Copyright

Dotan Arad, Esther-Miriam Wagner

Published On

2025-07-22

Page Range

pp. 212–220

Language

  • English

Print Length

9 pages

P.3.b: Letter from David ibn Shams to Moses b. Judah

Chapter of: 'Wisdom and Greatness in one Place': The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle (pp. 212–220)

This is the beginning of a letter, with praises for Moses b. Judah, in Hebrew (the letter itself was probably written in Judaeo-Arabic). The friendship between David and Moses is reflected especially well in this letter. The author chooses an intimate quotation from Song of Songs to describe the kinship between them. It is not a relationship between a master and his apprentice, as we find in some other letters in our corpus, but an equal relationship between two close friends. This closeness is illustrated well also in the address line, where David calls the addressee “the brother,” and not ‘the master’ etc. (see also P.3.c). This torn letter does not provide us with much historical information, and we know nothing of the subjects David wanted to discuss, but it has special importance in that it portrays Moses’ status, his reputation, and his public image as a leader and associate of the authorities on the one hand, and as an intellectual and a local scholar on the other.

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.