Copyright

Dotan Arad, Esther-Miriam Wagner

Published On

2025-07-22

Page Range

pp. 110–114

Language

  • English

Print Length

5 pages

C.1.b: Letter from the Nagid (Probably Solomon b. Joseph) to the Community of Alexandria

Chapter of: 'Wisdom and Greatness in one Place': The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle (pp. 110–114)

This letter, written by the scribe David ibn Shams for the Nagid, was sent as an answer to a letter received from the community of Alexandria (see l. 8). The letter is not preserved completely. Its left side and the beginning and the end of it are still missing. Some of its contents therefore remain enigmatic. The letter is preserved in two main fragments: lines 1–5 in Bodl. MS Heb. c. 72/28 and lines 6–21 in c. 72/41. We thought at first that there was not an immediate continuation between these two fragments; however, we fortunately succeeded in identifying a third fragment (Bodl. MS Heb. c. 72/17bis), which is a mirror-copy of the letter, made while the two fragments were still combined. In this copy, lines 3–21 are preserved, and prove that there is no missing part between the two fragments. The mirror script in the third fragment also helped us to improve our reading of some words. In the letter, the Nagid refers to a person of the community who does not obey the leadership (l. 12), and falsely portrays himself as a poor man in need of support, without justification (l. 14, see commentary). He could cause danger or financial damage to the community by spreading calumny to the authorities. It may be assumed that, in the missing part of the letter, the Nagid guided the leaders of the community as to how to deal with this person.

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.