Moshe Gil

Moshe Gil was born in Poland in 1921.[2] During World War II, he was active in the underground and in the Hashomer Hatzair movement in Romania, and was imprisoned for those activities.[1] He was held in a concentration camp and released in 1944.[2]

Following the war, Gil immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1945 and became a member of Kibbutz Reshafim in the Bet Shean Valley.[1][2]

Gil built his scholarly career at Tel Aviv University, where he served as associate professor from 1974 to 1980 and as a full professor from 1980 onward. He also served as dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1986 to 1989 and as head of the School of Jewish Studies.[2][1]

His research was conducted with the support of Tel Aviv University's Diaspora Research Institute and the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Chair in the History of the Jews in Muslim Lands, which he acknowledged in connection with both the Hebrew edition of his major work and its English translation.[5] His principal fields of research included the Cairo Genizah, the history of the Land of Israel, and the history of Islam.[1]

In 1998, Gil received the Israel Prize in the discipline of the Land of Israel.[4]

In 1976, Gil published Documents of the Jewish Pious Foundations from the Cairo Genizah, a detailed study of Genizah material concerning the Jewish institution of the kodesh, or pious foundation, which was essentially equivalent to the Muslim waqf.[6] The study systematically compared the Genizah findings with ancient, medieval, and modern Egyptian archaeological and literary material.[7] Gil found that such foundations flourished during the Fatimid period but found no evidence of them under the Ayyubid dynasty. He identified religious motives, including the centrality of charity in Jewish law, while also explaining how the institution could circumvent Islamic legislation concerning property without heirs.[6]

His 1981 Hebrew work The Tustaris: the Family and the Sect drew on Genizah documents to reconstruct the history of the influential Tustari family.[6] The family's two most prominent members were the sons of Sahl—Abū Naṣr Faḍl (Ḥesed) and Abū Saʿd Ibrāhīm (Abraham)—who engaged in trade and banking and participated in political affairs at the Fatimid court and within the Jewish community. Gil attributed the family's influence over Palestinian Jewry to Ḥesed's role as secretary to a Fatimid general involved in Palestinian affairs.[6]

Gil's three-volume Hebrew work Palestine during the First Muslim Period: 634–1099 appeared in 1983, published jointly by Tel Aviv University and the Ministry of Defense Publishing House.[8] The volumes combined historical studies, documents from the Cairo Genizah, and an index to those documents.[8]

The Jewish Virtual Library calls Gil's geographical study of Palestine using Cairo Genizah material "the most important one to date," placing it in the tradition of S. D. Goitein's foundational research.[6] Among the topics Gil examined were the Palestinian yeshiva and its leaders, the yeshiva's relations with Jewish communities in Egypt, Syria, and the Byzantine Empire, relations between Karaites and Rabbanites, Jewish life in Jerusalem and other Palestinian localities, taxation, pilgrimage, and immigration.[6]

A History of Palestine, 634–1099, published by Cambridge University Press in 1992, is a revised English translation by Ethel Broido of the first volume of Gil's 1983 Hebrew work.[3][2] Described as the first comprehensive history of Palestine spanning the Muslim conquest in 634 through the Crusader conquest in 1099, the book runs to approximately 800 pages.[3][9]

The work covers successive political and military periods under Abbasid, Tulunid, Ikhshidid, and Fatimid rule alongside everyday life, economic activity, taxation, the religious status of Jerusalem, and the communal histories of Palestinian Jews and Christians.[3] It gives particular attention to Jewish communities' locations, economic activities, and religious life, as well as to Karaite and Samaritan communities and the role of the Palestinian yeshiva in Jewish leadership.[6]

Gil's evidentiary approach gives priority among Jewish sources to Cairo Genizah documents, which he treats as contemporary records of high value.[5] His collection for the study comprised 643 documents, of which more than a third had previously been edited in full and 43 in part; the book's broader research drew on more than one thousand Genizah documents in total, alongside Arabic, Syriac, Latin, and Greek materials.[5] Gil examined many documents in the original, used ultraviolet light and specialized photographic facilities for difficult manuscripts, and consulted holdings in libraries across several countries.[5]

A review of the English edition appeared in the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, volume 27 (1993), pages 255–256.[10]

A Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs article in the Jewish Political Studies Review attributes to Gil the conclusion that a substantial Jewish population remained in the country after the Roman revolts and that much of the physical destruction of the remnant of that community occurred during the First Crusade in 1099 and the European occupation that followed.[9] The same article quotes Gil's characterization of the Jewish population in Palestine at the time of the Muslim conquest as "the direct descendants of the generations of Jews who had lived there since the days of Joshua bin Nun, in other words for 2,000 years."[9] Within that article, these attributed conclusions are presented as evidence of long-term Jewish continuity in the Land of Israel.[9]

Gil's personal archive, held at the National Library of Israel, spans the years 1970 to 2014 and consists of correspondence and drafts of his scholarly works.[1] Its extent is 0.8 linear meters, and its materials are in Hebrew and Arabic.[1]

In 1998, colleagues honored Gil with the Hebrew festschrift Masat Moshe, edited by Ezra Fleischer, Mordechai Akiva Friedman, and Joel Kramer.[11] The 426-page volume includes, on pages 421–426, a list of Gil's research publications.[11]

Gil's work made a major contribution to scholarship on Jewish life under early Muslim rule. Through Cairo Genizah documents, he reconstructed medieval Jewish institutions, families, communities, and connections across Palestine and Egypt. The Jewish Virtual Library describes his work on Palestine as the most important geographical Genizah study to date and places it in the scholarly tradition established by S. D. Goitein.[6]

His publications include Documents of the Jewish Pious Foundations (1976), The Tustaris: the Family and the Sect (Hebrew, 1981), Palestine during the First Muslim Period (Hebrew, 1983), A History of Palestine, 634–1099 (English, 1992), and Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages (Hebrew).[2][6] The 1998 Israel Prize recognized his contribution to the study of the Land of Israel.[4]