Did Chinggis Khan Have a Jewish Teacher? An Examination of an Early Fourteenth-Century Arabic Text

Abstract

The answer to the question posed in the title of this article is no, or rather: no, at least as far as we are aware of at this time. My hope here, however, is not to attract the reader's attention with a catchy but totally hypothetical question whose negative answer is obvious. Rather, I wish to discuss a unique and significant passage in an Arabic text emanating from the Mamluk Sultanate. Somebody in early fourteenth-century Cairo thought that the great founder of the Mongol Empire had indeed, early on in his career, received instruction and advice from a Jew. I intend to analyze this text to see what it says about Muslim perceptions of Chinggis Khan (from about a century after his death), as well as attempts to give expression to religious change perhaps among the Mongols of the Ilkhanate (the Mongol state in Iran and the surrounding countries) itself. It will also be interesting and useful to see how this information correlates with our knowledge of Chinggis Khan and his successors. Some or much of the story may be a later fabrication, but it also contains some material which echoes real matters and motifs from earlier and contemporary Mongol history. The passage in question is found in volume 27 of the encyclopedia by Shihab al-Din Ahmad b. 'Abd al-Wahhdb al-Nuwayri (died 733/1333): Nihdyat al-arab ftlfuniin al-adab (The Highest Aspiration in the Varieties of Cultures).' Al-Nuwayri, of Egyptian birth, enjoyed a long career as a middle-ranking official in the Mamluk bureaucracy in both Syria and Egypt. It was in the latter that he spent his last years, and there he wrote his magnum opus after his retirement around 1316; 2 this relatively late date will be of some relevance in the following discussion. The Mongols would have loomed large in the consciousness of any civilian official or officer in the Mamluk Sultanate (and even in the minds of the populace at large), since the Ilkhanid Mongols in Iran were its greatest enemies (up to about A.D. 1320), while the Mongols of the Golden Horde (the Mongol state in present-day southern