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

One Thousand Years of Cultural Harmony between Judaism and Islam r 247

Rabbi Khther Hnin, whose poems appear in the Mishaf, Yehezkel Hnin,
and Avraham Mosheh Shmuel. And despite the lack of information, some
of the strophic poetry of the Babylonian poets that appears in the Mishaf
attests to their acquaintance with the Spanish poetry and the muwashshah
(shir ezor) in particular.
Two other groups of poets are represented here. The first are the North
African poets from Libya, Tunis, and Morocco between the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries. This is despite the fact that the close relationship
between the Babylonian and North African communities dates from the
ninth century (Gruner 1989, 49).
The second group is the poets of Halab (Aleppo), from the eighteenth
century onwards. This can perhaps affirm the close relationship between
the Babylonian and Syrian communities that was reinforced in the eigh-
teenth century, when the former was in desperate need of leaders. After
a disastrous plague that killed a large number of its members, including
the leadership, the Babylonians invited the Syrian Rabbi Sdaqah Husin
(1699–1733) to be the head of their community (Hakak 2005, 15). The work
of his son, Mosheh Husin (d. 1810), was identified in the Mishaf.

Chronological and Geographical Boundaries

When the veil of anonymity is lifted from the poets of the Mishaf, a pan-
oramic landscape of time and place is revealed. This book encompasses
chronological and geographical boundaries that are, although broad,
carefully defined. Within these boundaries, it conveys the four formative
periods of Hebrew religious poetry in general and the PLS in particular.
These poets lived in the major capitals of Arabo-Islamic civilization while
conducting an intense intellectual dialogue with the surrounding society.
The Mishaf documents the first encounter of the Jews with Arabo-
Islamic culture in ̔Abbasid Baghdad during the tenth century; it then
moves to Islamic Spain from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, before
returning to western Asia under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in the
sixteenth century. This journey comes to an end in Baghdad between the
eighteen and the twentieth centuries, the city where this artistic and reli-
gious journey began.
Thus the Mishaf documents almost the entire history of Jewish para-
liturgical poetry, embracing periods of cultural growth and flowering in