Copyright
Dotan Arad, Esther-Miriam WagnerPublished On
2025-07-22Page Range
pp. 301–309Language
- English
Print Length
9 pages
P.5.b: Letter from Elijah b. Elyaqim to Moses b. Judah
- Dotan Arad (author)
- Esther-Miriam Wagner (author)
This is a letter from Elijah b. Elyaqim to Moses b. Judah, in Hebrew and Venetian. The letter was probably written on 12 June 1484. The year is not mentioned in the Hebrew text, but on the verso there is a short text in Venetian, in a different hand, from 8 June 1484,which was the festival of Shavuʿot (Pentecost), according to the Hebrew calendar. The Hebrew letter itself is dated at the end by mentioning the weekly Torah portion read in the synagogue: “on Thursday, in (the time of the reading of) the parasha of ‘The seven lamps shall give light’” (Num. 8.2). This verse is from the parasha of Behaʿalotekha (Num. 8.1–12.16). In that year, this portion was read on Saturday 14 June 1484, so the letter was written two days before, on 12 June.
The deciphering of the Venetian text is difficult, even for researchers used to reading medieval Italian manuscripts. We want to thank Prof. Benjamin Arbel, Prof. Charles Burnett, Dr Christopher Wright, Dr Mike Carr, and Dr Renard Gluzman for their help. The Hebrew part of the letter was published by Benayahu (1984, 263). The fragment also contains mirrored script on both sides, which was transferred from two missing letters, probably while stored in an archive. The text on the verso comes from the beginning of a letter by the Nagid to the community of Alexandria and is discussed under C.1.d. The beginning of the Nagid’s letter preserved here was written in Hebrew but the letter itself was probably composed in Judaeo-Arabic. The text on the recto is a smaller piece from another unpreserved letter, which was written in Hebrew. Three blurred lines were copied to our letter, but we can only read ] כי באמ]ת ‘which indeed’ from the first line, and the words )!( וליהודים ולישמעלים ‘and to the Jews and the Muslims’ from the second line.
Contributors
Dotan Arad
(author)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)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.