Yoel Maccabi
| Born | c. 1685 AN Haifa |
| Died | c. 1751 AN (aged about 66) Judah, Wechua Nation |
| Occupation | Philologist and scholar of religion |
| Known for | Founding the Israati University of Judah (1734 AN) |
Yoel Maccabi (c. 1685 AN to c. 1751 AN) was an Israati-descent philologist and scholar of religion, the founder in 1734 AN of the Israati University of Judah. Born among the Israati-descended families of Haifa, the southern diaspora that the migrations known as the going out had carried out of Israat, he spent his working life gathering the scattered record of the Judahite rite and brought it to Judah, the rite's former seat, to constitute it as a teaching collection.
The rite whose literature Maccabi recovered had ended as an organized body with the fall of Caputia on 30.XV.1668 AN, and its own writings had not survived it. What survived was the Yerenist quotation literature that had preserved the rite by quoting it to refute it, and Maccabi's scholarship rested on the position that such a hostile record is worth keeping.
Life
Maccabi was born about 1685 AN among the Israati-descended families of Haifa, whose ancestors the Haifan record places in the undated migrations that carried the Israati population south from their homeland.[1] He was of the confessional descent and not of the confession. The Judahite rite to which his forebears had belonged had ceased to function as an organized body seventeen years before his birth, and the community that still carried its vocabulary and its surnames no longer carried its worship.[2]
Little is recorded of his early life. He appears in the record as a collector: over some years he located surviving Yerenist commentaries across the former Hammish and Caputian lands and brought copies of them together at Judah.[3] Judah, the administratively senior of the two historical Israati cities and the former seat of the rite's court, lay by his lifetime within the Wechua Nation of Nouvelle Alexandrie, where the Faith of Inti is established. He settled there and remained until his death, about 1751 AN. He left no writings of his own.
The recovery
The record Maccabi set out to recover had been lost with the states that held it. The Israati collections kept by the courts at Judah and Ben Aliv were dispersed through the Hammish Civil War and the Alexandrian Flu of 1650 AN to 1652 AN, and by the fall of Caputia what remained of the rite's teaching survived only inside the Yerenist polemics written to refute it.[4] His undertaking was to gather that hostile record and read the rite back out of it.
Whether the quotations could be used had divided the rite's own scholars: one position held that a hostile witness is preferable to none, the other that a text known only through its enemies is an allegation and not a text.[3] Maccabi took the first position and built an institution on it. What the hostile record had preserved most fully was less the rite's theology than its disputes over the reckoning, the office that fixed the liturgical calendar. The authorities his collection recovered best, among them Nahum of Judah and Eliav of Ben Aliv, are known almost entirely through the citations of their opponents. Because the rite's liturgy had been kept in Haifan while its court corresponded in the Common Tongue, those citations were mostly translations, and much of his work was philological, concerned with the errors that hostile paraphrase introduced.[5]
The university and legacy
In 1734 AN, sixty-six years after the fall of Caputia had ended the rite as an organized body, Maccabi constituted the assembled commentaries as a teaching collection and founded the Israati University of Judah around it.[3] The residual community of Israati descent supplied the congregation, Maccabi the collection and the design, and the Wechua Nation the charter under which it stood; he led it as its first rector. The principle he set at its center, that a rite known only through its enemies is a rite worth recovering, survives as its motto, A hostile witness is preferable to none.
Maccabi is remembered through that institution, which keeps and studies the Yerenist collection he assembled, and through the surname he carried. Maccabi was among the few pieces of Judahite vocabulary to outlast the confession that coined it, attested on both sides of the going out and borne after the courts were gone by the club Maccabi Judah and by the Maccabi River.[3]
See also
- Israati University of Judah
- Judahite rite
- Nahum of Judah
- Yerenism
- Maccabi Judah
- Hapoel Ben Aliv
- Carrie Fitzwater
- Wechua Nation
References
- ^ Free State of Haifa, on the Israati families who settled Haifa in migrations its own record does not date.
- ^ Judahite rite, on the end of the rite as an organized body with Caputia and on the descent community that outlasted it.
- ^ a b c d Israati University of Judah, on Maccabi's recovery of the Yerenist commentaries and the foundation of 1734 AN.
- ^ Judahite rite, on the loss of the Israati collections and their survival inside Yerenist commentary.
- ^ Judahite rite, on the Haifan liturgical language and the translated character of the surviving quotations.
