Labraṭ ben Moses Ibn Sughmār, haDayyan

Labraṭ ben Moses ben Labraṭ was a son of (Abū ʿImrān) Moses ben Labraṭ. Like his father and grandfather before him, he was also a dayyan in al-Mahdiyya. In a letter to his siblings written in 1149, the Maghrebi merchant and scholar Abraham ben Yijū expresses deep respect for Labraṭ ben Moses (from which Goitein concludes that Ben Yijū had been his pupil). Appended to the letter is a poem in the dayyan’s honor in which Ben Yijū praises, among other things, the dayyan’s commentary on the Talmud. The same Labraṭ ben Moses ben Labraṭ is listed with his predecessors as one of the “sons of Zūghmār in the city of al-Mahdiyya” referred to by Ibn Daʾūd in his Sefer ha-Qabbala as the only ones, other than “the dayyan Solomon ben Formash (or Furmash) in the city of Qalʿat Banī Ḥammād,” who represent the last vestiges of talmudic learning in Africa (Sefer ha-Qabbala, text, p. 58, ll. 188–190). Qalʿat Banī Ḥammād was home of the Hamadids AND Isaac alFasi.

Bibliography

Gil, Moshe. Be-Malkhut Yishmaʾʿel bi-Tqufat ha-Geʾonim, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1997; vol. 1 trans. D. Strassler as Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

———. “Bene Sughmār,” in Intertwined Worlds of Islam: Essays in Memory of Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, ed. N. Ilan (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Ben-Zvi Institute, and Bialik Institute, 2002), pp. 149–170 [Hebrew].

Ibn Daʾūd, Abraham. The Book of Tradition: Sefer ha-Qabbalah, ed. and trans. Gerson D. Cohen (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1967).

Goitein, S. D. Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).

———. A Mediterranean Society, 6 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967–93).

——— and Mordechai Akiva Friedman. India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Genizah (“India Book”) (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

Citation Michael G. Wechsler. " Ibn Sughmār Family." Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. Executive Editor Norman A. Stillman. Brill Online , 2013. Reference. Jim Harlow. 24 January 2013 <http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-jews-...>