3. Inter- and Intracommunal Commercial Transactions

The seven Genizah documents covered in Chapter 3, all but one in Arabic, illustrate the wide range of commercial activities in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims engaged in Ottoman Egypt and beyond. The first two (T-S Ar. 39.341 and ENA 3959.1) concern the powerful 16th-century Bedouin chieftain Muḥammad ibn Baghdād: one is a letter to Ibn Baghdād from a military commander who oversees a village endowed to a Mamluk Sultanate-era pious foundation (waqf), the farm of whose revenues Ibn Baghdād presumably holds; the other—the only Ottoman Turkish document in this chapter—is a petition for redress from a Jewish merchant who has been coerced into selling Ibn Baghdād’s textiles in Cairo’s Khān al-Khalīlī bazaar following the Bedouin leader’s execution in 1550. In Document 3 (T-S Ar. 39.370), from the late 16th or early 17th century, a military officer from the Ottoman palace demands that the Jewish tax farmer of the Nile port of Miṣr al-Qadīma return a receipt for a delivery of sheep. Document 4 (AIU XII.173), dated 1649, is a complicated court case documenting a delivery of sugar and payment of a debt to an influential Jewish banker by the tax farmer of a sugar-producing village, assisted by a wide range of military administrators throughout the Egyptian countryside. Document 5 (AIU XII.86) is a letter to a Cairo-based Jewish coral merchant from two merchants, either Jewish or Christian, who have sent him Mediterranean coral in exchange for gum arabic from Sudan. The sixth document (AIU XII.87) describes an 1802 loan from the Muslim merchant Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār to the international trader Shimʿūn Fransīs, co-founder of a prominent Sephardic commercial company. Finally, the enigmatic Document 7 (AIU XII.84) is an affectionate letter, written in 1821, from one Ibrāhīm, who is certainly a Christian or Jewish merchant, to a number of Christian contacts, who may include his own family members.