Samuel ben Moses al-Maghribī

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SAMUEL BEN MOSES AL-MAGHRIBĪ

SAMUEL BEN MOSES AL-MAGHRIBĪ (ha-Ma'aravi ; 15th century), *Karaite physician and author living in *Cairo. In 1434 Samuel completed a code of Karaite law in Arabic entitled al-Murshid ("The Guide"), divided into 12 sections. His exposition is orderly and lucid, with infrequent polemics against the *Rabbanites, and he readily adopted Rabbanite customs that seemed to him unobjectionable. Samuel's work is apparently the last Karaite legal code to have been written in Arabic; all the later codes were, so far as is known, written in Hebrew. Although soon superseded by the code of *Bashyaẓi, Hebrew translations of "The Guide" were still current in the 18th century.

bibliography:

Steinschneider, Arab Lit, 250f.; S. Poznański, Karaite Literary Opponents of Saadiah Gaon (1908), 81f.; Mann, Texts, 2 (1935), index; L. Nemoy, Karaite Anthology (1952), 196–229.

[Leon Nemoy]

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