4. The Raʾīs al-Yahūd and Other Rabbis

Chapter 4 draws attention to Jewish community leaders, above all the Raʾīs al-Yahūd (‘Head of the Jews’), who represented the Jews of Egypt and Syria from the 11th century C.E. through the Ottoman conquest of the region in 1516–17. The first of the four Genizah documents presented here (CUL Or. 1080 4.61) is a Muslim court case, in Arabic, from 1375, when Egypt was part of the Mamluk Sultanate. The case documents the transfer of part of a building in Ḥārat Zuwayla, the Cairo neighbourhood where the greatest concentrations of both Jews and Coptic Christians lived, from a woman to her son, both of whom appear to be Muslim. The building was originally endowed to a Coptic church but is apparently located near the residence of the Raʾīs al-Yahūd, who at the time would have been David ben Joshua Maimonides, the last Raʾīs descended from the legendary sage Moses Maimonides (d. 1204). In the year of the court case, David fled Cairo for reasons that remain murky and spent the next fifteen years in Syria. In Document 2 (T-S Ar. 51.104), written in Arabic and dated 1499, Nathan Sholāl, one of the last occupants of the office of Raʾīs al-Yahūd, delegates authority over all Jewish pious endowment properties in Cairo and Fusṭāt to two Jewish merchants. Document 3 (T-S Ar. 39.471), dated 1615, is an Ottoman Turkish petition to an official, seeking protection for one Rabbi Samuel as he makes his way, presumably from Egypt, to Jerusalem for Passover at the height of a multi-pronged, empire-wide crisis that rendered travel especially perilous. The final document (ENA 3958.10, in Arabic), from 1829, shows a personage who appears to be the chief rabbi of Istanbul, Ḥayyim Benyakār, obtaining a loan from the Jewish orphans’ fund; the loan is guaranteed by Shimʿūn Fransīs, the influential Sephardic merchant referenced in Chapter 3, Document 6. Intriguingly, the document refers to Benyakār as Ḫāḫām Başı, the title that the Ottoman government introduced in 1835, the year of Benyakār’s death, to designate the Chief Rabbi of the entire Ottoman Empire.