Ka'b al-Ahbar

Origins and early life

Ka'b ibn Mati' al-Himyari, known as Ka'b al-Ahbar, 'Ka'b of the rabbis', was born in Yemen at the end of the sixth century into a Jewish family of the tribe of Dhu Ra'in and was himself a Jewish scholar, the son of a scholar, trained in the Torah and the rabbinic learning of the Jews of Himyar.

Work and career

This fiche states plainly that he converted to Islam in the caliphate of Abu Bakr or of Umar, the accounts differ, and moved to Medina and later to Homs in Syria, where he died around the middle of the 650s. He is included here under the rule of this site that a Jew who left Judaism remains part of its story, and his contribution belongs precisely to that crossing: he became the chief authority of the first Muslim generation on what Islamic tradition calls the isra'iliyyat, the biblical and midrashic material about the prophets, the creation, the end of days and the sacred geography of Jerusalem, which entered Quranic commentary and the hadith through him.

He advised the caliphs Umar and Uthman, and the sources credit him with guiding Umar to the site of the Temple Mount when Jerusalem surrendered in 638 and with urging that the place be cleared of the refuse that had covered it, a story that shows what such a man was for: he carried the memory of one scripture into the world of another. This fiche notes as plainly that later Muslim scholarship has treated the traditions attributed to him with caution, some critics regarding the isra'iliyyat as foreign matter and some polemicists blaming him for it, so that his figure is disputed within Islamic historiography itself. His grave at Homs was still shown centuries later.