Copyright

Dotan Arad, Esther-Miriam Wagner

Published On

2025-07-22

Page Range

pp. 96–109

Language

  • English

Print Length

14 pages

C.1.a: Letter from Solomon b. Joseph ha-Nagid to the Community of Alexandria

Chapter of: 'Wisdom and Greatness in one Place': The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle(pp. 96–109)
This is a letter from the Nagid, copied by his scribe, David ibn Shams, to the community of Alexandria. The fact that the letter was saved in Moses b. Judah’s archive reflects his high position in the community and indicates that he was actually the addressee of the letter. The community of Alexandria was experiencing inner conflict due to criticism of the activities of the Zeqenim (the Seven Town Elders), especially pertaining to financial decisions. The Nagid backs the local leadership and warns the members of the community against disobedience of the Zeqenim, and also gives instructions about how to arrange the cantorship in the synagogue. The letter was written close to the Day of Atonement, but the year is unknown.

Contributors

Dotan Arad

(author)
Senior Lecturer in the Israel and Golda Koschitzki department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5395-6653

Dr. Arad is a senior lecturer in the Israel and Golda Koschitzki department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry in Bar-Ilan University. Dotan has a PhD in Jewish History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on the Jews in Egypt, Syria and Palestine during the Mamluk and Early Ottoman period. Between 2012 and 2014 he published, with Prof. Shmuel Glick and other colleagues, a series of volumes containing responsa fragments of Jewish Sages in the Ottoman Empire, from the Cairo Genizah. His current research focuses on the Judeo Arabic letters of the Karaites in the Ottoman empire and on the social history of the Damascus and Cairo’s Jews during the Ottoman Period.

Esther-Miriam Wagner

(author)
Executive Director of the Woolf Institute at University of Cambridge
https://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/people/dr-esther-miriam-wagner

Esther-Miriam Wagner is the Executive Director of the Woolf Institute. She is a Fellow of St Edmund's College and teaches the MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies: Muslim-Jewish Relations at the University of Cambridge. Miriam has written broadly on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics of Judaeo-Arabic and Yiddish, scribal practice, and Jewish-Muslim relations in Egypt and Muslim Spain as reflected in the Genizah sources. Her books include Linguistic Variety of Judaeo-Arabic in Letters from the Cairo Genizah (2010), Scribes as Agents of Language Change (2013), Merchants of Innovations. The Languages of Traders (2016) and A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic (2021). Her work has been featured on TV and Radio programmes, such as on BBC3 The Essay, in History Magazine and in documentaries on the Cairo Genizah.