Copyright

Dotan Arad, Esther-Miriam Wagner

Published On

2025-07-22

Page Range

pp. 162–187

Language

  • English

Print Length

26 pages

C.7: Sample Letter, Based on a Letter to the Community of Cairo

Chapter of: 'Wisdom and Greatness in one Place': The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle(pp. 162–187)
This is a template and guidance for how to write letters in high poetic Hebrew. Perhaps it is a page from a bigger collection of samples of letters. Such a book was in some places called an ʾIgron (from ʾiggeret, a letter). Although this is only a template, which has never been sent, it is an important historical source, because it is based on a real letter (or letters). The original letter on which at least part of this text was based was sent to the community of Cairo, as it says in f1/13: “the community of Cairo, that he who dwells in heaven may save them.” Another clue that the original letter was sent to Cairo is the praise in f1/v16: “who princely see the king’s face, who are highest in the kingdom.” This description fits well the Jewish clerks who worked in the Mamlūk administration and had relatively free access to the sulṭān’s palace in Cairo as well as to the emirs. It is possible, therefore, that Moses’ scribe, or one of his associates, took a copy of a letter that was sent from Alexandria to Cairo, and re-used it for this purpose.

The first part of this text (f1/2–v17) is a general opening of a communal letter. The writer gives respect first of all to the sages of the community (f1/v7), but mentions also other classes in the community. The Nagid is not mentioned here at all. We can only assume that he was mentioned in the original letter but was omitted here to allow the text to be adapted for any other community. The second part of the text (f1/v19–end) provides guidance as to how to write a letter of request for a donation. For further discussion, see Arad (2020).

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.