Copyright

Dotan Arad, Esther-Miriam Wagner

Published On

2025-07-22

Page Range

pp. 358–364

Language

  • English

Print Length

7 pages

P.11: Letter from an Anonymous Writer to a Certain Yedidiah

Chapter of: 'Wisdom and Greatness in one Place': The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle(pp. 358–364)
Beginning of a letter of unknown content. Hebrew. Only praises are preserved in this fragment, and we cannot learn much historical data from it. The addressee of the letter is not known from other documents in our corpus or any other source. The name Yedidiah was not common in the medieval Jewish diaspora in the Islamic world, although it appears from time to time in Genizah letters.1 The rarity of this name calls us to take into account the possibility that it may only be a nickname. Yedidiah ‘the friend of God’ was the name given by God to Solomon after his birth (2 Sam. 12.25). Is it perhaps a nickname for Solomon b. Joseph, the Nagid? One of the phrases in the letter, “the light of our eyes” ( אור עינינו ) is a typical epithet for a Nagid at that time. The expression is very common in letters addressed to leaders and rabbis in the Classical Genizah documents (e.g., Budapest, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 278; TS 12.68; TS 8J13.14; TS Misc. 36.203), but in the Mamlūk period it is used only (to the best of our knowledge) in letters addressed to Negidim, such as David ha-Nagid (the first; TS 16.63),2 and his son Abraham (ENA 2592.17). In the fifteenth century, this expression appears in connection with Joseph the Nagid (TS 12.815; TS 13J4.16) and his son Solomon the Nagid (TS 13J4.16),3 and Nathan Sholal (TS 16.216; TS Misc. 28.71). In light of this, we cannot reject the possibility that the addressee here was Solomon the Nagid. If so, it could be that this fragment is a draft of a letter from Moses b. Judah, which was sent to the Nagid, maybe as a response to his letters addressed to the Alexandrian community. Nevertheless, this hypothesis is doubtful. The addressee of this letter is not characterised as a leader, and the word ‘Nagid’ (or any similar title) does not appear in it. He is characterised mainly as a prominent sage and is praised for his wisdom and for his good virtues. The writer also emphasises the origin of the addressee from a pious family (l. 9). It seems that his ancestors, and maybe he himself too, took part in the Judaeo-Sufi Ḥasidic movement, which was an important element in the spiritual life of Egyptian Jewry in the Mamlūk period.

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.