5. Documents from the Muslim Community (?)

Chapter 5 presents six Genizah documents that, on the surface, are concerned entirely with Muslim affairs. Four of them, however, may bear some relation to the Jewish community. The first (Manchester G 63), dated 1594, is an Arabic marriage contract between a North African Muslim bride and groom; it is unusual in including an enslaved woman as part of the groom’s dower, and in requiring this woman to serve the groom’s brother. Documents 2 and 3 (T-S Ar. 39.153 and T-S NS 297.51) comprise part of the type of primer on Islamic practice, known as ʿilm-i ḥāl in Ottoman Turkish, that was widely popular in the Ottoman Empire during the 16th century. This one may conceivably have belonged to a Jewish convert to Islam. Documents 4 and 5 (T-S Ar. 39.435 and T-S NS 306.84), apparently from the mid-18th century, are Ottoman Turkish trade letters documenting large deliveries of firewood, apparently to Cairo’s Mevlevī Sufi lodge. Since Sufi orders were popular channels of conversion to Islam, the lodge may conceivably have incorporated Jewish converts, whose presence may explain how the documents ended up in the Genizah. Document 6 (ENA 3904.13), finally, is the only known example in the Genizah of Sufi poetry in Ottoman Turkish; it combines two poems attributed to a well-known 17th-century wandering Sufi minstrel with a third, dated 1758, by an apparent Janissary officer who belonged to the self-abnegating Melāmī Sufi tradition and who may conceivably have been a Jewish convert to Islam.