Nethanel al-Fayyūmī נְתַנְאֵל בֶּן אַלְפַיּוּמִי

The father of that Jacob ben Nethanel al-Fayyūmī who wrote to Maimonides in Fustat about the afflictions of the Yemenite community and received the Epistle to Yemen in reply. And this matters more than it seems: the story is usually told as though Maimonides were writing into a void, into a remote and scholarly helpless periphery. Nothing of the kind.

Nethanel al-Fayyūmī wrote Bustān al-ʿUqūl (in Hebrew Gan ha-Sekhalim, "the Garden of the Intellects") around 1160—a Jewish theology built in the terms of Ismāʿīlī philosophy. In it, a doctrine of cyclical prophecy and, explicitly, the acceptance that Muḥammad was a genuine prophet sent to the Arabs, while the Torah remains binding for Israel. Such a move is almost unique in medieval Jewish literature; the nearest parallels are sought not in Jewish but in Ismāʿīlī writing.

So Maimonides was writing into a live and many-voiced local intellectual scene, with theologians of its own and a solution of its own to the question of Islam—and the Epistle to Yemen is, among other things, a reply to that solution. Maimonides' insistence that prophecy has ceased and that the Muslim scriptural proofs do not hold reads differently once one remembers that the head of the Yemenite community was the father of his correspondent.

The English edition with translation was made by David Levine at Columbia in 1908; the Hebrew by Rabbi Yosef Qāfiḥ in Jerusalem in 1954. That both Qāfiḥs—the grandfather who rejected the Zohar as a late book, and the grandson who edited the whole of Maimonides—held this very text in their hands is itself telling: the Yemenite tradition knew about its philosophical branch and did not hide it.