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

86 r Shimon Shtober

Ludolf Krehl, [Leiden 1862–1908], 3:51). The tradition there states in the name of the
Prophet, “Had ten Jews believed in me, then all the Jews would have believed in me.” See
appendix, section 1.

32. Cf. the third question in the excerpt (section 3 above, near note 24).


33. Most of the manuscripts that contain these versions were retrieved from the Cairo
    Geniza.


34. This Cambridge University Library manuscript, T-S 161.32, was deciphered and
    translated from the Judeo-Arabic by Moshe Gil. See Gil, “The Story of Bahīrā and Its
    Jewish Versions” in Hebrew and Arabic Studies in Honor of Joshua Blau, ed. Haggay Ben-
    Shammay (Jerusalem: Tel-Aviv University, Faculty of Humanities and Hebrew Univer-
    sity of Jerusalem, Institute of Asian and African Studies, 1993), 193–210 (Hebrew), see
    206–10.


35. The Kingdom of Muhammad. The very beginning of this manuscript is missing,
    and therefore the first sentence of this text is fragmentary.


36. Al-Muqtadir, the eighteenth Abbāsid caliph, ruled the Muslim empire between
    908 and 932.


37. The acronym of the date “RoF’E[y]” is based on the biblical verse “Rof’ey elīl kul-
    lechem” (Ye are all physicians of no value; Job 13:4). The numerical value of the corre-
    sponding Hebrew letters R.F.A. is [1]281 (the year of the Seleucid era), i.e., 969–70. The
    anagram PeR’E (alluding to the biblical verse “He shall be a wild ass of a man”; Genesis
    16:12) was one of Muhammad’s most common appellations in medieval Jewish polemi-
    cal literature. Cf. M. Steinschneider, Polemische und apologetische Literatur in arabischer
    Sprache zwischen Muslimen, Christen, und Juden (Leipzig, 1877) in the indices (Register):
    455 s.v. PeR’E (Hebrew).


38. In this manuscript, eleven sages are enumerated!


39. Gil, “The Story of Bahīrā,” 207–208. At the end there are some apocryphal verses
    ascribed to the Quran.


40. Cf. appendix, section 2. A. Neubauer, ed., Mediaeval Jewish Chronicles and Chron-
    ological Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), 2: 89–110, published a Judeo-Arabic man-
    uscript of the Bodleian Library entitled Kitāb al-Ta’rīkh.


41. The eschatological literature is replete with messianic speculations corresponding
    to those years. See Gil, “The Story of Bahīrā,” 198–99.


42. One of the Islamic versions of this story is included in the Sīra. Cf. Ibn Hishām,
    Al-Sīrah al-nabawiyyah, 1:147–49; Al-’Asqalānī, 4:271 (no. 598: Bahīra al-Rahīb).


43. Gil, “The Story of Bahīrā,” 206, iii, ll. 8–9. On Bahīra in the multifaceted polemic
    arena, see Shimon Shtober, “The Monk Bahīrā, the Counselor of Muhammad, and the
    Jews: Between Polemic and Historiography,” Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of
    Jewish Studies 1 (Jerusalem, 1990): 69–78 (Hebrew).


44. See David Zevi Baneth, “The Ten Jewish Companions of Muhammad,” Tarbiz
    3 (1932): 112–16 (Hebrew). See 112–13 for conjectures as to the components of the early
    Jewish story of Bahīra. See also Gil, “The Story of Bahīrā,” 193–98.


45. The names of the sages and their titles take up fourteen lines of the manuscript.
    See Gil, “The Story of Bah.īrā,” 206.


46. Cf. M. Schmitz, “Ka’b al-Ahbār” Encyclopaedia of Islam 4 (1978): 316–17.