Moše Rafael Attias
Bosnian scholar (1845–1916)
Moše Rafael ef. Attias, also known as Moše Rafaelović and Zeki Effendi (1845 – 2 July 1916), was a Bosnian historian, journalist, poet, translator and financial advisor, who studied Islam, Persian literature and Bosnian Jewish history. He is regarded as one of the most important personalities in the history of Sarajevo.
Biography
Born to a prominent family of Sarajevo Sephardi Jews in the late Ottoman times, he spent most of his active life during the Austro-Hungarian administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Moše Rafael Attias attended an Ottoman state school in Sarajevo – open to all confessions but mainly attended by Bosnian Muslims – and studied according to an Islamic curriculum. He then moved to Istanbul to perfect his studies on Islamic religion and culture. There he became a scholar of the 13th century Persian poet and mystic Saadi Shirazi. Attias may have even become a Jewish sufi. Attias got the title of effendi, a scholar of Islam, which is visible from the Latin inscription on his grave. He was known in his last years as Zeki Effendi.
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This entry incorporates text from “Moše Rafael Attias” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.