A manuscript. A family. A forgotten story at the heart of Jewish–Islamic intellectual encounters.

In the final centuries before the 1492 Expulsion—and in the first century after it—a Jewish family quietly helped shape the intellectual landscape of al-Andalus. The Banū Waqār moved between languages and worlds—Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic, Hebrew, Castilian—and left behind a trail of writings that no one has yet fully traced.
This project begins to follow that path.

At its centre is The Conciliatory Treatise between Philosophy and Religious Law—a bold and largely forgotten work by Joseph ibn Waqār, preserved in a single Judaeo-Arabic manuscript, but also in dozens of manuscripts of a partial Hebrew translation. Drawing deeply on both Jewish and Islamic traditions, the treatise seeks to bring philosophical reasoning into dialogue with religious law—interpreted through the lens of Kabbalah—without collapsing one into the other.

But this is more than the story of a manuscript. It is also the story of a family, and of the world around them: a world of philosophers, astronomers, physicians, and converts; a world in which ideas could move quietly from synagogue to madrasah, and sometimes—as if through a side door—into the emerging world of Christian Kabbalah.

The Banū Waqār Project began in April 2025 as part of Kabbalah, Philosophy, and Power in the 14th and 15th Centuries Iberian Peninsula, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action funded by the European Commission (Grant Agreement ID: 101147087, DOI: 10.3030/101147087). In its current early phase, it is based at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid.