Sprecher
Beschreibung
Just as the modern era put challenges before Muslim reformers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries Egypt who sought a middle path between tradition and modern conditions, Jewish religious authorities understood that modernity brought in fundamental changes that require creative Jewish responses. The British conquest of Egypt, the influx of Jewish immigrants to the land of the Nile, and the increased pace of secularization that penetrated local Jewish communities placed a pressure on religious leaders to accommodate the Jewish faith to the rapid technological, cultural, and social developments their society was experiencing. Aware of the challenges of their community, Jewish religious authorities, as communal leaders, acted enthusiastically, although gradually, to underline the ways in which these rapid changes affected their community and provided responses to their people’s inquiries and interpretations to religious texts in order to accommodate tradition to modern currents and preserve the coherence of the Jewish community.
In this paper, I would like to investigate the ways in which intertextuality lent itself in texts legal authorities produced in late 19th and early 20th centuries and were published in Hebrew and Arabic. It will examine closely how ideas, traditions, and previous rulings were mobilized, adjusted, and incorporated into their juridical and literary texts in their treatment of the relationship between tradition and modernity. It will explore the legal and literary techniques religious leaders used towards maintaining and preserving their authoritative status in the community as attentive to the spiritual, moral, and current needs of their people without breaking with the past or violating the principles that constitute the collective identity of the Jewish people in Egypt. For example, in their treatment of modern issues like the Western dress, the gender-mixed social gatherings, seeking treatment with the help of modern medications, how these authoritative voices sought precedents in previous legal and literary texts found in earlier legal authorities like in the Talmud or in the works of medieval and early modern religious reformers Maimonides and Yosef Karo respectively, to name but a few. This paper will also look into the incorporation of legal and literary texts from Arabo-Islamic culture in the Jewish legal discourse to both articulate the connection between Judaism and Islam and to bring the tenets of the Jewish faith closer to the attention of non-Jewish Egyptian legal authorities and to establish communication with members of the Jewish community who were very well-versed and well-established in Arabic and Islam.