Late Judaeo-Arabic Poems of Ibn Mi‹mār—an Unknown 17th century Humourist(?)

Abstract Naṣr Allah ibn Miʿmār is a heretofore unknown Jewish Karaite poet. Most likely, his father was Aharon Miʿmār—a cantor whose name turns up in documents from the Firkovitch Collection. To date, six of Ibn Miʿmār's poems have been discovered in the Firkovitch Collection. Most deal with his indigence and other tribulations and belong to the genre al-faraj baʿda l-Šidda literature. Another poem offers a debate song that contains indications that his verse was performed—read aloud or sung—before a Jewish audience. In my estimation, this same figure was among the storytellers active in seventeenth-century Egypt. The goodnatured humour woven throughout his poetry suggests that he functioned, in modern terms, much like a stand-up comic. The manuscripts that preserved Ibn Miʿmār's verse authentically represent his 17th century Egyptian vernacular. Above all, these documents capture the shift of the Arabic qāf to ġayn, monophthongization of the CA diphthongs ay and aw into the long vowels ī and ū respectively and internal and final ʿimāla.