Summary
Murad Farag (1866–1956), the leading intellectual of Egypt’s Karaite community and its poet laureate, who openly called for intermarriage and closer Karaite-Rabbanite relations against the communal leadership’s bans (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 87-109, 534-574).
Details
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With his protégés among the young Karaite intelligentsia, Farag “openly called for intermarriage and closer Karaite-Rabbanite relations.” Though they did not succeed in formally changing Karaite religious law, they influenced the Karaites to strengthen their ties to the Rabbanite community, against Chief Rabbi Tuvia Babovitch’s position that Karaites who married Rabbanites excluded themselves (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 87-109).
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He composed both colloquial Egyptian poetry (zagal) and standard Arabic qasidas; his style “was said to resemble that of Ahmad Shawqi, a leading twentieth-century, Egyptian poet” (Chapter 2, note 39) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 534-574).
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Maurice Shammas, the Arabic journalist who wrote for the Rabbanite al-Shams (1946–48) and then the Karaite Al-Kalim before emigrating to Israel in 1951, was his protégé (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 87-109).
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In Chapter 2’s wording, Farag “had long advocated closer relations between Karaites and Rabbanites”; he encouraged the educated youth around al-Kalim who were unsatisfied with their elders’ Communitarianism to seek contacts with the Rabbanites, who were considered more “advanced” — a step beyond the community’s boundaries that exposed some of them to the era’s political orientations, including Zionism (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 534-574).
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In Chapter 3 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Farag’s qasida for the wedding of King Faruq and Narriman Sadiq was printed in Al-Kalim’s May 16, 1951 celebratory issue, alongside colloquial azgal [as printed] by two other poets — evidence of the small Karaite community’s capacity for publishable poetry in both standard and colloquial Arabic (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1221-1222).
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Farag also composed a poem to mark Muhammad Naguib’s official visit to the Karaite synagogue in ‘Abbasiyya on October 25, 1952 (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1244-1245).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Karaites, Tuvia Babovitch, Al-Kalim