Computer generated offprint of: S.

Ward, "A Possible Etymon for North African Jewish Arabic muhajir 'Jewish convert to Islam'," Jewish Linguistic Studies, 2 (1990), David L. Gold, ed., pp. 32-35. A Possible Etymon for North African Jewish Arabic muhjir 'Jewish convert to Islam' Seth Ward At a conference on the religious conversion of Jews in Islamic countries held in 1989, Jane Gerber discussed the derogatory Jewish Arabic word muhjir 'Jewish convert to Islam', noting that its origin was unclear.1 She gave the word as being used in Fez Jewish Arabic, but it is of somewhat broader use, hence the designation in the title of this note. The word in question was one of several for 'convert to Islam' discussed during the conference. Two others were muslimn and jadd al-islm.2 Jadd al-islm refers specifically to one of the Jews in Mashhad, Persia, forced to convert to Islam in 1839.3 John O. Hunwick reported at "The Making of a Fatwa" (a conference held in Granada, Spain, in 1990) that the term muhjira is still used in the oases of Tuwat-Gurara (in the Algerian Sahara) to designate Muslims of Jewish descent. In non-Jewish Arabic, muhjir is a laudatory word meaning 'emigrant', i.e., someone who went with Muhammad from Mecca to Medina as part of the Hijra in 622 CE. One might, therefore, want to suggest that Jews adopted this word from non-Jewish Arabic and gave it a derogatory meaning (a convert to Islam, so to speak, has "emigrated" from one religion to another). However, there is also at least one other possibility. Could our problematic word reflect a play on words? Perhaps it refers The conference, called hamarot-dat veanisut shel yehudim beartsot-haislam in Hebrew, was held at the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem on 5 April 1989. Although I have discussed my suggestion with Gerber, I have not seen a written copy of her presentation to the conference. On muslimn see D. Little, "Conversion to Islam under the Bar Mamlks 692-755/1293-1354," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 39, 1976, p. 558. See the new Encyclopaedia Judaica article by W.J. Fischel, "Jadd al-Islm" 9:1246, with references.
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to Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, who in Jewish and Muslim tradition is held to be an ancestor of the Arabs. That is, 'Hagarized' = 'Arabized' = 'Islamicized'. Although Hagar is known and honored in Islam, 4 Muslims or Arabic-speakers do not use her name or a derivative thereof to mean 'Muslim', 'Arab', 'Arabic' or 'Arabize.' Muslim tradition holds that the Arabs descend from Ishmael (and thus from Hagar), and that Muslims follow in her footsteps when performing one of the ceremonies of the Pilgrimage to Mecca (indeed, according to Muslim tradition, her tomb is at the Ka'ba itself). She is thus well-known and honored among Muslims, though her name or a derivative thereof is not used to mean 'Muslim', 'Arab', 'Arabic' or 'Arabize' (none is registered in, e.g., Abu Manzr, Lisn al-cArab, s.v., and Ibn al-Athr, Lubb al-lubbb, s.v. hajar.) Four points may be offered to suggest why that may be so: a. The Qur'an contains no usage parallel to the Jewish ones discussed in this note. b. Most tribal and gentilic names were coined before Islam. The idea that Arabs, or at least some Arabs, are descended from Hagar through Ishmael does not predate Islam and thus had very little influence on this phenomenon. (If one argued that we have here an Islamic coinage, the other reasons given here against that argument {a, c, and d} would still apply). c. In the Jewish tradition, transfer of the reference of Biblical names of places and people is common. For example, sefarad, tsarefat, ashkenaz, and togarma are used in post-Biblical Hebrew (with reflexes in other Jewish languages) to refer to places or peoples different from the ones which these words designate in the Bible (the Hebrew adjective hagri 'Arabic' is also an example of this, as Hagar was an Egyptian, not an Arab, and it is hardly clear that the language of the Hagrites of Psalms and Chronicles was Arabic). This kind of transfer, so common in Hebrew, is rare in Arabic. Perhaps that is because Arab tradition preserved traditions identifying and providing much detail about the peoples and places to which various proper nouns refer. A discussion of majz 'metaphoric usages' (which is what the classical Arabic tradition would have called such a transfer had it been conscious of it) is beyond the scope of this note. Hagar's Arabic name is hjar (see, e.g., Ibn al-Athr, al-Kmil f al-Ta'rkh, 1:102. T. P. Hughes, Dictionary of Islam, 1885, rpt. New Delhi, Cosmo Publications, 1977, s.v.).
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d. Perhaps most important, Hagar was a non-Muslim and a female (in Muslim society, which is strongly male-oriented, it would be highly unlikely were the name for a member of a certain group of people to be derived from a woman's name). All this should not be taken to imply a position on whether the figure of Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, was considered a mother of the Arabs or whether her name was in actuality the now-forgotten but once-conscious basis for gentilic forms or words representing the root h-j-r. The only point of this digression is to speculate on why Arab tradition has either not created such forms or does not present them in this way. Clearly, then, if my suggestion about a play on words is correct, the problematic meaning of this word did not arise among Muslims. In contrast to Muslims, certain Jews and other non-Muslims do use a derivative of Hagar's name to mean 'Arab; Muslim', e.g. Latin agarenus, Spanish agareno, and English Hagarene; this usage is also found in Russian and in Eastern Christianity.5 Among Jews, at least, use of a proper noun or adjective derived from Heb. hagar 'Hagar' presumably also alludes to the Hagrites mentioned in Psalms 83:7 and I Chronicles 5:10, 19, 20, and 27:31 (the Jewish Publication Society translation of 1982 has Hagrites, the form which I have adopted here, rather than Hagarites or Hagarenes; it thus follows the Masoretic vocalization hagri). 6 Hebrew hagri 'Arab, With respect to Slavic languages, Horace H. Lunt wrote the following in his review of S.G. Barxudarov et al., eds., Slovar' russkogo jazyka XI-XII vv. in Language 52, 3, September 1976, pp. 708-717: "Agarene are not explicitly Moslems {as the dictionary under review mistakenly writes}, but 'Hagarenes' -- which in the Old Testament can mean pre-Moslem Arabs, and in most Slavonic texts means 'Saracens, non-Christians, heathens (in general)', although the context frequently points to Moslems" (p. 714). On Eastern Christianity see my remarks in the text below. Agareno: Listed in Mar!ia Molina, Diccionario de uso de Espaol, Madrid, Gredos, 1966, 1:83. This term is not found, however, in Corominas - Pascal, Diccionario critico etimologico castellano e hispanico, Madrid: Gredos, 1980-83. English Hagarene 'Arab' and Spanish agareno 'Arab' go back to Latin Agarenus, which consists of a reflex of the Hebrew given name hagar and the Latin ending -enus. None of these words, therefore, supports the pointing hagari in Psalms and Chronicles (inasmuch as none
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Muslim' and leshon-hagri 'Arabic' are well attested (see, for example, Avraham Even-Shoshan's Hamilon Hechadash, where the vocalization is /hagri/). An example of Heb. hagri 'Arabic' is found in Divre Yosef, composed by D. Sambari, who lived in Egypt in the seventeenth century.7 Use of 'Hagrite' as a word which might not readily be understood by Muslim readers of Jewish apologetic and polemic works is mentioned briefly in the Encyclopaedia Judaica 3:194. If my suggestion is correct, the derivation of muhjir would be straightforward. Classical Arabic usage would permit the formation of a denominative verb *hajjara 'to become a Hagrite' (it would be a faccala (II) conjugation from the root h-j-r). The active participle of this conjugation would be *muhajjir. The form muhjir would be based on the fcala (IIIrd) conjugation hjara The IIIrd conjugation may conceivably be used for denominative constructions of this type as well, although such a use is less common. In any case, the influence of the long vowel in the Arabic hgar 'Hagar' is not to be discounted, although the most important explanation for the choice of the IIIrd conjugation rather than the second is probably to make it identical in form with the word meaning 'emigrants'.8 In any case, using muhjir. for *muhajjir., given that the former refers specifically to the "emigrants" in Muslim speech, would be well within a Jewish tradition is derived from a Hebrew adjective). Note, however, that the King James Version does support such a pointing: whereas Hagarenes in Psalms 83 presumably rests on the Latin-based English usage, the King James Version has Hagarites in I Chronicles 5. This variant is presumably dependent, at least in part, on the Biblical form hagri. I have not looked at other Bible translations. In the Hebrew original, the three occurrences in 1 Chronicles 5 are spelled with alef (!): hahagri=im.. I do not know of any use of *hagri=i instead of hagri for the gentilic adjective. Mivchar ben Hagri is mentioned in 1 Chron 11:38. See W.J. Fischel, "A Chapter from Sambari's Chronicle 'Divre Joseph' on the Beginnings of Islam," Tsiyon. 5, 5700, beginning of section 5, p. 209). For a discussion of second- and third-conjugation verbs, see William Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language, (reprint, Cambridge University Press, 1967), paragraphs 39-43, esp. 42c (note Wright's example of hammara 'to speak Himyarite'), and 43, remark a.
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of wordplay, such as qalon for Qur'an, meshugac or meshumad for Muhammad, or avon gilayon for Evangelon.9 Muhjirn are people who, so to speak, have "emigrated," that is, left Jewish tradition, and specifically, Jews who have become Hagrites, i.e., Muslims. A similar characterization of Muslims is found in early Syriac sources. From the earliest appearance of the new religion, mhaggraye. was used to mean 'Muslims'. As S.P. Brock has observed, this usage is presumably related to Arabic muhjirn, "but to most Syriac writers it probably came to be more or less synonymous with bnay Hagar 'sons of Hagar' a word which could evidently... bear pejorative overtones," as it recalled the Muslim's servile origins.10 Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, in their book Hagarism, 11 refer to this word and to Greek magaritai as names for followers of the new Arab religion. They also report an attestation of ahgar used of a Christian contemplating conversion to Islam. They note that one element in the derivation of the word -- the genealogy to Abraham through Hagar -- was "rather lost in the Islamic tradition."12 In any case, it is clear that these words applied to all adherents of the religion now known as Islam, Arabs and non-Arabs, converts and those born to the faith. To summarize: the use of muhjir. for 'Jewish convert to Islam' has not been unknown among Muslims in North Africa. Regardless of the degree to which Jewish use of this word is derived from non-Jewish Arabic, it seems reasonable to assume that reference to Hagar was important in its development. Minimally, reference to Hagar validated use of an existing non-Jewish term in a Jewish-Arabic context, Maximally, this reference played an important role in the derivation of the word. {The usual Yiddish name for the Hungarian language is ungerish. A The passage which Fishel published (cited above) also contains these words. "Syriac views of emergent Islam," in Studies on the First Century of Islamic Society, edited by G.H.A. Juynboll, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1982, p. 15. Crone and Cook (see the reference in the next note) vocalize the Syriac forms as mahgre, mahgraye.
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Cambridge University Press, 1980, esp. pp. 8-9, and 160.

Crone and Cook did not see the need to attempt to explain this missing genealogy in terms which make sense within Islamic tradition; I have offered a few musings above.

marked synonym, used for cryptic or humorous purposes, is loshn-hoger, literally 'Hagar's language'. It is based on the phonological similarity between Yid. ungerish and Yid. hoger 'Hagar'. As a result of the influence of Yid. loshn-hoger 'Hungarian', Heb. hagrit, literally 'Arabic', has been used in the sense of 'Hungarian' (see Even-Shoshan's Hamilon Hechadash, which gives a citation from the works of S.Y. Agnon, whose native language was Yiddish. Even-Shoshan failed to say that this sense of hagrit was due to Yiddish influence. Instead, he wrote "al-shum dimyon hatselilim hagri -- hungari"); D.L.G.}

The editor's preferred method for offprints of this article was to have computer-generated prints, as I had access to the IBM-SCRIPT program used to print the pages exactly as they appeared in the Journal, on a University mainframe computer. I am not sure the electronic copy I currently have on file is exactly the file and in any case it had to be completely reformatted to fit with word-processing programs currently available to me. It has not been possible to reconstruct the page-breaks and editing may have resulted in a different division of footnotes. Let me take this opportunity for two comments: 1. On the Arabic usage of nisba endings based on women's names. "F im" is a good example of one of these: but used primarily politically rather than as a kinship indicator. 2. David Gold pointed out a rather humorous Yiddish use of loshn-hoger for "Hungarian"; perhaps I should have asked him to speculate on any relations between "Magyar," and Aramaic mhagraye and Greek magaritai. Seth Ward