The Convergence of Judaism and Islam. Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions

132 r Mark S. Wagner

1918, Jews claimed that the land on which the Jewish Quarter (qā ̔ al-
yahūd) was built was their private property. Muslims claimed that it was
waq f land on which Jews had neglected to pay rent. Jews countered that
the paucity of documentation for their claims of private ownership were
due to looting by tribesmen. The court determined that waq f land was
mixed (multabis) with land privately owned by Jews. A one-time payment
of 7,500 riyals from the Jewish community to the waq f was negotiated in

1918.^30 The chief rabbi, Yahyā Ishāq, was made responsible for allotting the
payment to community members.
When the synagogues controversy began in the mid-1930s, R. Sālim
Sa ̔īd al-Jamal argued that Yahyā Ishāq, then head of the faction that
claimed private ownership, made individual Jews’ payments for the Jew-
ish Quarter proportional to the size of their homes. He considered roads,
bathhouses, and synagogues the responsibility of the entire community.
Thus the faction now claiming private ownership of synagogues, al-Jamal
argued, had in the past accepted the idea that they were “public prop-
erty.”^31 Moreover, if the Muslim court ruled that synagogues were private
property, representatives of the Muslim waq f could argue that those prop-
erties still remained to be bought or rented from them. In short, for finan-
cial reasons it would have been in many Muslim jurists’ interests to press
for the synagogues to be considered private property.
Imām Yahyā removed the judge Lutf al-Zubayrī from the case of the
Kuhlānī Synagogue and gave it to Husayn Abū Tālib, whom al-Jamal de-
scribes as honest, wealthy, and loyal to Imām Yahyā.^32 Having scored a
major victory with the imām’s statement, al-Jamal entered Husayn Abū
Tālib’s courtroom as the representative of the Dor De ̔ah faction. Al-Jamal
explained the halakhic position to the judge:

The legal statute of Moses (al-qānūn al-shar ̔ī al-mūsawī), which

was set down and legislated by Mūsā b. Maymūn [Maimonides],

based on the great commentary on the Torah (sharh al-tawrāh al-

kabīr),^33 that is followed by all Jews in the world, [says] that syna-

gogues in cities were built according to the wishes of every Jew in

the world and they are “public property” (mubāh) to any who wish

to pray therein, even if they are from the ends of the earth.^34

Ahmad al-Hādirī, the attorney for the anti-reformist faction, objected,
insisting that al-Jamal’s claim of ibāhah was clearly a fiction.^35 He said,