Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

One Thousand and One Nights: Too Jewish for Some Egyptians?

It was reported today that a group of Islamist lawyers in Egypt is calling for “The Arabian Nights,” also known as “One Thousand and One Nights,” to be banned as obscene. A new 3-volume translation of “Alf laila wa-laila” will coincidentally be published by Penguin Classics on May 25, complete with all of the time-honored spicy tales, many of them involving the lubricious real-life gay poet Abū-Nuwās.

An important 9th century writer, Abū-Nuwās has himself been denounced lately for his indulgence in wine, women, and boys. Beyond morality or Disneyfication, “The Arabian Nights” may be saddled with even more worrisome baggage for Islamic integrists. A 1996 article, “The Jews and ‘The Arabian Nights,’” by librarian Victor Bochman, from The Israel Review of Arts and Letters, details the amount of Yiddishkeit to be found in “The Arabian Nights.”

As Bochman points out, some of its stories are of Jewish origin, such as “The Tale of Bulukiya,” about the son of an Israelite king. King Solomon plays an important role in several other tales, wielding power over genies and the book of Ecclesiastes provides two proverbs quoted in “The Tale of Sindbad the Sailor.”

The earliest surviving use of the title “One Thousand and One Nights” is on a 12th century loan record from a Jewish bookshop in Cairo. The first European translation of the tales from 1704-1717 was rapidly followed in 1718 by a Yiddish adaptation. A more precise Yiddish translation had to wait until 1796, and in Judeo-Arabic until 1882, when an Algerian Arabic version was printed in Hebrew characters. By the end of World War I, Ladino and Bukharian-Jewish versions were also available. A complete Hebrew translation was published in Jerusalem in 30 volumes from 1950-1971. Great Jewish scholars like Ignác Goldziher and Joseph Horovitz have explicated the text as well. Could the Egyptians lawyers suspect that “The Arabian Nights,” is just too Jewish to be kosher for Islamic readers?

Watch a short video of Jaffa’s Arab-Hebrew Theater’s production of “1001 Nights” below:

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.