the process, he
observed, a group of Jews have adopted this as a daily regimen.
Although Maimonides critiqued this group of ascetics, he praised ascetic discipline as a
targeted, therapeutic practice for select individuals. Maimonides argued that such extreme
measures were unnecessary for most Jews, seeing that the laws of the Torah – from dietary
restrictions to sexual prohibitions to an emphasis on regular charity – were already calibrated
to steer their practitioners away from fixation on physical pleasure and worldly gain. More
extreme measures of self-denial, he maintained here and in other works, should only be
adopted by a handful of individuals for whom it is not only appropriate but also necessary.
Maimonides’ views on ascetic discipline aside, he was keenly aware that growing numbers
of Jewish pietists were modeling themselves after groups of gentile ascetics, and it is not hard
to imagine which specific gentile groups he had in mind.
It is one of the great ironies of Jewish history that Abraham, the only son and successor of
Maimonides as leader of Egyptian Jewry, became the most prominent advocate of Egyptian
Jewish pietism in the next generation. A number of scholars have viewed Abraham’s embrace
of the pietists as a sign that he rejected his father’s rationalism in favor of Sufi mysticism.10
While this is a reasonable conclusion at first glance, I believe the son hewed closely to the ideals
of the father, for at least two reasons. First, much like Baḥya, Abraham’s pietism was a synthesis
of philosophy and mysticism that specifically highlighted the role of the intellect in contempla-
tive practice and as the site of mystical communion with God. Second, Abraham believed that
he was continuing his father’s legacy even in his embrace of pietism. Maimonides’ famous ex-
ception to the golden mean for the select few became the guiding principle for his son’s efforts

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to forge a movement aimed at cultivating just such a spiritual elite.11 Abraham’s magnum opus,
a massive treatise entitled Kifāyat al‘ābidīn (“The Compendium for the Servants of God”), was
divided into four parts with this very distinction in mind. The first three parts he devoted to
laws common to Jews as a whole (al-sulūk al-‘āmm), while the fourth and final part he aimed at
those undertaking the unique path (al-sulūk al-khāṣṣ) of the pietist elite.
In his embrace of Sufi prototypes, Abraham was both more radical and more conservative
than Ba ḥya. If Ba ḥya stopped short of specifically naming Sufism and limited his allusions
to anecdotes and teachings on the inner life, Abraham advocated for the incorporation of
specific Sufi rites into Jewish practice and explicitly hailed the exemplary practices of “the
Sufis of Islam.” At the same time, Abraham was more conservative than his predecessor in
his claim that Sufi rites originated in ancient Jewish practices that were neglected over the
course of the Jewish exile. Abraham adopted the same approach when he advocated the
reinstitution of prostration, kneeling, and orderly rows in prayer, for example, arguing that
these and other rites were originally part of Jewish prayer and ought to be restored by the
community, even if he was only successful among fellow pietists. The case for Jewish origins
is evident in Abraham’s account of the special attire well known among Sufis and adopted
by Jewish pietists.

When Elijah passed by Elisha before [Elisha] became his loyal follower…, Elijah cast his
cloak over him as a sign … that his own perfection would be transferred to him and that
he would attain to what he himself had attained. You are aware of the [custom] among the
Sufis of Islam, among whom – due to the sins of Israel! – some of the ways of the ancient
saints of Israel are to be found, while such is not found – or only in small numbers – among
our contemporaries, according to which the master places the ragged cloak over the aspi-
rant, when the latter wants to join his path and travel with him… We transmit from them
and emulate their rites, [such as in] the wearing of the sleeveless shirts and the like.12

Abraham maintained that, by adopting key Sufi rites, the pietists were merely restoring mys-
tical practices of the ancient prophets and lost over the course of the exile. In the scriptural
scene of Elijah casting his cloak before his disciple, Abraham identified a biblical precedent
for the Sufi rite of initiation, in which the shaikh cast a ritual cloak at the novice to indicate
acceptance. Working on the assumption that Islam received many core beliefs and practices
from its older Mosaic cousin, Abraham saw it as his sacred duty to identify long-discarded
Jewish rites and restore them to their ancestral home.
Prophecy was a central motif of Egyptian pietism and not out of purely theoretical in-
terest. The ultimate ambition of the movement was the restoration of prophecy among the
people of Israel, something Abraham believed, like his father before him, was destined to
occur at the onset of the messianic era. Abraham and his colleagues were no doubt aware
of the importance of prophecy in Sufi literature. Since the ninth century, Muslim scholars
interpreted the Quran’s description of Mu ḥammad as “seal of the prophets” to mean that
he was the last of the prophets.13 Yet this was by no means the original meaning of the term
“seal” nor the accepted interpretation of the phrase before the ninth century. As late as the
thirteenth century, a number of Sufi authors asserted that prophetic attainment was still
possible and constituted the highest state to which a mystic may aspire.14 Al-Ghaz ā l ī put it
eloquently in his Deliverance from Error:

Each movement and each stillness of [the Sufis], both outward and inward, flows from
the light of the state of prophecy. There is no light from which they seek illumination

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save the light of prophecy… Whoever has not enjoyed the state of “tast”’ cannot un-
derstand the truth of prophecy, only its name. Indeed, the wonders performed by the
“friends” (al-awliyā’) are in fact the first stage of the prophets.15

For Abraham and his colleagues, the pietist movement constituted a prophetic revival, draw-
ing upon biblical precedent through the lens of Sufi mysticism. It aimed to train individual
mystics for a “taste” of prophecy but it also hoped to revive what it considered the biblical
institution of prophecy. They maintained that prophetic training was part of the original tra-
dition from Sinai, which provided not only a system of laws but also a paradigm for attaining
revelation. The pietists sought to recreate the ancient system of prophetic training, according
to which a seasoned prophet instructed a group of novices (“disciples of the prophets”) in
how to receive the spirit of God.16 Pietists constructed master-disciple circles aimed at the
attainment of prophecy through meditative and trance-inducing practices that, like the bib-
lical model, would perpetuate itself into future generations.17
By finding traces of “the prophetic path” of ancient Judaism in Sufism, Abraham en-
visioned a symbiotic relationship between Judaism and Islam. Much as he believed that
Judaism played a formative role in the development of the Islamic religion, he was convinced
that Islam (and Sufism in particular) could play a critical role in the revitalization of Jewish
religious life at the dawn of the redemption. The road to the renewal of Judaism and the
fulfillment of its ancient destiny traveled through Islam. A fragment of Abraham’s Compen-
dium for the Servants of God that survived in the Cairo Genizah provides one of the strongest
statements on the symbiosis of Judaism and Islam.

[Part of the Jewish tradition] has been transferred to the nations among whom [the Jews]
reside and has become [re]established among the Jewish people through [the influence
of ] the nations. Providence has ordained that [ Jewish tradition] will disappear from
among them while they reside [among the nations], until they repent and turn in repen-
tance unto God, on account of which they will be delivered. In this way, the nations
will become the instrument for the rebirth of [Israel]…18

Piety, pietism, and the problem of origins

In order to properly determine the origins of Jewish-Sufi pietism, we must begin by asking
what set it apart from parallel ideals of piety in the cultural landscape of the medieval Islamic
Near East. To address this question, we shall focus on two examples: asceticism and the twin
practices of fasting and prayer vigils. Each of these rites was central to the ascetic regimen
of Sufis and their Egyptian pietist disciples. Yet these expressions of piety were not limited
to these groups. Their pervasiveness presents a dilemma as to when we are faced with direct
Sufi influence compared with the impact of broader cultural forces in the environment.
Some recent scholars have designated forms of Jewish piety in the Near East as examples
of “Jewish-Sufism” and, on that basis, have traced the origins of its development earlier than
Ba ḥya. These scholars have pointed to the liturgical poetry of the early eleventh-century Iraqi
Jewish exilarch, David ha-Nasi b. Hezekiah. According to one scholar, David’s poems betray
an ascetic spirit that echoes the spirit of self-negation in Sufi mysticism that were more fully
developed in Ba ḥya’s writings and culminated in the pietist movement in thirteenth-century
Egypt.19 In a recent essay on the beginnings of Jewish-Sufi literature, another scholar took this
theory one step further, describing the Nasi’s poetry as a “Sufi creation,” all the more signif-
icant for being “the earliest literary expression of Sufism” by a Jewish author of the medieval

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period.20 If correct, this discovery would upend the scholarly consensus that Ba ḥya ibn Paquda
pioneered the use of Sufi sources as a basis for a new model of piety.21
At the root of the question of origins is a linguistic problem. The Hebrew term ḥasidut
can mean either piety in general or pietism proper. In my study of Egyptian pietism, I have
argued that the distinction between piety and pietism lies principally in its social organiza-
tion.22 According to this model, an ideal mode of behavior (which we may call a culture of
piety) must be carefully distinguished from a movement with recognized leaders and formal
discipleship (constituting a community of pietism). When it comes to the term ḥasidut, it is
clear that one of these translations works better than the other. To view the poetry of David
ha-Nasi as the forerunner of Jewish-Sufi pietism, if not an outright Sufi creation, is to priv-
ilege the conception of pietism over the ideal of piety.23
Two aspects of David ha-Nasi’s poetry resemble the Sufi worldview and Sufi praxis. For
example, the poet applied the words “world” and “soul” as terms of opprobrium, evoking
parallels with the Sufi doctrine of renunciation of world and self hood, well known in the
ascetic poetry (zuhdīyāt) prevalent in Sufi circles from the ninth century.24 The parallel is
quite intriguing, yet the search for influence and origins is hardly cut and dry. Some Sufi
poets certainly composed ascetic verses but this genre is also known from non-Sufi circles,
including philosophers of different religious backgrounds. One Arabic poem from the period
is described by its anonymous Jewish copyist as “a philosopher’s ascetic poem” (zuhdīyat fay-
lasuf ).25 Many ascetic poems went undetected due to the selective use of the term, zuhdīyah,
including in David ha-Nasi’s own poetic collection.26
What is more, the turn to asceticism in the tenth century was by no means limited to
Sufi mystics but constituted a core element of medieval Near Eastern culture, among phi-
losophers of every stripe and adherents of every religion. The closer one reads the works
of Arabic philosophers from Kindi and Razi to Farabi and Ibn Bajja, the more one recog-
nizes that the culture of material and worldly renunciation was as much at the heart of the
philosophical path as it was of the mystical.27 So central was the ascetic ideal among the
philosophers that Ghaz ā l ī, in his autobiographical tract, Deliverance from Error, went so far as
to accuse the philosophers of imitating and coopting Sufi ideals.

All that [the philosophers] speak about are the different qualities and dispositions of
the soul … and the application of therapy and self-discipline to them. All of this they
co-opted from the doctrines of the Sufis, those divine men who apply themselves assid-
uously in the remembrance of God and the suppression of the passions and follow the
path to God by renouncing the pleasures of the world… The philosophers co-opted
these [methods] and mixed them with their own doctrines, hoping thereby to use these
virtues to promote their vanities.28

In an ironic twist on the comparison of Sufism and philosophy, A ḥ mad Ibn Taymiyya
(d. 1328), charged Ghaz ā l ī with imitating the philosophers, rather than vice versa. In a fatw ā
against the Sufi practice of solitary retreat, Ibn Taim īyah declared that Ghaz ā l ī “praises
asceticism beyond all proportion. These are the lingering influences of philosophy upon
him.”29 Less polemical writers from the medieval period also maintained that mysticism and
philosophy closely resemble one another in their emphasis on otherworldly transcendence.
The eleventh-century littérateur, Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīd ī (d. 1023), a native of Iraq and con-
temporary of David ha-Nasi, observed that “Sufism and philosophy are neighbors and visit
one another” ( fa-inna al-ta ṣawwuf wa’l-tafalsuf yatajāwirān wa-yatazāwirān).30 Even the use of
“world” and “soul” as an ascetic trope was not unique to Sufism, but was an outgrowth of

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a broader cultural ideal. In a somewhat later period, Judah al-Ḥar īzī admonished his soul in
the following terms:
Oh, my soul! Judgment day awaits you, when deed will meet its reward.
Return from the paths that lead their travelers astray.
How much have you been seduced with distractions and sloth?
Be cleansed, my soul, from the stain of desire…31

The poet charged his reader to wake the soul from the slumber of worldly desire and raise it
to the celestial heights, applying the same terms for soul and world (nafs and ‘ālim) common
among Sufis and philosophers alike.32
Several of David ha-Nasi’s poems refer to nightly or early morning prayer vigils, which
recall the well-known Sufi tradition of “rising” (qiyām) at night for similar private devotion.
Yet here, too, the evidence likely reflects the Near Eastern Jewish practice of predawn chant-
ing of special hymns, albeit with clear echoes of the Islamic milieu. One early Iraqi respon-
sum by Sherira Gaon (d. 1006) describes “a pious custom” (middat ḥasidut) to rise at midnight
for the recitation supererogatory “hymns and praises.”33 In the Andalusian context, these
hymns were known variously as baqqashot, ta ḥannunim, zemirot, or the latter’s Judeo-Arabic
equivalent, mazāmīr.34
Even when Jews combined the practice of nightly prayer with daily fasting, a phenome-
non well attested in Sufi tradition as “fasting and rising” (ṣiyām wa-qiyām),35 it need not be
directly associated with Sufism. Interestingly, this combination was occasionally taken as the
most characteristic form of piety by which a Jew may distinguish himself. When an Egyptian
Jewish merchant doing business in India and Yemen wrote to his wife in Futat of his adven-
tures overseas, he mentioned the most curious details in quick succession:

Day and night I have been constantly drinking, not as I would have wished, yet still I have
conducted myself in an exemplary way… I … cure my soul by fasting during the days and
praying during the nights… I am regarded [by others] and regard myself as a pious man.36

And when Judah al-Ḥar īzī praised an Iraqi Jewish elder for his devotion to God, he wrote pri-
marily of the latter’s practice of nightly prayer and daily fasts: “Throughout his days he does not
cease to fast and his nights [are spent] in solitude and standing in prayer.”37 For Ḥar īzī, this was
not a mark of Sufi piety, but of piety pure and simple, every much Jewish as Islamic.
In a liturgical poem Judah Halevi composed for predawn supererogatory prayer, the poet
praised the pious for their nightly prayer and daily fasts.
Go out at midnight among men of renown,
With praise [of God] upon their tongues and no deceit in their hearts,
Their nights are spent in prayer and their days in fasts.38

These diverse examples bear witness not to a simple mechanism of inter-confessional bor-
rowing any more than they are evidence of a concerted social movement of Jewish-Sufi
pietism. We would do well to consider the shared cultural matrix that left its mark on the
religious and intellectual movements throughout the medieval Near East, among Muslims,
Christians, Jews, and freethinkers alike – a function of the cultural unity and free flow of
ideas in the Islamicate world. Rather than read the ascetic poetry of David ha-Nasi as the
earliest exemplar of Jewish-Sufi pietism, we may see it as a reflection of a shared culture of
piety among intellectuals from Iberia and the Maghreb to Egypt and Iraq.
The question of origins is not limited to the encounter between Judaism and Sufism.
Historians of Jewish culture in the Islamic world have long been intrigued by the question of

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mutual influence. In his classic study of Jewish-Arab relations, S. D. Goitein noted the initial
Jewish influence upon Islam and the later reversal in which the flow of influence shifted in
the opposite direction “under Arab-Muslim influence.”39 According to Hava Lazarus-Yafeh,
“Judaism, more than any other religion and culture, left a decisive impact on Islam” during
its period of formation and consolidation, after which “Islam, which had become a rich and
variegated culture, profoundly influenced Jewish culture. Consequently, the interrelation-
ship of these two cultures may be regarded as a closed circle, a rare phenomenon in cultural
relationships.”40
In the realm of Jewish-Sufi scholarship, Paul Fenton made a similar case of two-way in-
fluence: “From a strictly chronological point of view, it was Judaism that initially influenced
Sufism in its formative period in Baghdad.”41 At a later point, “once Sufism had asserted itself
as a spiritual force, it began to exert a compelling attraction for Jews,” beginning with “Sufi
beliefs concerning the ascetic ideal and the vanity of the lower world” among Jewish figures
in Baghdad, and culminating in the assimilation of Sufi literary and doctrinal currents by
Jewish mystics from Iberia to Egypt and beyond.42
An alternative approach views culture as a unifying element, greater than the sum of its
fragmented parts and more permeable than religious discourse or polemical exchange would
readily admit. It is often helpful to disentangle the unifying structures of culture (a bedrock of
linguistic, material, and spiritual components) from the identity formation operative in the
production of distinct communities. Culture may be conceived as a porous web, encompassing
major components within an overarching framework that allows for degrees of permeability
on all sides. This working definition of culture forces us to reevaluate traditional lines of de-
marcation and spheres of influence, destabilizing familiar boundary markers in the process.
In his reconceptualization of Jewish culture in the Greco-Roman context, Michael
Satlow recently argued against an “essentialization” of Jewish versus non-Jewish cultural
expression, taking his own point of departure from the deep structures of meaning that
unite otherwise distinct communal identities. In Satlow’s words, “Many Jews in antiquity
maintained their ethnic distinctiveness, but they were physically indistinguishable from, and
socially integrated with, their non-Jewish neighbors. They shared their ‘deep structures’ of
meaning.”43 In Satlow’s view, Jewish distinctiveness was one of various “strategies of Jewish
identity formation,” by which Jews identified themselves even as they were otherwise en-
meshed in the local cultural milieu.
The cultural framework of medieval Near Eastern society bears obvious parallels with
its Hellenistic predecessor: the diffusion of a common linguistic substructure facilitating a
dynamic cultural exchange at nearly every level of society. Writing on the early confluence
of Jewish and nascent Muslim traditions in seventh-century Arabia, Haggai Ben-Shammai
emphasized the importance of a common language for the development of a porous cul-
tural environment, an “environment that enabled intercultural relations between Jews and
Arabs,” in which “the free flow (not necessarily borrowing!) of religious ideas and literary
motifs between [them] seems also inevitable.”44 The common linguistic substratum and en-
ergetic exchange of idea and ideals throughout the Islamicate world allowed for a shared
cultural nexus that bound together Muslims, Jews, and others throughout the region.

The decline of Jewish-Sufi pietism: one family’s story

Around 1360, a Jewish woman in Cairo dispatched a worried letter to David b. Joshua, de-
scendent of Maimonides and head of the Jews in the Mamluk Empire. The woman identified
herself as the wife of Ba ṣī r al-Jalājil ī (“the bell maker”) and as the mother of three children.

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David b. Joshua knew the family not only in his capacity as head of the Jews but also as
communal physician. In her letter to the Nagid, the woman did not miss the opportunity to
remind him of the prescription he promised her for her son’s earache. But, as the letter makes
plain, her son’s earache was the least of her worries. Her emotional letter casts invaluable
light on a unique chapter in the intertwined destinies of Judaism and Islam.

The maidservant, wife of Ba ṣī r the bell maker, kisses the ground [of the master] and
notifies [him] that she has three children to care for, while her husband has taken to
the mountain in the company of al-Kū r ān ī for the sake of vanity and nonsense – a place
devoid of Torah, prayer, and calling upon God’s name in truth. He is altogether taken
with going up the mountain in the company of the Sufis, who have the semblance, not
the essence [of worship].
The maidservant is afraid that he may associate with a bad man, who will convert
him and the three children out of the [ Jewish] religion… What is more, he wants the
maidservant to sell [our] house, separate from the Jewish community, and live up on
the mountain…
Our lord … is the leader of [the Jews of the] region and his great responsibility cannot
keep him from restraining that man from ascending the mountain and inducing him
to spend time in the synagogue and occupy himself with providing food for his family.
Our lord has promised to provide the ear medicine for the little boy, who suffers from
the pain… May [God] have mercy!45

The woman in our letter may have been nameless but she was by no means voiceless. While
her husband had all but abandoned his family and job to spent time in the company of a Sufi
order in the mountains outside Cairo, she did everything in her power to keep her household
together in his absence – caring for her children’s food, health, and education – and explor-
ing the head of the Jews to assert his jurisdiction to bring her husband back to his senses and,
most importantly, back to his family and community.
In addition to being resourceful, the woman was quite savvy about the world around her.
Her letter displays keen insight into her Islamic environment, including intimate knowledge of
Sufi mysticism. She described the Sufi order led by al-Kūrānī as a place devoid of “calling upon
God’s name in truth” (zekhirat ha-shem). Here she alluded to two key Sufi terms not in her native
Arabic but in Hebrew, as if to claim that these concepts were originally Jewish and corrupted
by Sufism.46 Her reference to “calling upon God’s name” literally means “recalling the name,”
an unmistakable reference to the Sufi practice of dhikr, in which a group of devotees call God’s
names to mind in a meditative chant.47 Her additional phrase, “in truth” (‘al ha-emet), echoed the
Sufi concept of truth (ḥaqīqah) as well as the Sufi name of God, “the Truth” (al-ḥaqq).
Nor does it end there. She referred to the Sufis as “the poor” (al-fuqarā), as Sufi authors
typically referred to themselves, but she added that they were only poor on the outside
(al- ẓāhir), not the inside (al-bāṭin). Here she deftly turned a classic Sufi dichotomy against
itself. With remarkable wit, she adopted technical Sufi terminology only to turn it into a
Jewish polemic against Islamic mysticism. She did so not only by her rhetoric but also by
cleverly shifting between Arabic and Hebrew idioms. We can almost hear the woman ar-
guing with her husband, hoping to convince him that what he thought was Sufi was in fact
Jewish and only corrupted by the Sufis.
What Ba ṣī r’s wife likely did not know was that the Nagid was himself a sympathetic
and sophisticated reader of Sufi literature, who integrated many core Sufi concepts into his

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own writings, the latest in a venerable tradition of Egyptian Jewish pietists descended from
Maimonides. David b. Joshua wrote extensively on the ideal of pietism in his treatise on
the spiritual life, Guide to Solitude and Aid to Detachment (al-Murshid il ā’l-tafarrud wa’l-murfid
il ā’l-tajarrud), a work that deftly synthesized Jewish tradition with Sufi mysticism. Several
themes in the woman’s letter take on new resonance in light of the Nagid’s Jewish-Sufi
manual.
To take the woman’s first example, that of dhikr, David b. Joshua wrote of the importance
of constant recollection of God with the goal of achieving mystical illumination. In the
classical Sufi manuals, which the Nagid knew well, recollection of God was a key meditative
practice for attaining a state of illumination. One of the most influential early Sufi masters,
Abū’l-Qā sim Qushayr ī, wrote that a master who sees a disciple’s potential should “instruct
him to patiently practice constant dhikr until the lights from above shine in his heart and the
luminescence of communion beam brightly in his mind.”48 According to the later ‘Umar
al-Suhraward ī, “when the manner of dhikr grows strong…, the heart becomes like a crystal,
within which dwells the light of certainty.”49
In keeping with this venerable Sufi tradition, David b. Joshua viewed the mystical
path as one of ascetic discipline and meditative practice in search of illumination. In
his treatise, David b. Joshua constructed an intricate spiritual path based on an ancient
rabbinic hierarchy of virtues buttressed by core Sufi doctrines. The ancient rabbinic
hierarchy, recorded in the name of R. Pin ḥ as b. Yair, began with the ideal of caution
or diligence (zehirut) and culminated in piety (ḥasidut), the attainment of the holy spirit,
and the onset of redemption. 50 This became the prototype for what the Nagid called “the
path to piety.” 51 The Nagid played on the word zehirut, which shares a root with the term
for brilliance or illumination, evoking the school of illuminationism (ishr āq īyah) founded
by Shah ā b al-D ī n al-Suhraward ī.

[T]he word zehirut derives from the scriptural verse[s], “and the enlightened shall
shine like the radiance of the sky (yazhiru ke-zohar ha-raqia‘)” (Daniel 12:3), “like the
appearance of radiance (ke-mar’eh zohar), like the light of the electron” (Ezekiel 8:2). The
meaning [of zohar] is the quest for illumination and enlightenment (istishrāq wa-tanw īr).
So, too, zehirut refers to the quest for illumination, such that the person possessing this
spiritual station (maqām) is called zahir. The meaning of someone seeking illumina-
tion is the quest for enlightenment of the soul, illumination by means of enlightening
thoughts, divine luminescence, and intellectual flashes of the spirit, which come about
by means of constant meditation upon the kingdom of heaven and recollection of God
with a true recollection…52

We may wonder why Ba ṣī r went to the trouble of abandoning his family and community
for induction in a Sufi order when the leader of his own community was a master mystic
able to combine the spiritual riches of Judaism and Sufism. Two answers present them-
selves. The first is the fact that the Sufi circle of al-Kū r ā n ī likely encouraged Ba ṣī r as a
potential conversion to Islam. Sufi masters often combined spiritual mentorship of their
own acolytes with missionary activities aimed at the conversion of infidels to Islam. Few
Jewish sources attest to these conversions nor do we have any clear sense as to the extent
of this phenomenon, but multiple Sufi sources, both Arabic and Persian, include stories of
celebrated masters attracting and converting non-believers, the majority of which are said
to have been Jews.53

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To take one example, the celebrated Sufi poet, Rū m ī, known for his verses professing to
transcend the confessional boundaries of religion, wrote with great passion of the demonic
character of the Jews in his epic poem (Mathnawi-yi ma‘naw ī ) and was repeatedly celebrated
by his followers for successfully converting thousands of infidel Jews and Christians in his
native Konya during his lifetime. There are many stories of the miraculous ability of Sufi
masters to turn heretics into believers. In these stories, Jews serve as the archetypal infidel,
whose conversion from sinner to saint is considered the greatest proof of the wonders of the
shaikh in the eyes of his followers. To be sure, many of these stories should be viewed not
as historical anecdotes but as paradigmatic tales of Sufi saints, replete with literary embel-
lishment and devised for maximum effect on the reader.54 Yet the recurrence of this motif
and the fixation on Jewish conversion testify to Sufi interest in missionary activity across a
spectrum of periods and places. It is probably no coincidence that the fourteenth-century
mystic to whom Baṣī r was attracted, Yū suf al-‘Ajam ī al-Kū r ān ī, was revered by his followers
for his miraculous ability to turn heretics into devout Sufi acolytes.55
What is more, Baṣīr was most likely not aware of the Nagid’s interest in Sufism or of his
works bridging Jewish and Sufi spirituality. Whoever was reading David b. Joshua’s pietist
works was almost certainly part of a close circle of disciples, beyond the reach of the broader
community. They were meant for those dedicated pietists he called “the knowers, the wayfar-
ers, the seekers of illumination (al-mustashriqīn).”56 We may wonder whether the Nagid later
encouraged Baṣīr to join his circle of pietists, given his interest in bringing the recalcitrant
husband back into the Jewish fold. But there is no doubt that Baṣīr was under the impression
that ascetic mysticism was the exclusive domain of Islam and alien to Jewish practice.
For the better part of the thirteenth century, Jewish interest in Sufism generated inter-
mittent tension with the Egyptian Jewish community. This took the form of communal
opposition from anti-pietist preachers in the courts of public opinion, trumped-up heresy
trials, and even appeals to the Muslim authorities to suppress the Jewish innovators.57 By
the late thirteenth century, this led to an increasingly introverted circle of pietists, many
of whom did not wish to expose their association with the movement and risk the fall-out
within their own families. By the mid-fourteenth century, the movement was so clandestine
that a number of Jewish mystics began to gravitate to Muslim Sufi orders. Sufism continued
to attract Jews as mystics and potential converts, even as Jewish-Sufism was on the wane as
a spiritual option for all but a handful of Jewish devotees. During this last phase of what was
once a vibrant movement, Jewish-Sufi pietism went from a community of fellow mystics to
a literary and spiritual legacy that was all but forgotten in Jewish and Muslim memory until
its dramatic rediscovery by modern scholars.

Notes

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