Copyright

Dotan Arad, Esther-Miriam Wagner

Published On

2025-07-22

Page Range

pp. 144–153

Language

  • English

Print Length

10 pages

C.5: Letter from a Certain Hārūn to Moses b. Judah

Chapter of: 'Wisdom and Greatness in one Place': The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle(pp. 144–153)
This letter was probably written in 1485 CE. The writer was most likely living in Sicily or spent a period there for his commercial affairs (see l. 12). It contains additional lines in the margin written in the handwriting of David ibn Shams. The verso is in a similar hand to the recto, but appears to have been written at a different stage.

The letter is written in a comparatively conservative style, with a few post-classical Judaeo-Arabic spelling conventions, such as the spelling of Classical Arabic tāʾ marbūṭa with tav and the inconsistent spelling of the /a/ sound, not following the prescriptive spelling norms of Classical Arabic. Classical Arabic ʾalif maqṣūra spelled with yāʾ usually receives a stroke above the yāʾ, apparently in an effort to mark its reading as an /a/ sound—as in, for example, ' תעאלי in l. 7 and ' עלי in l. 12—thus displaying familiarity with Arabic-script spelling conventions.

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.