Moshe ben Rafael Attias

Moshe ben Rafael Attias, also known as Moshe Rafajlovic and Zeki Effendi (Sarajevo, 1845 – 2 July 1916), was a Bosnian Jew who became a scholar of the Islamic faith and of medieval Persian literature.[1]

Born to a prominent family of Sarajevo Sephardi Jews in the late Ottoman times, he spent most of his active life during the Austro-Hungarian administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1878–1914).

Moshe Attias attended an Ottoman state school in Sarajevo – open to all confessions but mainly attended by Bosnian Muslims – and studied according to an Islamic curriculum. He then moved to Istanbul to perfect his studies on Islamic religion and culture. There he became a scholar of the XIII century Persian poet and mystic Muslih-uddin Sa'di, the author of "Gulistan". Attias may have even become a Jewish sufi. Attias got the title of effendi, a scholar of Islam, which is visible from the Latin inscript on his grave. He was known in his last years as "Zeki Effendi".[1]

He then returned to Sarajevo, where he joined the Ottoman civil service, working for the tax authorities. He remained in town as a financial advisor after the Austro-Hungarian takeover of the capital in 1878.[1]

He was the treasurer of the Sarajevo Jewish society La Benevolencija, for which he kept a correspondance with Angel Pulido in Madrid.[2]

Zeki Effendi used to write in standard Castilian Spanish language, rather than in the Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) usually used by Sarajevo Jews, but still using the Hebrew alphabet.[1]

The poet Abraham Aaron Capón commissioned him to write an authoritative history of the Bosnian Jews. Zeki Effendi published it on the short-lived Sarajevo Ladino periodical, La Alborada, under the pen name '‘el amante de la luz'’ ("the light-lover") – a reference to his illuministic approach to historiography.[3] He published in 1901 "La historia de los judiós de Bosna" (History of the Bosnian Jews), or "Konsezos de nuestros viezos".[4] His most well-known historiography piece concerns Rabbi Moshe Danon, "the rabbi of Stolac."[5]

In 1908 his voice was recorded by Julius Subak in his trip to Sarajevo with Abraham A. Cappon – the record is kept at the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv, together with a 1907 recording of one of his poems.[4]

In 1911 Zeki Effendi made a tour of the Balkans together with the renowned Spanish scholar of Sephardic balladry, Don Manuel Manrique de Lara, recording oral texts from the Sefardi culture of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Kosovo.[1]

Zeki Effendi is buried at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Sarajevo. His gravestone contains inscriptions in three scripts: Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic. His gravestone is possibly the only Jewish gravestone in the world containing both the Hebrew and Arabic script.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Stephen Schwartz, Balkan Dreams, Modern Realities; Sarajevo, Center of Sephardism, Forward.com, 15 August 2003
  2. ↑ Sefardiweb
  3. ↑ Julia Phillips Cohen, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History, Jewish Quarterly Review, Volume 100, Number 3, Summer 2010, pp. 349–384 (Article)
  4. 1 2 Sefardiweb
  5. ↑ Centre for Islamic Pluralism, Gedenken an Muhamed Neziroviċ

Bibliography

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