The Maghrib and Egypt

chapter 4 THE MAGHRIB AND EGYPT m e n a h e m b e n - s a s s o n and od ed z i ng er INTRODUCTION The Jewish communities of Egypt and North Africa are arguably the best-documented Jewish communities in the medieval Islamic world (with the possible exception of those of Palestine). The riches of the genizot of Cairo and geonic responsa open unparalleled vistas for the study of Jewish life in these regions and attest to the strong links between them. As explored further below, Egypt and North Africa shared a common orientation toward the Mediterranean and were tied by a vibrant maritime and overland trade. In 969, the dynasty that had ruled over the central Maghrib from the beginning of the century conquered Egypt and subsequently proclaimed this victory by establishing its new capital in it (Cairo, Arabic al-Qāhira, “the victorious”). The transfer of the religious, military, and administrative center of the empire from the Maghrib to Egypt constituted another strong connection between the two regions. The combination of these commercial and political ties brought about a substantial migration and settlement of Maghribī Jews to Egypt, a process that further bonded the regions together and proved decisive in shaping their Jewish communities. THE MAGHRIB AS A GEOPOLITICAL UNIT* Derived from the word for the West – the setting sun – the Maghrib sits in opposition to the rising sun of the East – the Mashriq or the Levant. The Maghrib refers to the region of North Africa stretching from the southern shores of the Mediterranean to the Atlas Mountains in the south; and from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to Barqa, Libya (ancient Cyrenaica). It includes the regions of Tripolitania, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Partially isolated from the rest of the continent by the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara desert, the inhabitants of the northern parts of the region * This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 2087/18). 127 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 128 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger were the Berbers. Berber and – later – Phoenician and Carthaginian settlements were centered in the Gulf of Tunis (Carthage, Utica, Tunisia) along the North African littoral, between the Pillars of Hercules and the Libyan coast east of ancient Cyrenaica. Roman defeat of Carthage in 206 bce led to the establishment of the province of Africa (Africa Proconsularis), which in turn yielded to Barbarian invasions in the fifth century. Barbarian Vandals established their capital at Carthage in 430 ce, and a century later, the Byzantines defeated the Vandals and ruled the region for 150 years.1 Among the autochthonic elements of the region were Jews who dwelled therein from the Roman period. The population in the far west (for example, in Ceuta) included many refugees – among them Jews – from a ruinous Visigoth civil war that had broken out in Hispania. Arian Christians and Jews alike took refuge in the Maghrib, fleeing forced conversions at the hands of the Visigothic Catholic Church. Arab conquerors took control of the region with the advent of Islam in the mid-seventh century. Islamic conquest of Byzantine-controlled territories of northwest Africa began in 647; conquest of urban areas and the coast was complete by 710: central Libya in the 640s, Tunisia between 670 and 698, Algeria in the 680s, and Morocco by 710. Yet none of these states was strong enough to unify control and to place all the Berber tribes under one rule. Berber tribes were restive under their new overlords and perpetually rebelled against their authority – among the rebels was a Berber queen, Kāhina, mistakenly regarded by some traditions as having had Jewish origins.2 The Maghrib is divided into three regions – West (Maghrib al-Aqsā), _ Central (Maghrib al-Awsat), and East (Maghrib al-Adnā). _ SOURCES AND SCHOLARSHIP Basic data on the history of the Maghrib is found in the historical writing of Muslims on the conquest, the land, and its inhabitants. The place of the Jews in the Muslim reports is rather marginal and rare.3 Archaeological 1 2 3 John D. Fage, ed., The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 2: From c. 500 bc to ad 1050 (Cambridge, 1979), 1–10. Haim Zeev Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1974–81), 1:21–86; for the Kāhina, see ibid., 88–97; Haim Zeev Hirschberg, “Ha-ʻKāhina’ haBerberit,” Tarbiz 26 (1956/57), 370–83; EJIW, s.v. “Kāhina, al-” (Norman A. Stillman). Hirschberg, History of the Jews of North Africa, 87–88; Hady Roger Idris, La Berbérie orientale sous les Zīrīdes, Xe-XIIe siècles, Volume 1 (Algeria, 1962), xxiii, 764–66; Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands (Philadelphia, 1979), xiii; Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634–1099, trans. Ethel Broido (Cambridge, 1992), xiv; Eliyahu Ashtor, History of the Jews in Egypt and Syria under the Rule of the Mamluks, 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 1944), 1:iii–x. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 129 findings of Jewish remnants are even scarcer. However, the riches of the Cairo Genizah compensate for this, particularly for the tenth and eleventh centuries. Indeed, one could refer to the Cairo Genizah as the “Maghribī Genizah found in Cairo.” As we shall see, the Genizah Synagogue became the central gathering place for Maghribīs living or simply sojourning in Egypt. This prominent community was established by migrants in the wake of the relocation of the Fātimid court to Fustāt in the 970s.4 _ _ _ JEWISH-MUSLIM RELATIONS AND JEWISH RELATIONS WITH THE MUSLIM STATE According to tradition, the great Arab conqueror of the Maghrib, ʿUqba b. Nāfiʿ (622–683), invited Jews to settle in the newly founded town of Qayrawān and exempted them from taxes in order to promote its growth and commercial development.5 In later times, Jews were heavily taxed; though in turn they seem to have been protected by Muslim rulers for most of Islamic history. Muslims and Jews had close economic ties, sharing both in commercial and agricultural ventures. The fifties and sixties of the eleventh century were marked by destruction of urban settlements – including Qayrawān – by Bedouins of the Hilāl and Sulaym tribes. The Jewish community was affected as well by these attacks.6 The middle of the twelfth century saw a second major crisis, this one even more traumatic than the earlier depredations of the Bedouin: the rise of the Almohad dynasty (1145–1248), preaching an extreme form of Islam that ignored dhimmī status and demanding either conversion to Islam or exile. Almohad rule stretched from Spain to Ifrīqiya and included Morocco. While the majority converted and few chose to die as martyrs, 4 5 6 S. D. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden, 1966), 279–328; S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley, 1967–93), 1:1–28; Jessica L. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and their Business World (Cambridge, 2016), 12–13, 41, 44–45, 148, 291–94; Menahem Ben-Sasson, “The Cairo Genizah: One Hundred Years of Research,” in Stefan C. Reif and Menahem Ben-Sasson, eds., The Cairo Genizah: A Mosaic of Life (Jerusalem, 1997), 8–10; Menahem Ben-Sasson, “The Jews of Islam in their Formative Era: The Cairo Genizahs – The Findings and Their Impact,” in Yirmiyahu Yovel et al., eds., New Jewish Time: Jewish Culture in a Secular Age [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2008), 223–32; Menahem Ben-Sasson (with Z. Elkin), “Firkovitch and Cairo Genizas” [Hebrew] Peʿamim 90 (2002), 51–95. Hirschberg, History of the Jews of North Africa, 1:144; see note 8 (regarding Fez) and note 9 (regarding the four captives). Roland Oliver, ed., The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 3: From c.1050 to c.1600 (Cambridge, 1977), 241–47. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 130 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger many continued to practice Judaism secretly and remained faithful to Judaism behind closed doors; others preferred to leave the region. Since Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were at the far eastern periphery of their vast empire, we do not have evidence that the Almohads imposed conversion upon the conquered non-Muslim population there as elsewhere. Despite this, the heavy yoke of the Almohads was also felt in the eastern parts of the Maghrib; an anonymous poet mentions the suffering of S ̣urmān, Mesallāta, and Misurāta – all towns in Tripolitania – although he alluded to heavy taxes and_ exile rather than to death or forced conversion.7 A tradition very different from that of Qayrawān concerns the establishment of Fez: Jews, who emigrated from Spain and Ifrīqiya, constituted an important and active segment of the population of Fez from the time of its founding in 789.8 Although the precise number of Jews in medieval Fez is unknown, they must have been quite numerous, as early chronicles reckon their jizya (capitation tax) at 30,000 dinars in the time of the Idrīsids (788–974). After the waning of Almohad rule, Fez regained its economic and social prestige under the Marīnid dynasty (1244–1465) and later. DEMOGRAPHY, ECONOMIC LIFE, AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE The famous legend “The Story of the Four Captives,” referring to the tenth century, describes the migration of four Jewish scholars from Italy to the Islamic Mediterranean world. Three of their names are mentioned: Ḥushiʾel the father of Ḥananel, Moses and his son Enoch, and Shemariah 7 8 Hirschberg, History of the Jews of North Africa, 1:134; Oliver, ed., Cambridge History of Africa, 3:245–48, 339–46. In the context of these forced conversions under the Almohads, one should read Maimonides’ “Epistle on Martyrdom,” showing the way of keeping crypto-Jewish life under the watchful eye of the Almohads. See Menahem Ben-Sasson, “La persécution almohade – mythes et histoire,” in Samuel Trigano, ed., Le monde Sépharade (Paris, 2006), 1:123–38; Menahem Ben-Sasson, “On the Jewish Identity of Forced Converts: A Study of Forced Conversion in the Almohade Period” [Hebrew], Peʿamim 42 (1990), 16–37; Menahem Ben-Sasson, “The Prayer of the Anusim,” in Isaiah M. Gafni and Aviezer Ravitzky, eds., Sanctity of Life and Martyrdom [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1992), 153–66; Menahem Ben-Sasson, “Remembrance and Oblivion of Religious Persecutions: On Sanctifying the Name of God (Qiddush ha-Shem) in Christian and Islamic Countries during the Middle Ages,” in Arnold E. Franklin, Roxani Eleni Margariti, Marina Rustow, and Uriel Simonsohn, eds., Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Medieval and Early Modern Times: A Festschrift in Honor of Mark R. Cohen (Leiden, 2014), 169–94. Hirschberg, History of the Jews of North Africa, 99; Menahem Ben-Sasson, “Mouvement de population et perceptions d’identité – Fès sous les Idrisides et les Zirides,” in Michel Abitbol, ed., Relations judéo-musulmanes au Maroc (Paris, 1997), 47–56. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 131 the father of Elhanan. Other historical materials testify to the redemption of captives in _ the period: Shabbetay Donnolo the physician, and Shabbetay b. Hodayah b. Amittai. Taken captive by sea pirates, the scholars were released in exchange for a substantial ransom paid by the Jewish community of the Maghrib, and they eventually became leaders of that same community.9 The main question raised by this legend is how individuals coming from outside the community came to replace traditional local leaders. This suggests a process whereby intellect and certain functional-courtier qualities began to displace the inherited role of prominent, “pedigreed” families in leadership. Maghribī Jewish communities were primarily urban and pursued a variety of occupations, among which international commerce was predominant. Jewish immigration to the Maghrib dwarfed the autochthonous population that preceded the Arab conquest. Jews were also active in most spheres of the economy outside of government administration.10 The Jewish Maghribī family was marked by distinctive local customs which counteracted several destabilizing forces in daily life. Among these destabilizing forces was the predominance of migrants and sojourners, who brought distinct customs to the community. Yet migrants from Babylonia were encouraged to adopt the customs of local representatives of Babylonian Jewry, which seem to have held sway over the local community as a whole. On the other hand, these varieties in Jewish practice in the Maghrib were not as broad as they were elsewhere; the absence of Karaism within the Maghrib prior to the end of the tenth century is particularly striking, the sole documented exception to this being a Karaite presence in 9 10 For the four captives, see Gerson D. Cohen, “The Story of the Four Captives,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 29 (1960–61), 55–131. See also Abraham Ibn Daud, The Book of Tradition: Sefer ha-Qabbalah, ed. and trans. Gerson D. Cohen (Philadelphia, 1976), 46–48 (Hebrew section), 63–64 (English section); Piergabriele Mancuso, ed. and trans., Shabbatai Donnolo’s Sefer Hakhmoni: Introduction, Critical Text, and Annotated English Translation (Leiden, 2010), 12–13, 224–27. Maurice Eisenbeth, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord: Démographie et onomastique (Algiers, 1936). Research on Qayrawān between 800 and 1057 indicates that a few Jews were artisans, mainly dyers, scribes, and workers in precious metals, while others were involved in moneylending, international commerce, and the slave trade; see Menahem Ben-Sasson, The Emergence of the Local Jewish Community in the Muslim World (Qayrawan 800–1057) [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1996), 54–74; Menahem Ben-Sasson, “A Family at a Time of Transition: A Study of the Encounter between Halakha and History in North Africa with New Evidence on Dunash ben Tamim” [Hebrew], Sefunot 20 (1991), 51–69; on Gabès as an example for midsize community, see Menahem BenSasson, “The Jewish Community of Gabes in the 11th Century,” in Michel Abitbol, ed., Communautés juives des marges sahariennes du Maghreb (Jerusalem, 1982), 264–84. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 132 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger Wargla (Ourgla) noted by Abraham Ibn Daud.11 International commerce was a second destabilizing force. Family networks and Jewish communal institutions alike provided support for individuals who participated in long-distance trade. These communal institutions included the aforementioned local representatives of the Iraqi/Babylonian Jewish leadership.12 However, any investigation into the rise of the local Jewish community must not be limited to ties between it and the Jewish centers, nor to the community’s self-understanding in halakhic terms. Communal institutions fall into two groups: those whose activities were entirely within the realm of the community, including the synagogue, pious foundations (Hebrew, hekdesh; Arabic, waqf), and various charitable institutions; and those whose activities devolved from their connections with the central leadership institutions in Babylonia and the Land of Israel, including the local academy (beit midrash or midrash), the court (beit din), and the “regional” headship (negidut). Although the synagogue was a central institution in communal life, the synagogue itself did not hold sway over the community at large. Rather, it housed other communal structures that did wield authority within the community and through which the synagogue maintained an aura of authority: the beit midrash – which was in the synagogue or next to it – and the beit din. The batei midrash of Qayrawān, Gabès, Sijilmāsa and Fez maintained local traditions of learning eventuating in halakhic treatises produced for their students. These treatises also led to further independence of the local beit midrash and reduced the need for frequent consultations with the Eastern authorities. The beit midrash of Qayrawān took on a position of unique regional importance and channeled both halakhic questions and financial gifts to the Babylonian yeshivot. En route, halakhic questions were revised by the Qayrawānese rabbi Jacob b. Nissim Ibn Shāhīn (late tenth century), giving the regional sage the status of a high 11 12 Abraham Ibn Daud, The Book of Tradition, 68 (Hebrew section), 93 (English section); the Muslims of medieval Wargla were adherents of the Khārijite Ibādī sect, which was _ a Karaite center generally tolerant of Jews. The Jewish community there was apparently (noted as such by Abraham Ibn Daud and Abraham Ibn Ezra – the latter in his commentary to Exodus 12:11). Based on documents from the Genizah, it would appear that the Jews of Wargla were involved in the trans-Saharan trade and that the community was prosperous. On Karaites in Qayrawān and Gabès after the eleventh century, see Ben-Sasson, Emergence, 47–53; Nissim Levi, ed. and trans., Iggeret ha-Mofet: be-Khashrut Baʿale ha-Ḥayyim (= Risālat al-barhān f_ī tadkiyat al-hayawān) le-Rabi Shemuʾel Ibn Gāmaʿ [Arabic and Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2018), 89–98. _ Menahem Ben-Sasson, “Varieties of Inter-communal Relations in the Geonic Period,” in Daniel Frank, ed., The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society and Identity (Leiden, 1997), 17–31. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 133 court for the surrounding communities. Over time, local authorities came to serve as authorities for answering halakhic questions throughout the region, particularly with the ascendancy of Ḥananel b. Ḥushiʾel (c. 981–1053) and Nissim b. Jacob Ibn Shāhīn (987–1062). The beit din, like its counterpart in the yeshivot of the East, controlled many aspects of communal life beyond the judicial. The court’s use of both early and contemporary halakhic sources in making their decisions was a crucial factor in determining the public’s trust or lack of it in the capability of their judges, as well as judges’ willingness to act decisively. Thus, the ability of the Maghribī local community to run its life independently relied heavily upon the level of learning and the judicial authority of the leaders of the local academic and judicial institutions, and the way these were put into practice as they guided the community. The headship of the community – the negidut – was the third pillar of local leadership. It is generally accepted that the title of Head (nagid) was not acquired through official appointment of the Muslim ruler, but rather was an honorary title bestowed by the Jewish centers in Babylonia and the Land of Israel.13 Bestowing this title was a way to influence the person occupying the highest status in the community – due to his connections with the court of the local ruler and his involvement in the affairs of the leadership and the judiciary – to act on behalf of the centers. CONNECTION WITH THE BABYLONIAN CENTER The ties of the local Maghribī communities with the Babylonian center were not merely formal, projecting the subjugation of the former to the latter; they were functional in nature. The arrival of responsa from the sages of Iraq affirmed the supremacy of the center, but those responsa were only generated at the initiative of the communities of the West, who had sent in their questions in the first instance. There was no fixed system of referral, nor was the community bound to accept the conclusions following from the decisions handed down from Babylonia.14 Thus, the 13 14 For an annotated and updated discussion of this topic, see Chapter 13 in this volume; see also note 18; Menahem Ben-Sasson, “The Emergence of the Qayrawan Jewish Community and Its Importance as a Maghrebi Community,” in Norman Golb, ed., Proceedings of the Founding Conference of the Society for Judaeo-Arabic Studies (Amsterdam, 1997); and Menahem Ben-Sasson, “Maghrib/Mashriq Ties from the Ninth to Eleventh Centuries” [Hebrew], Peʿamim 38 (1989), 35–48. Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven, 1998), 150–54; Shraga Abramson, “One Question and Two Answers” [Hebrew], Shenaton ha-Mishpat ha-Ivri: Annual of the Institute for Research in Jewish Law 11/12 (1984–86), 1–40. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 134 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger West retained a modicum of independence – an independence which grew with the waning of Babylonian hegemony. Connections between center and periphery relied not only on the place of the East in the Jewish mindset as the source of the Talmud and rabbinic wisdom generally, but also upon the idea of kelal Yisraʾel – Jewish collectivity – an idea which persisted among the Jews of Islamic lands. These ties were of particular importance to the Jews of Qayrawān. Thus, to have officially proclaimed their independence would not only have constituted a deviation from accepted custom; it would have been an open rejection of certain fundamental, sacred, and concrete elements – that is, the supremacy of the halakhic scholars and judges – that were of direct significance to the inner life of the community. Yet, as has already been mentioned, the central institutions of Maghribī leadership, the beit din and the beit midrash, operated in parallel to their Babylonian counterparts: “It was right and necessary for each small communal entity to take upon itself all those offices and functions which were meant to serve the community as a whole.”15 With this in mind, we may see how leading communities within the intercommunal network, such as Qayrawān and Fez, avoided assuming responsibility for the local communities in their respective orbits. On the contrary, local communities retained independence and a sense of distinctive identity and as the decay of the Babylonian center would give way in the later Middle Ages to regional, local, and communal identities supracommunal relationships faded from view. What remained was a purely ceremonial relationship with the Iraqi center. In contrast, Maghribīs living in Egypt had a vibrant relationship with the yeshiva of the Land of Israel, embracing mutual economic, institutional, and social interests. The economic and political power of the Maghribī trading diaspora in Fustāt was significant; this group might even _ _ in Egypt. Likewise, there was an be regarded as a “Maghribī lobby” additional Maghribī collective in the Land of Israel – composed of Maghribīs who had made their way there for a host of reasons. Some came out of religious devotion or seeking penance; others came as representatives of great commercial houses that had established outposts along the arteries of international trade; still others sought employment as religious functionaries or sought better economic conditions. Given the predominance of the Land of Israel in the study of Hebrew grammar and similar subjects, some may have come to learn. Living in the Land of Israel meant official 15 Yitzhak Baer, “The Foundations and Beginnings of a Jewish Community Structure in the Middle Ages” [Hebrew], Zion 15 (1950), 1. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 135 subordination to the yeshiva of the Land of Israel and its officials. These Maghribī émigrés also served as an informal pipeline for information about the institutions of the Land of Israel to their confrères in Egypt and the Maghrib; this information also helped Maghribīs decide how much financial support to give institutions in the Land of Israel. For example, a report was circulated about the disappearance of sixty dinars sent from Ifrīqiya to the Land of Israel, for which the Head of the yeshiva was called to account.16 Some of these Maghribī Jews also rose to positions of control and leadership among the communities of the Land of Israel.17 However, one position seemed to be closed to them: the headship of the yeshiva of the Land of Israel. Until the end of the tenth century, this office was the sole province of members of three “Israeli” families; although toward the end of the tenth century, a few Maghribīs managed to buck this trend. The appointment of Maghribīs to key positions in the central institutions of the Land of Israel was the culmination of efforts of three groups of Maghribī Jews: those living in the Maghrib, those in Egypt, and those in the Land of Israel. These groups worked in tandem to bring about the appointment of persons preferred by the Maghribīs. These efforts were not always successful; in a controversy concerning the office of the gaon at the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh centuries, members of a priestly Maghribī family from Sijilmāsa challenged the gaonate of Samuel b. Joseph ha-Kohen, a member of a priestly family of the Land of Israel. But despite their failure on this particular occasion, not long afterward members of this Maghribī family filled senior leadership roles in the yeshiva.18 16 17 18 Arthur E. Cowley, “Bodleian Geniza Fragments,” Jewish Quarterly Review 19 (1907), 255–57; Moshe Gil, Palestine during the First Muslim Period (634–1099), 3 vols. [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1983), 2:605–7. Menahem Ben-Sasson, “The Jews of the Maghreb and Their Relations with Eretz Israel in the Ninth through Eleventh Centuries” [Hebrew], Shalem 5 (1987), 31–82. Joseph b. Menahem ha-Kohen Sijilmassi presided as av bet din (president of the rabbinical court) during the first quarter of the eleventh century, and his son Solomon was appointed gaon in 1025. Solomon ha-Kohen the Maghribī appointed Solomon b. Judah Fāsī as gaon. The latter relates in a document that when the previous gaon decided to appoint him president of the court, some people tried to challenge his promotion, arguing that he did not belong to one of the families worthy of the appointment. This argument was repeated in another context, in a description of how the Maghribīs gained control of positions and offices in Egypt and the Land of Israel. When Solomon b. Judah fell into disfavor after nearly fifteen years in office, it was precisely the Maghrībīs living in Egypt and their associates who were involved in an attempt to replace him with Nathan b. Abraham. They pressed for Nathan’s appointment and, according to members of Solomon’s party, Nathan arrived in Egypt from the Maghrib with letters of support from the Maghribī leadership recommending his Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 136 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger Political intervention did not always take the same form, and not all Maghribīs were of one camp. However, Maghribīs seem to have agreed to endorse candidates who were themselves from the Maghrib or who were educated in the Maghrib. Egyptian Maghribīs lobbied local Muslim officials for their ends; and the nagid in the Maghrib itself played an important role in influencing the opinion both of Fātimid officials in Egypt and the _ bore significant influence and Maghribī community as a whole. The nagid by extension his local community had the most sway over the appointment to the headship of the yeshiva of the Land of Israel, despite the fact that he was physically farther away than the other groups of Maghribīs in the Land of Israel itself or in Egypt. The power of the nagid was due at least in part to his control over financial gifts from the Diaspora to the Land of Israel, although he also had influence over Muslim state officials. The appointment of a Maghribī candidate meant that other posts would also be given to allies of the new gaon.19 THE MAGHRIBĪ INTERCOMMUNAL FRAMEWORK Maghribī communities were attractive to their Eastern counterparts for three reasons: their affluence from an intensive involvement in international commerce; their growth owing to immigration; and, finally, the power individual Jews in the West had gained by finding their way to the courts of Muslim rulers. The influence of these individuals allowed them to play key roles both in the activities of their own communities and in international Jewish politics. While in the East leadership was largely determined by pedigree, Maghribī communities selected their leaders based on their skill.20 With 19 20 appointment as gaon of the yeshiva of the Land of Israel. Both sides in this affair tried to mobilize the support of the most prominent Jew in the Maghrib – the nagid who resided in North Africa (on the office of the nagid, see note 13), asking him to make public his position on the appointment of a gaon for the yeshiva. The appointment of Daniel b. Azariah was likewise not devoid of controversy. In this case, too, Maghribīs living in Egypt were enlisted to help him obtain the post. During the 1080s, when David b. Daniel sought the office of Chief of the Jews, the Maghribīs in Egypt and Jerusalem came to his aid. Those in North Africa were not involved, as at the time they were busy restoring their own communities after the great sack of cities to which the Maghrib had been subject in that decade. Such was the case soon after the appointment of Solomon b. Judah, Daniel b. Azariah, and David b. Daniel to the office of Head of the yeshiva; Ben-Sasson, “The Jews of the Maghreb.” See also Menahem Ben-Sasson, “The Gaonate of R. Samuel b. Joseph haKohen Which Was ‘Like a Bath of Boiling Water’” [Hebrew], Zion 51 (1986), 379–409. See Chapter 13 in this volume; see also Menahem Ben-Sasson, “Intercommunal Relations and Regional Organization in the Maghreb in the 9th to the 11th Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 137 no local tradition of sacred authority, communities in the West were able to define their own developing, basic needs. For the Eastern centers, the problem was clear: how to maintain tight bonds with the Maghribīs. Knowing the needs of the Western communities for responsa, books, and commercial contacts, the geonim employed existing intercommunal ties to develop their influence in the Maghrib. As leaders, they were not unique in combining economic ties with politico-religious aims. Caliphs also used merchants on the East-West caravan route – as well as those who went to India – to deliver their messages and propaganda. Economic ties among Jews facilitated the delivery of mail, halakhic questions and responsa, new books, and money. In order to develop contacts with the Western communities, which lay outside the formal reshuyot, the Eastern centers took several initiatives: 1. They bestowed honorary titles upon the regional leaders. Traditionally, such honorifics as Rosh Kallah, Rosh Seder, Aluf, Ḥaver be-Sanhedra Rabbah, and Nagid belonged exclusively to the world of the sacred centers.21 2. They composed books and dedicated them to regional leaders. 3. They encouraged regional leaders to build a local network, over and above the existing commercial network, for the collection of funds and the delivery of responsa. In the Maghrib, we may properly speak of “intercommunal” relationships which did not rely on subordination to a center, but rather operated on a voluntary basis; the Maghribī intercommunal network served the sacred centers for a long time without being part of a supra-communal system. Even when the centers weakened during the second half of the eleventh century, the leaders of the intercommunal regional networks did not attempt to claim sacred authority – that remained, in the final analysis, the prerogative of the geonim and the exilarchs. CHALLENGES TO COMMUNAL UNITY: ITALIAN AND SICILIAN IMMIGRANTS TO THE MAGHRIB One challenge to local authorities was the influx of Italian Jewish refugees, known in North Africa as early as the tenth century. A resonance of their 21 Centuries” [Hebrew], Peʿamim 18 (1984), 3–37; Ben-Sasson, “Varieties of Intercommunal Relations in the Geonic Period.” Menahem Ben-Sasson, “Senior Nominations: Positions, Titles and Ceremonies in Jewish Communities in the Mediterranean Basin in the Middle Ages,” in Aharon Barak, Karin Karmit-Yefet, and Elyakim Rubenstein, eds., The Turkel Festschrift: Studies in Theory, Philosophy and the Law [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2020), 215–38. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 138 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger influence is apparent in the aforementioned “Story of the Four Captives.” Some Italians who found their way to the communities of Tunisia were indeed captives redeemed by the community, and others had chosen to migrate to Ifrīqiya thanks to favorable economic and security conditions at a time of trouble in southern Italy.22 In fact, an early eleventh-century document suggests that the second nagid of Qayrawān, Jacob b. Amram, had personal and perhaps familial connections to Jews in Italy, since funds raised partially in Italy and earmarked for the Land of Israel were deposited with a “Roman” relative of the nagid.23 Local communal organizations had to respond to problems presented on various levels by those immigrants, ranging from redemption of captives to supporting the needy, payment of the poll tax, and the purchase of food. Migration from Italy to Ifrīqiya should be seen as part and parcel of a general migratory trend to the region. Connections between the Maghrib and Italy therefore cut across at least three domains: members of each community dwelled in the lands of the other; they had shared conceptions of what communal institutions should hold sway; and each region’s own institutions worked with those of the other. At the same time, migrants from Italy in the Maghrib and vice versa were a source of tension. The author of Megillat Ahimaaz describes his ancestors – who were community leaders – as wonder workers, and describes at length how they revived the dead, how they transported themselves magically from place to place, and how they calmed stormy seas and repelled enemies. Yet a responsum of Hayya Gaʾon directed to the community of Qayrawān, dated some forty years earlier and containing similar vignettes of the miraculous powers of Italian migrants, is clearly meant to convince the community that the tradition was false. Indeed, the people of Qayrawān asked more than once about miracles – including how they might perform the same wonders in their own time. Yet despite their differences, Italian immigrants were able to influence the Maghribīs in matters of faith, doctrine, and the character of Jewish communal leadership. 22 23 See Chapter 6 in this volume; see also Menahem Ben-Sasson, “Italy and Ifriqiyya from the 9th to the 11th Centuries,” in Jean-Louis Miege, ed., Les relations intercommunautaires juives en Méditerranée et en Europe occidentale (Paris, 1984), 34–50; Menahem Ben-Sasson, The Jews of Sicily, 825–1068: Documents and Sources [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1991). Jacob Mann, “Addenda to The Responsa of the Babylonian Geonim as a Source of Jewish History,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. VII–X, Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 11 (1920/21), 454–56; Moshe Gil, In the Kingdom of Ishmael, 4 vols. [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1997), 2:348–50. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 139 Scholars – not merchants – from the “Land of Edom” presented challenges to the leadership in Ifrīqiya in the realm of halakhah and custom just as popular legends had affected Maghribī faith and doctrine. At times, the Italian approach won out over the traditional local one. In the academy of Qayrawān, as in other Maghribī academies, the tradition of the halakhist rather than that of the wonder worker prevailed, although immigrants would come to take over leadership of the local academy. This trend was reversed when a local scholar, the aforementioned Nissim b. Jacob Ibn Shāhīn, inherited the position of his Italian teachers. During the first half of the eleventh century, the rulings of the academy of Qayrawān were considered authoritative both locally and by Maghribī Jews throughout the Mediterranean. The hegemony of this academy rested on its tradition of intensive study, although the heyday of Qayrawān was followed by a period of decline in the 1040s and eventual destruction by the Banū Hilāl and Sulaym in the fifties and sixties of that century. We may turn to Italian thinkers at this point for their attitude toward the academic traditions of the Maghrib. A question concerning animal slaughter was addressed by the rabbis of Siponto to various authorities, but they received no answer: A few scholars were present in that beit midrash . . . Some of them declared it kosher, and others unfit to eat . . . No one was to be found . . . who would either permit or forbid it, until they found the responsum of Rabbenu Ḥananel b. Ḥushiʾel of blessed memory and those of Rabbenu Nissim Gaʾon, of blessed memory.24 These words suggest not only that the sources summarized in Ifrīqiya were considered normative in Italy, but also that the jurisdiction of the last generation of halakhists active in the academy of Qayrawān – one an immigrant from Italy, the other native-born – extended there. Italian rabbis of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries continued this tradition. The lexicon of Rabbi Nathan b. Jehiel of Rome, entitled Sefer he-ʿArukh, was a compilation of the teachings of the geonim that drew heavily on the works of Rabbenu Ḥananel and Rabbenu Nissim. Shortly after it appeared, this lexicon was supplemented by a halakhist from the city of Gabès (Qābis), Samuel Ibn Jāmaʿ. Among the other Italians influenced by the doctrine of the geonim as received by the scholars of Qayrawān were Isaiah di Trani the Elder (c. 1180–1250) and Zedekiah b. Abraham ʿAnav. In short, the characteristics and traditions of refugees competed on equal grounds with those of the denizens in their places of refuge. That competition led to the creation of a new, synthetic cultural 24 Adolf Neubauer, “Devarim ʿAtiqim me-Oxford” [Hebrew], ha-Magid 17 (1874), 41. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 140 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger tradition, which in subsequent generations became the core of a tradition common to the Mediterranean Basin, with roots in both Italy and the Maghrib. In time, that cultural synthesis would come to shape the way of life of the medieval Jewish community. EGYPT* The Fātimid conquest of Egypt in 969 and the transfer of their adminis_ trative center there from Ifrīqiya transformed Egypt from an autonomous province to the center of a new, prosperous, and generally well-managed empire.25 Capitalizing on the geographic position of Egypt at the nexus of the Mediterranean, the Nile and the Red Sea, the empire became a hub connecting North Africa, Nubia, Syria and Palestine, and India (via Yemen). With the founding of Cairo, the Fātimids created one of the _ major centers of Islamic life and culture that outlived their own rule. The Jews of Egypt were profoundly affected by this transformation. While they never regained the wealth and prominence they enjoyed before the Kitos War – the Diaspora Rebellion of 115–17 ce – there was a continuous Jewish presence in Egypt from late antiquity onward. The evidence for Jews in late antique Egypt is not abundant, but it is clear that the largest Jewish center was in Alexandria and that Egyptian Jews maintained a marked Palestinian orientation.26 Information on the Jews of Egypt under Muslim rule up to the Fātimid conquest is similarly scant. Arabic literary works rarely mention Jews_ and are more concerned with the Christians who constituted the majority of the Egyptian population.27 * This study was supported by the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University. Oded Zinger would like to thank Amir Ashur, Moshe Yagur, Menahem Ben-Sasson, and the editor of this volume, Phillip I. Lieberman, for their helpful comments on an early draft. 25 A convenient guide to the Fātimid Empire is Paul E. Walker, Exploring an Islamic Empire: Fatimid History and Its_ Sources (London, 2002). See also Michael Brett, The Fatimid Empire (Edinburgh, 2017). 26 Roger S. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1993), 275–78; Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore, 1997), 91–127; Guy Stroumsa, “Jewish Survival in Late Antique Alexandria,” in Robert Bonfil et al., eds., Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures (Leiden, 2012), 257–70; Tal Ilan, “The Jewish Community in Egypt before and after 117 ce in Light of Old and New Papyri”, in Yair Furstenberg, ed., Jewish and Christian Communal Identities in the Roman World (Leiden, 2016), 216; Colette Sirat et al., La Ketouba de Cologne: Un contrat de mariage juif à Antinoopolis (Opladen, 1986). 27 See, for example, Hussein Omar, “‘The Crinkly-Haired People of the Black Earth’: Examining Egyptian Identities in Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s Futūh,” in Philip Wood, ed., _ 149–67. History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East (Oxford, 2013), Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 141 A famous account of the Islamic conquest of Egypt reports that when the Arabs conquered Alexandria in 642, they found there some 40,000 Jews, but this number is clearly an exaggeration.28 Even though our information on Egyptian Jewry before the Fātimid period is scarce, the fact that both _ Israeli (c. 855–955) and the polymath the Neoplatonist philosopher Isaac Seʿadyah Gaʾon (882–942) spent the first decades of their lives in Egypt and wrote their first works there shows that substantial Jewish and general education was available.29 Indeed, Seʿadyah was born in Dīlās, a small _ town east of the Fayyūm Oasis, which suggests that at least preliminary educational opportunities were available even outside Alexandria and the Delta. Tellingly, however, both scholars left Egypt to greener intellectual pastures – Isaac to Qayrawān and Seʿadyah to Palestine and later Iraq. A century later, under the Fātimids and later under the Ayyūbids, this _ scholarly outflow would be reversed as Jewish scholars – most famous among them Moses Maimonides – would come from both East and West to settle in Egypt with its then-stable and prosperous Jewish community. Papyri (as broadly defined by papyrologists) are the most important source for the history of Egyptian Jews before the Fātimid period.30 Particularly promising are papyri written in Arabic script, _only a fraction of which have been published and studied, and thus we may expect new material relating to Jews to be identified in the future.31 At the moment, what we can learn about Jews from the papyri is limited because it is not clear to what extent Jews had distinct onomastic practices and the evidence that refers explicitly to Jews (Arabic, yahūdī, for example) is rather meager and scattered. However, as noted perceptively by Petra Sijpesteijn, the 28 29 30 31 Another report has 70,000 Jews fleeing Alexandria when it was captured by the Muslims: see Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, Futūh Misr, ed. Charles C. Torrey (New Haven, _ _ 1922), 82. On Israeli, see Alexander Altmann and Samuel M. Stern, Isaac Israeli: A Neoplatonic Philosopher of the Early Tenth Century, with a new foreword by Alfred Ivry (Chicago, 2009). On Seʿadyah Gaʾon, see Robert Brody, Saʿadyah Gaon (Oxford, 2013). Colette Sirat catalogs fragments in the Hebrew alphabet from the third to tenth centuries in her Les Papyrus en caractères hébraïques trouvés en Égypte (Paris, 1985). In their “Judeo-Arabic Papyri: Collected, Edited, Translated and Analysed,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 9 (1987), 87–160, Joshua Blau and Simon Hopkins published Judeo-Arabic documentary papyri in full. This preliminary study led to a more broadly conceived study, the first volume of which was recently published as Joshua Blau and Simon Hopkins, Early Judaeo-Arabic in Phonetic Spelling: Texts from the End of the First Millennium [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2017). This volume includes texts dealing with the Bible (glossaries, translations, exegesis, etc.), while the next volume will deal with texts not related to the Bible, including documentary material. On Arabic papyri, see Petra M. Sijpesteijn, “Arabic Papyri and Islamic Egypt” in Roger S. Bagnall, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology (Oxford, 2009), 452–72. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 142 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger relative rarity of people labeled as “Jewish” does not indicate absence of Jews from early Islamic Egypt so much as reflect concerns other than religious identity. In the first two centuries after the Islamic conquests, the major division in Egyptian society was between rulers and ruled (expressed often as Arabs versus Egyptians, or soldiers versus peasants). It is in the ninth century, with the continued migration of Arabs deeper into the Egyptian countryside, increased conversion of the local population to Islam, and the arrival of Persian-Turkish military elite that replaced the older ruling Arab elite, that religious and ethnic identities come to the fore in the documents.32 However, even this earlier material is highly suggestive. For example, two eighth-century letters from a traveling Jew to a stationary Jew deal with the maintenance of the writer’s family left behind and the moral character of the addressee’s son-in-law.33 A papyrus from 761–62 records the sale of a mule by a Jewish family through a non-Jewish document.34 A prison register apparently from 806 records the successful petition of a Jew for release from debt imprisonment, the result of forty dinars owed to another Jew.35 Despite their dispersion, these documents shed light on crucial issues ranging from Jewish adoption of Arabic language and epistolary formulas, the definition of what constitutes moral character, to Jewish use of Muslim legal and state institutions. As the field of Arabic papyrology is currently undergoing a revival, we may expect substantial advances in our knowledge of Egyptian Jews in the pre-Fātimid period.36 _ 32 33 34 35 36 This is the argument developed in Petra M. Sijpesteijn, “Visible Identities: In Search of Egypt’s Jews in Early Islamic Egypt,” in Alison Salvesen, Sarah Pearce, and Miriam Frenkel, eds., Israel in Egypt: The Land of Egypt as Concept and Reality for Jews in Antiquity and the Early Medieval Period (Leiden, 2020), 424–40. This study also surveys the known mentions of Jews in Arabic papyri. I am grateful to Sijpesteijn for sharing with me her study before its publication. See also Omar, “‘The Crinkly-Haired People.’” Werner Diem, Vier Studien zu arabischen Dokumenten des 8.-14. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 2018), 1–16, with references to earlier studies by Karl Jahn, Giorgio Levi della Vida, and Simon Hopkins. Alia Hanafi, “Two Unpublished Paper Documents and a Papyrus,” in Petra J. Sijpesteijn and Lennart Sundelin, eds., Papyrology and the History of Early Islamic Egypt (Leiden, 2004), 56–60. Mathieu Tillier and Naïm Vanthieghem, “Un registre carcéral de la Fustāt abbasside,” _ Islamic Law and Society 25 (2018), 323 and 325. Notice the editors’ comment at 343n25 that this record constitutes the first documentary attestation for Jews residing outside the ancient settlement of Babylon; see also Wladyslaw B. Kubiak, al-Fustat: Its Foundation and Early Urban Development (Cairo, 1987), 84. The indispensable tool for searching Arabic papyrology is the Arabic Papyrology Database (www.apd.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/apd/project.jsp). For navigating the papyri collections and editions, the Checklist of Arabic Documents is essential (www.naherosten.lmu.de/isapchecklist). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 143 The scarcity of sources disappears at the point where the documents of the Cairo Genizah begin to appear. The Genizah includes a small number of documents dated to the ninth century, a growing trickle from the tenth century, and then a deluge for the eleventh, twelfth, and the first half of the thirteenth centuries.37 The corpus is estimated at about 40,000 documentary fragments (as opposed to around 360,000 literary items, though there is substantial overlap). Scholars are still far from cataloging and mapping adequately the documentary Genizah, let alone exhausting its riches.38 Another valuable source for the study of Egyptian Jewry are the responsa of Egyptian rabbis, most importantly Moses Maimonides and his son Abraham.39 As the majority of these responsa have been preserved outside the Genizah, they provide an important “control” over the evidence from 37 38 39 Two previous overviews of the Jews of Egypt mention a Genizah fragment dated to 750; see Norman A. Stillman, “The Non-Muslim Communities: The Jewish Community,” in Carl F. Petry, ed., The Cambridge History of Egypt (Cambridge, 1998), 199; and EJIW, s.v. “Egypt” (Elinoar Bareket and Racheline Barda). This fragment is CUL T-S 16.67, published in Israel Abrahams, “An Eighth-Century Genizah Document,” Jewish Quarterly Review 17 (1905), 426–30. However, Abrahams’ date of 750 is due to a scribal omission of “three hundred” from the dating formula, as has already been convincingly argued in Jacob L. Teicher, “The Oldest Dated Document in the Genizah?” Journal of Jewish Studies 1, 3 (1949), 156–58. For a survey of the oldest dated documents in the Genizah, see Simon Hopkins, “The Oldest Dated Document in the Geniza?” in Shelomo Morag, Issachar Ben-Ami, and Norman Stillman, eds., Studies in Judaism and Islam Presented to Shelomo Dov Goitein (Jerusalem, 1981), 83–98. The aforementioned second volume of Blau and Hopkins, Early Judaeo-Arabic in Phonetic Spelling, promises to provide an updated survey and study of this early material. For the most recent estimate, see Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton, 2020), 2, 7, 451, 453. By “the Cairo Genizah,” I am referring to the Genizah found in and around the Ben Ezra Synagogue; on this, see Phyllis Lambert, ed., Fortifications and the Synagogue: The Fortress of Babylon and the Ben Ezra Synagogue, Cairo (Montreal, 1994). The Genizah that makes up a substantial part of the Second Firkovitch Collection at the National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg, was probably found in the Karaite Dār Simhah Synagogue in Cairo. This Genizah contained _ documentary material is mostly from a later much less documentary material and its period. For the different genizot of Cairo and what “the Cairo Genizah” may have been, see Haggai Ben-Shammai, “Is ‘The Cairo Genizah’ a Proper Name or a Generic Noun? On the Relationship between the Genizot of the Ben Ezra and Dār Simha Synagogues,” _ in Ben Outhwaite and Siam Bhayro, eds., “From a Sacred Source”: Genizah Studies in Honour of Professor Stefan C. Reif (Leiden, 2010), 43–52; and Rebecca J. W. Jefferson, “Deconstructing ‘the Cairo Genizah’: A Fresh Look at Genizah Manuscript Discoveries in Cairo before 1897,” Jewish Quarterly Review 108 (2018), 422–48. See also Chapter 1 in this volume. Moses Maimonides, Responsa, ed. Joshua Blau, 3 vols. [Hebrew] (fourth edition, Jerusalem, 2014); and Abraham Maimonides, Responsa, ed. Abraham H. Freimann, trans. S. D. Goitein [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1937). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 144 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger 40 the Genizah. S. D. Goitein’s magnum opus, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, is the most comprehensive study of Genizah documents and Egyptian Jewry. Indeed, it is widely regarded as one of the great works of historical scholarship and imagination of the twentieth century. Yet despite its undisputable significance, it is important to note that A Mediterranean Society is a synchronic synthesis rather than a diachronic study and as such it does not provide a narrative history of Egyptian Jews. While this lacuna has partially been filled by the work of Elinoar Bareket and Mark R. Cohen for the eleventh century, we are still waiting for a diachronic study of the twelfth and the first half of the thirteenth centuries.41 While one might debate whether “the Jewish Communities of the Arab World” formed a distinct society – as implied by the subtitle to Goitein’s work – rather than being embedded in broader Islamic society, there is little doubt that Goitein’s characterization of these communities as “Mediterranean” is correct.42 The life-giving Nile plays an important role in Genizah documents, but Egyptian Jewry was primarily oriented toward 40 41 42 Another source, still far from exhaustion, are Arabic literary works mostly from the Mamlūk period which occasionally mention Jews. See, for example, Amir Mazor, “Jewish Court Physicians in the Mamluk Sultanate during the First Half of the 8th/ 14th Century,” Medieval Encounters 20 (2014), 38–65; and Nathan Hofer, “The Ideology of Decline and the Jews of Ayyubid and Mamluk Syria,” in Stephan Conermann, ed., Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Middle Islamic Period: Jews in the Ayyubid and Mamluk Sultanates (1171–1517) (Bonn, 2017), 113–20. Mark R. Cohen, Jewish Self-government in Medieval Egypt: The Origins of the Office of Head of the Jews, ca. 1065–1126 (Princeton, 1980); and Elinoar Bareket, Fustat on the Nile: The Jewish Elite in Medieval Egypt (Leiden, 1999). This is true for political history as well as economic history, where the works of Moshe Gil and Jessica Goldberg deal with the eleventh century, but not with the twelfth century; see Moshe Gil, Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages, trans. David Strassler (Leiden, 2004); and Jessica L. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and Their Business World (Cambridge, 2012). The recently published documents regarding the India trade are mostly from the twelfth century; see S. D. Goitein and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (‘India Book’) (Leiden, 2008). These documents offer a great wealth of material for historical inquiry. For two wonderful initial forays in this area, see Roxani Eleni Margariti, Aden & the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill, 2007); and Elizabeth Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Cambridge, 2018). The title A Mediterranean Society suggests that “the Jewish Communities of the Arab World” formed a distinct society within the Mediterranean. However, in various places Goitein writes of “Mediterranean Society” or “The Mediterranean Mind” as a coherent broader unit; see, for example, Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:70 (“The Geniza People as Representative of Mediterranean Society”). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 145 the Mediterranean. Goitein famously collected a list of 450 professions mentioned in the Genizah, which shows the diverse economic base of Egyptian Jewry. But it was the merchants plying the Mediterranean and later the Indian Ocean that he believed not only served as the economic mainstay of the Jewish communities, but also constituted their political and religious leadership. Indeed, Goitein saw them as representative of the middle class that was for him the bearer of Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages and played a decisive role in formulating the spirit of Islam.44 Jessica Goldberg has recently emphasized that these merchants were also heavily involved in securing raw material deep in the Nile Delta, but the destination for trade – as shown by the marvelous maps she has prepared – was mostly the Islamic Mediterranean.45 Conducted mostly through various forms of partnerships and “friendships,” Jewish merchants specialized in a broad variety of commodities, including finished textiles and their raw material, dyeing material, spices and aromatics, metals (often copper and tin), olive oil and its products, paper and books, and coins.46 Most of the trade was conducted from Fustāt through Alexandria, Rashīd, and Tinnīs to the ports of Tunisia, _ _ and Syria-Palestine. Even with the growing prominence of the Sicily, Indian Ocean trade in the twelfth century conducted through Qūs, _ ʿAydhāb, and ʿAden, this trade was deeply connected with the 43 43 44 45 46 The seasons of Mediterranean navigation are far more present in Genizah correspondence than the Nile’s cyclical inundations. For this tension between the Mediterranean and the Nile among the Jews of Egypt in the modern period, see Aimée Israel-Pelletier, On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt (Bloomington, 2018). S. D. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden, 1966), 217–54, esp. 243. Closely associated with the merchants, and like them often combining positions of government employment and communal leadership, were the physicians, whom Goitein viewed as “the torchbearers of secular erudition, the professional expounders of philosophy and the sciences . . . disciples of the Greeks, heirs to a universal tradition, a spiritual brotherhood which transcended the barriers of religion, language and countries,” A Mediterranean Society, 2:241. See now Amir Mazor and Efraim Lev, “Dynasties of Jewish Physicians in the Fatimid and Ayyubid Periods,” Hebrew Union College Annual 89 (2018), 221–60; and Paulina B. Lewicka, “Healer, Scholar, Conspirator: The Jewish Physician in the Arabic-Islamic Discourse of the Mamluk Period,” in Stephan Conermann, ed., Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Middle Islamic Period: Jews in the Ayyubid and Mamluk Sultanates (1171–1517) (Bonn, 2017), 121–43. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions, 101–4, and the maps in 301–2. See also A. L. Udovitch, “International Trade and the Medieval Egyptian Countryside,” Proceedings of the British Academy 96 (1999), 267–85. For the different ways to conduct business, see Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman, The Business of Identity: Jews, Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt (Palo Alto, 2014). For the different commodities, see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:153–54. For a landmark study on the Jewish merchants, see Goldberg, Trade and Institutions. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 146 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger Mediterranean trade, as can be seen in the careers of merchants like Joseph Lebdī and Ḥalfon b. Nethanel.47 Alongside this international trade, the Genizah contains much information that awaits close analysis on local industries and, of course, local consumption.48 The total number of the Jews of Egypt in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is estimated to be between 10,000 and 15,000. This makes Egypt one of the largest centers for Jews in the medieval Islamic world, second probably only to Iraq and al-Andalus. The center of Jewish life in Egypt was Fustāt, which in the mid-twelfth century contained between 3,600 and _ _ 49 The famine, earthquake, and epidemic of 1200–1202, which 7,000 Jews. were followed by subsequent epidemics in 1216 and 1235–36, led to a substantial decline in the Egyptian Jewish population.50 The population recovered only with the renewed immigration of Jews from Iberia and the prosperity of the early Ottoman period. The Mediterranean orientation and cosmopolitan mix often found in the heart of empires is reflected in the constitution of Egyptian Jewry. At different periods, the native Egyptian Jewish population was supplemented by different waves of migration. The first discernable wave of immigration was Jews from Iraq and Persia.51 The majority of these Jews settled in Egypt before the eleventh century – that is to say, their arrival took place before the Genizah sheds its dazzling light.52 The Iraqis were numerous enough to maintain a separate synagogue in the larger towns, where they completed the reading of the Torah in a single year, as opposed to the 47 48 49 50 51 52 For Lebdī, see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 27–36. For Ḥalfon, see Mordechai Akiva Friedman, Ḥalfon and Judah ha-Levi: The Lives of a Merchant Scholar and a Poet Laureate according to the Cairo Geniza Documents [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2013). For the local industries and the working people, see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:75–147. For consumption, see ibid., 4:105–269. 3,600 is Goitein’s estimate explained in A Mediterranean Society, 2:140. 7,000 is reported by Benjamin of Tudela for Fustāt-Cairo. For various reasons, Goitein’s estimate is _ probably a minimum figure, and _Benjamin of Tudela’s a maximum. Elisha Russ-Fishbane, “Earthquake, Famine, and Plague in Early Thirteenth-Century Egypt: Muslim and Jewish Sources,” in Stephan Conermann, ed., Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Middle Islamic Period: Jews in the Ayyubid and Mamluk Sultanates (1171–1517) (Bonn, 2017), 145–75. The migration of Iraqi Jews to Egypt was part of a much larger migration; see Eliyahu Ashtor, “Un mouvement migratoire au haut Moyen Âge: Migrations de l’Irak vers les pays méditerranéens,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 27 (1972), 185–214. See also Chapter 11 in this volume. Notice that one of the earliest dated documents from the Genizah is a fragment of a ketubbah from Iraq; see Norman Golb, “A Marriage Deed from ‘Warduniā of Baghdad,’” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 43 (1984), 151–56. Also, the building for the synagogue of the Iraqis was bought from the Christians in 882, further demonstrating the early arrival of this community. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 147 53 three-year reading circle followed in the Palestinian tradition. Since the Karaite movement began in Persia and Iraq, it is not surprising to find that many of the Karaites also had their origins in the East.54 The immigrants most prominent in Genizah documents are the Maghribīs, mentioned in the earlier section on the Maghrib. Hailing mostly from towns in what is modern-day Tunisia, in all likelihood they either followed the Fātimid imperial administration and army when it _ drawn to Egypt as it became the heart of a moved to Egypt or were prosperous empire. Following the Seljūq invasion and the onslaught of the Crusaders there was also a wave of refugees and redeemed captives from Palestine and Syria from the seventies of the eleventh century onward. With Almohad persecution of non-Muslims in al-Andalus and the Maghrib in the middle of the twelfth century, Egypt received another wave of refugees from the West.55 In the beginning of the thirteenth century, a wave of French Jews arrived in Egypt.56 Throughout this period, there was also immigration to Egypt from various other regions such as Yemen, Byzantium, Sicily, and Italy that did not fall into recognizable waves.57 With the exception of the Iraqis, these various waves of migration did not lead to the formation of distinct communities or congregations – as would later be the case in Ottoman Egypt. At the same time, Genizah documents certainly attest to tensions between the various groups.58 For instance, autochthonous residents objected when immigrants from Palestine, Spain, and France were appointed to positions of communal 53 54 55 56 57 58 Since we do not have the Genizah of the Iraqi synagogue, it is not clear whether by the eleventh and twelfth centuries it served mostly Jews of Iraqi origin or Jews won over to the Iraqi synagogue service. In any case, its establishment in 882 was probably a response to the needs of recent immigrants from the East. See, for example, the famous Tustarī family, studied in Gil, Jews in Islamic Countries, 269–271 and 663–75. See also Shaul Shaked, “An Early Karaite Document in JudeoPersian” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 41 (1971), 49–58. Moshe Yagur is finalizing a study on Spanish Jews in Egypt titled “The Cautious Beginnings of Sephardi Self-identification: A View from the Cairo Geniza (10th–13th Centuries).” I am grateful to Dr. Yagur for sharing with me his study before its publication. Alexandra Cuffel, “Call and Response: European Jewish Emigration to Egypt and Palestine in the Middle Ages,” Jewish Quarterly Review 90 (1999), 61–102. Many Jews also left Egypt to settle elsewhere, but the nature of the Genizah makes it difficult for us to discern their histories. For Jewish Yemenites in Egypt, see S. D. Goitein, The Yemenites: History, Communal Organization, Spiritual Life [Hebrew], ed. Menahem Ben-Sasson (Jerusalem, 1983), 120–34. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:67 and 167. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 148 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger 59 leadership. When it comes to the relations between the Rabbanite and the Karaite communities, the situation in Egypt was usually characterized by cooperation and mutual assistance, as opposed to their more confrontational relations in Palestine;60 one of the strongest indications for this cooperation are the several marriage agreements for mixed couples that lay out in advance a modus vivendi between the religious requirements of each spouse.61 However, evidence of such cooperation decreases with the decline of the Karaite courtier class (and the Karaite community in general) after the eleventh century, and the efforts of Moses Maimonides to distance Rabbanite Jews from the Karaites.62 The cosmopolitan composition of Jewish communities in medieval Egypt is also reflected in the realm of scholarship. With its Genizah, Egypt provides us with a unique opportunity to observe scenes of Jewish learning that did not otherwise bequeath an enduring legacy in the Jewish intellectual tradition. Egypt never enjoyed the sanctity of Palestine or the scholarly prestige of Iraq – and, with the notable exception of the time of Maimonides, was not considered as a center of learning of the first rank.63 The weakness of Egyptian institutions of learning is at least partially due to 59 60 61 62 63 For an example of the community of al-Mahalla rebelling against an appointed leader _ that we now know to have been of Syrian-Palestinian origin, see Cohen, Jewish Selfgovernment, 322–34. The identity of the leader was pointed out by Shulamit Elizur, Sheʾerit Yosef: The Piyyutim of Rabbi Yosef ha-Levi he-Ḥaver [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1994), _ 16; and Oded Zinger, “Meanderings in the Literary Genizot,” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 8 (2020), 207–12. For the communal strife surrounding the appointment of French immigrants as communal leaders, see Cuffel, “Call and Response,” 73–75; Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “Maimonides Appoints R. Anatoly Muqaddam of Alexandria” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 83 (2015), 135–61; and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “The Nagid, the Nasi and the French Rabbis: A Threat to Abraham Maimonides’ Leadership” [Hebrew], Zion 82 (2017), 193–266. Karaite-Rabbanite relations are currently a controversial topic: see Marina Rustow, “The Qaraites as Sect: The Tyranny of a Construct,” in Sacha Stern, ed., Sects and Sectarianism in Jewish History (Leiden, 2011), 266–88; and Yoram Erder, “The Split between the Rabbanites and the Karaite Communities in the Geonic Period” [Hebrew], Zion 88 (2013), 321–49. Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Ithaca, 2008), 239–65, and especially 243n11 for the geographical spread of these mixed marriages. For Maimonides and the Karaites, see Maimonides, Responsa, #242, 263, 265, 351, 449. This is reflected in the way Israel M. Ta-Shma’s literary history of Talmudic commentary covers Ashkenaz, France, North Africa, Spain, Provence, and Italy, but leaves out Egypt; see his Talmudic Commentary in Europe and North Africa: Literary History, Volume 1: 1000–1200 (Jerusalem, 2000). A chapter on Egypt from Ta-Shma’s nachlass was published in his Studies in Medieval Rabbinic Literature, Volume 4: East and Provence [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2010), 64–84. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 149 Egypt’s allegiance to the Palestinian yeshiva in Jerusalem (on this, see below) that was essentially a political institution rather than an institution of learning like its counterparts in Iraq. Even though it was the supposed destination of one of the four captives from the famous foundation legend found in Abraham Ibn Daʾud’s Sefer ha-Qabbalah,64 Egypt produced very few local scholars of stature and most of the scholars we hear about in the Genizah are of foreign origin.65 Besides the obvious case of Maimonides, other scholars like Judah “ha-Rav” ha-Kohen b. Joseph, Shemariah haKohen b. Nathan, Isaac b. Samuel ha-Sefaradi al-Kanzī, and Joseph b. Jacob Rosh ha-Seder were all of foreign origin.66 These scholars typically composed biblical commentaries, liturgical poetry, sermons, and responsa, and the later ones also engaged in talmudic commentary, usually by commentating on al-Fāsī’s abridgment. Beyond the works of such second-tier scholars, the survival of the lecture notes of disciples in the Genizah offers us a glimpse into Egyptian study halls.67 The well-being of the Jewish communities in the medieval Islamic world depended largely upon securing favorable relations with the state. The Fātimids have long been noted for their relatively favorable treatment _ 64 65 66 67 The Egyptian captive in the story of the four captives was Shemariah b. Elhanan; on him, see EJIW, s.v. “Shemariah ben Elhanan” (Marina Rustow). On his son, _see EJIW, s.v. “Elhanan ben Shemariah” (Elinoar_ Bareket). _ The notable exception is Ḥananel b. Samuel of the Ibn al-Amshātī family, on whom see _ Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 90–120 (with the long presence of the family in Egypt at 94n22, and further bibliography at 112n106). See also Dan Greenberger, Steven B. Bowman, and Nahem Ilan, “From the Quill of Ḥananel ben Shmuel,” Ginzei Qedem _ 13 (2017), 9–23. For Judah, Isaac, and Joseph, see their respective entries in the EJIW. On Shemariah haKohen b. Nathan and his book of sermons, see Rafiq Nahara, “Kitab al-Tuffāha: _ Collection of Judaeo-Arabic Homilies on the Torah, from the End of the 11th or the Beginning of the 12th Century” [Hebrew] (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2016). Perahyah b. Nissim, who wrote several commentaries on al-Fāsī that _ have been published, belonged on his father’s side to the famous Maghribī Ben Yījū family, and on his mother’s side to the equally famous Egyptian Ibn al-Amshātī family; _ often see the genealogical tree in Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 120. A scholar mentioned in this context is Ishmael b. Ḥakmon, who, like Perahyah b. Nissim and _ Ḥiyya b. Isaac b. Samuel, composed commentaries on al-Fāsī. However, doubt has recently been raised whether Ishmael indeed resided in Egypt; see ʿAdiʾel Breuer, “Rabbi Ishmael b. Ḥakmun and the Identification of Segments of His Commentaries to Sukkah, Beitzah, Pesahim and Yevamot” [Hebrew], Yeshurun 35 (2017), 70–86. _ See Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “Notes by a Disciple in Maimonides’ Academy Pertaining to Beliefs and Concepts and Halakha” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 62 (1993), 523–84; Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “Page with Notes of a Disciple of Maimonides Quoting Notes of a Disciple of Ibn Migash” [Hebrew], Ginzei Qedem 15 (2019), 163–78, with further references at 171n52. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 150 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger of the non-Muslim communities of their empire. With the notable exception of al-Ḥākim’s persecutions in the beginning of the eleventh century and the execution of the Head of the Jews, Masliah Gaʾon, in 1139, this _ _ Mamlūk periods, see assessment seems to hold true (on the Ayyūbid and 68 below). Goitein characterized the Egyptian state as maintaining a laissezfaire policy toward the everyday affairs of its subjects. Studying the great mass of state documents preserved in the Genizah through their reuse by Jews, Marina Rustow has challenged this view, arguing for a much more intense involvement of the state in the lives of Jews from all walks of life.69 The state did not just appoint the Head of the Jews (on this office, see below), resting content and allowing him to administer the Jewish communities. There were several other points of contact between Egyptian Jews and the state. Many upper-class Jews served in the administration of the Fātimid state, where they served as an important channel both for the _ communal leadership as well as for regular Jews to the operation and decision-making of the state.70 Middling Jews occasionally served as tax farmers (sing. d āmin, pl. d ummān) for various localities and trades.71 Jews of all classes – _including a_ substantial number of women – made extensive use of Muslim legal venues, whether qād ī courts, government procedures _ or Muslim jurisconsults (muftīs for the redress of wrongs (mazālim courts), _ 68 69 70 71 For al-Ḥākim, see Paul E. Walker, “Al-Ḥākim and the Dhimmīs,” Medieval Encounters 21 (2015), 345–63. For Genizah evidence for his reign, see Gil, A History of Palestine, 376–78 (sec. 572); and Miriam Frenkel, “Adaptive Tactics: The Jewish Communities Facing New Realities,” Medieval Encounters 21 (2015), 380–83. The “Egyptian Scroll” mentioned in these publications has recently been republished in Joseph Yahalom and Naoya Katsumata, The Yotserot of R. Samuel the Third: A Leading Figure in Jerusalem of the 10th Century, 2 vols. [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2014), 2:1007–13. On the murder of the Head of the Jews, see Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “On Judah ha-Levi and the Martyrdom of a Head of the Jews: A Letter by Ḥalfon ha-Levi b. Nethanel,” in Y. Tzvi Langermann and Josef Stern, eds., Adaptations and Innovations: Studies on the Interaction of Jewish and Islamic Thought and Literature from the Early Middle Ages to the Late Twentieth Century Dedicated to Professor Joel L. Kraemer (Louvain, 2007), 92–96. Rustow, The Lost Archive. See also Goldberg, Trade and Institutions, 164–77. Scholars tend to point out the few Jews who reached the very highest echelons of the state, like Ibrāhīm b. Sahl al-Tustarī, or Jews who converted to Islam on the way to the top, like Yaʿqūb Ibn Killis, Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm al-Tustarī, and S ̣adaqa b. Yūsuf al-Fallāhī; _ see Stillman, “The Jewish Community,” 206–7. However, there were dozens of Jews employed in the lower levels of the state bureaucracy. On tax farming in Egypt, see the recent Chris Wickham, “The Power of Property: Land Tenure in Fātimid Egypt,” Journal for the Social and Economic History of the Orient 62 _ The Genizah contains a wealth of information about tax farming (2019), 67–107. (especially about who were the tax farmers) that remains to be sifted through and analyzed. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 151 and their fatwās). A Genizah letter in which a mother updates her son on the recent actions of Ayyūbid sultan al-Kāmil (r. 1218–38) and gives her son valuable advice on how to secure a lower tax rate once he returns to Egypt suggests a high level of familiarity with the workings of the state even among circles in which we might not initially expect it.73 Vertical relationships with the state did not come at the expense of horizontal relationships with Muslims (typically referred to as goy/goyyim in Genizah documents).74 Genizah documents occasionally attest to the existence of anti-Jewish sentiments (Hebrew, sinʾut) among the general population, especially in connection with Alexandria, though coexistence and cooperation are much more commonly attested.75 While certain neighborhoods and streets had a substantial concentration of Jews, none were exclusively Jewish: Jews were not restricted to them nor was there any spatial separation between religious communities. Indeed, examining records of sale of real estate, Goitein showed that Jews, Muslims, and Christians often lived as neighbors in the same residential complex and shared a common courtyard.76 In the economic realm, while Jews generally preferred to cooperate with other Jews, we also hear of partnerships between Jews and Muslims, both in long-distance trade as well as in running of a local workshop.77 Such cooperation could extend to the upper echelons of society, as attested in the Moses Maimonides–Ibn Sanāʾ circle.78 When a thirteenth-century Egyptian Jewish judge instructed his son to appear before the Muslim governor of Jerusalem 72 72 73 74 75 76 78 Marina Rustow, “At the Limits of Communal Autonomy: Jewish Bids for Intervention from the Mamluk State,” Mamluk Studies Review 13 (2009), 133–59; Uriel Simonsohn, A Common Justice: The Legal Allegiances of Christians and Jews under Early Islam (Philadelphia, 2011); Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman, “Legal Pluralism among the Court Records of Medieval Egypt,” Bulletin d’études orientales 63 (2014), 79–112; Oded Zinger, “‘She Aims to Harass Him’: Jewish Women in Muslim Legal Venues in Medieval Egypt,” AJS Review 42 (2018), 159–92. JTS ENA NS I.99, unpublished. This, I think, is a central problem in the relevance of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s thesis to medieval Egypt; see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Servants of Kings and Not Servants of Servants: Some Aspects of the Political History of the Jews (Atlanta, 2005). Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:278–83. It is not clear what made Alexandria into a hotspot for anti-Jewish sentiments. 77 Ibid., 290–93. Ibid., 276 and 293–98. S. D. Goitein, “The Moses Maimonides–Ibn Sanāʾ Circle (A Deathbed Declaration from March 1182),” in Moshe Sharon, ed., Studies in Islamic History and Civilization in Honour of Professor David Ayalon (Jerusalem, 1986), 399–405; and Franz Rosenthal, “Maimonides and a Discussion of Muslim Speculative Theology,” in Mishael Maswari Caspi, ed., Jewish Tradition in the Diaspora: Studies in Memory of Professor Walter J. Fischel (Berkeley, 1981), 109–12. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 152 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger and request a favor, he told him to tell the governor that they are “from his family.”79 While the Genizah contains substantial evidence on Jewish-Muslim relations (much of it still unpublished and under-examined), the general impression is that there is much less evidence on relations with Christians (usually referred to as ʿarel/ʿarelim – “uncircumcised” in Genizah documents).80 This is striking because at least until the thirteenth century, Christians comprised the majority of the Egyptian population.81 This relative silence is explained in part by the fact that Jews were mostly concentrated in the urban centers of the Delta, while Christians were more dominant in Middle and Upper Egypt. Another explanation is that the Jewish community was oriented toward the Muslim state and cultivated relations with prominent Muslim figures, but had less of an incentive to foster such relations with Christians.82 The well-known History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church also only very rarely refers to individual Jews.83 As for the communal structure of Egyptian Jewry: at the beginning of the eleventh century, when the Genizah begins shedding substantial light on communal affairs, Egyptian communities were under the authority of 79 80 81 82 83 Bodl. MS Heb. d 66.57 verso line 13, ed. S. D. Goitein, Palestinian Jewry in Early Islamic and Crusader Times in Light of the Geniza Documents [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1980), 327–32. On the Christians of Egypt, see Maged S. A. Mikhail, From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest (London, 2016); Mark N. Swanson, The Coptic Papacy in Islamic Egypt (641–1517) (Cairo, 2010); Johannes Pahlitzsch, “The Melkites in Fatimid Egypt and Syria (1021–1171),” Medieval Encounters 21 (2015), 485–515; and several of the other articles in this special issue of Medieval Encounters on “Non-Muslim Communities in Fatimid Egypt (10th–12th Centuries ce)”; Marlis J. Saleh, “Government Relations with the Coptic Community in Egypt during the Fātimid Period (358–567/969–1171)” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1995); Stanley H. Skresket, “The Greeks in Medieval Islamic Egypt: A Melkite Dhimmi Community under the Patriarch of Alexandria (640–1095)” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1987). See the discussion in Tamer El-Leithy, “Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo, 1293–1524 a.d.” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2005), 13–65. The majority of Christians in medieval Egypt belonged to the Coptic Church, but there was also a Melkite minority. Jacob Mann described the Christian and Jewish communities as “waging bitter war against each other”: Jacob Mann, The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine under the Fātimid Caliphs, 2 vols. (New York, 1920–22), 1:212. However, Goitein argued that “this generalization is not warranted by our sources”; see A Mediterranean Society, 2:281. For an exceptional mention there of a Jew who converted to Christianity in 1159, see Moshe Yagur, “Religious Identity and Communal Boundaries in Geniza Society (10th– 13th Centuries): Proselytes, Slaves, Apostates” [Hebrew] (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2017), 166–68. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 153 the Palestinian yeshiva in Jerusalem. The Fātimid caliph recognized the heads of the yeshiva (Hebrew, gaʾon, short_ for Rosh Yeshivat Geʾon Yaʿaqov) as the preeminent Jewish leader in his empire; apparently the Fātimids even provided financial support to the yeshiva in the early years of _their rule.84 The authority of the Palestinian yeshiva over the Jews of Egypt included the power to appoint judges for the larger Jewish communities, recognizing local Jewish leaders by bestowing titles, and power to declare the ban.85 For Egyptian communities, in turn, recognizing the authority of the Palestinian yeshiva meant accepting these prerogatives and sending donations to the yeshiva.86 However, the relationship between yeshiva and community was not one of a simple and rigid hierarchy, as the yeshiva in Palestine was dependent on the more prosperous and populous communities of Egypt for financial support and upon the Jewish courtiers at the Fātimid court in Cairo for their entrée to Muslim power.87 _ the Palestinian yeshiva did not have exclusive authority over Furthermore, the Egyptian community because alongside the main Palestinian congregation there were also Iraqi and Karaite congregations in Egypt. The Karaites seem to have been independent from the Palestinian yeshiva, while the Iraqis kept strong ties (i.e., sent donations and received titles) with the yeshivot in Iraq. Up until the 1060s, we see occasional attempts to set up separate Karaite and Babylonian courts; but these attempts seem to have been short-lived.88 84 85 86 87 88 Gil, A History of Palestine, 551–52. Miriam Frenkel has put forward the reasonable argument that the state recognition of the Palestinian yeshiva was a Fātimid innovation; _ see Miriam Frenkel, “Jewish Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Fatimid Period,” in Yitzhak Hen and Iris Shagrir, eds., Ut Videant et Contingant: Essays on Pilgrimage and Sacred Space in Honor of Ora Limor [Hebrew] (Raʿanana, 2011), 137. The basic title bestowed by the Palestinian yeshiva was haver, i.e., a member of the hierarchy of the yeshiva; see Friedman, Ḥalfon and Judah_ ha-Levi, 94–98. Other titles were of the form “beloved of the yeshiva,” “cherished of the yeshiva,” “diadem of the yeshiva,” etc. Often a shortened version of the title became the common way of referring to a person, and thus we find references to “the beloved,” “the cherished,” or “the diadem” in Genizah documents. As the Palestinian yeshiva was not an educational institution like its Babylonian counterparts, the answering of queries was not a significant element of its authority. See Marina Rustow, “The Genizah and Jewish Communal History,” in Ben Outhwaite and Siam Bhayro, eds., “From a Sacred Source”: Genizah Studies in Honour of Professor Stefan C. Reif (Leiden, 2010), 289–318. See also the earlier overview by Mark R. Cohen, “Jewish Communal Organization in Medieval Egypt: Research, Results and Prospects,” Judeo-Arabic Studies 1 (1997), 73–86. Oded Zinger, “A Karaite-Rabbanite Court Session in Mid-Eleventh-Century Egypt,” Ginzei Qedem: Genizah Research Annual 13 (2017), 98*–102*; and Oded Zinger, “Introduction to the Jewish Legal Arena in Medieval Egypt,” in Miriam Frenkel, ed., The Jews in Medieval Egypt (Brookline, MA, forthcoming), 92n19. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 154 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger With the Seljūq conquest of Palestine, the yeshiva migrated to Tyre and eventually to Damascus, outside the control of the Fātimid Empire;89 _ “Head of the amidst these developments, an independent office of the 90 Jews” (Arabic, raʾīs al-yahūd) slowly developed in Egypt. This development was seemingly due to a host of factors, including both intra-Jewish dynamics and a desire on the part of the state that the leader of the Jews be a local figure in the capital of the empire. The Head of the Jews was thus usually a highly placed official in the state administration (often a physician) as well as a recognized Jewish communal leader. The Head of the Jews took over most of the prerogatives of the Palestinian gaon, most importantly appointing judges to the larger towns and local leaders (Arabic, muqaddam) to the smaller communities. This development took place mostly through the efforts of two rival leaders: the Maghribī Mevorakh b. Seʿadyah (r. 1078–82 and 1094–1111) and the son of a Palestinian gaon, David b. Daniel b. Azariah (r. 1082–94). The Head of the Jews was occasionally referred to in Hebrew as nagid (a title earlier attested in North Africa and Spain) – a fact that led to much scholarly confusion – but this title only became standard in the reign of Abraham Maimonides (r. 1204–37), in the beginning of the second decade of the thirteenth century.91 The titles and prerogatives of the Head of the Jews fluctuated during the twelfth century, and only during the Ayyūbid and Mamlūk periods do we have clear and systematic elaborations of the prerogatives of the office in Egypt, and even then they are found only in Muslim sources.92 While the Palestinian gaon had authority only over the 89 90 91 92 For a discussion of the movements of the Palestinian yeshiva, see Chapters 6 and 13 in this volume. The process was explored in depth in Cohen, Jewish Self-government in Medieval Egypt. An alternative narrative developed by Shulamit Sela and Elinoar Bareket has not gained broad acceptance: see Shulamit Sela, “The Head of the Rabbanite, Karaite and Samaritan Jews: On the History of a Title,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 57 (1994), 255–67; and Elinoar Bareket, “The Head of the Jews (Raʾis al-Yahud) in Fatimid Egypt: A Re-evaluation,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 64 (2004), 185–97. Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “A Complaint to the Sultan against Abraham Maimonides” [Hebrew], Zion 81 (2016), 350; and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “New Evidence of the Abolition of Eretz-Israel Prayers and Prayer Rituals in Egypt in Abraham Maimonides’ Times,” in Uri Ehrlich, ed., Jewish Prayer: New Perspectives [Hebrew] (Beer Sheva, 2016), 320. Another source of confusion in the first decades of Genizah research was that one of the holders of the office of the Head of the Jews, Samuel b. Ḥananiah, is commonly referred to in Genizah documents as Samuel ha-Nagid; this led researchers to confuse him with the famous Andalusian poet who bore the same title. Clifford E. Bosworth, “Christian and Jewish Religious Dignitaries in Mamluk Egypt and Syria: Qalqashandi’s Information on Their Hierarchy, Titulature and Appointment Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 155 Palestinian congregation, the new Head of the Jews apparently represented all Jewish communities: Palestinian, Babylonian, and even the Karaite.93 In the twelfth century, a branch of the Palestinian yeshiva settled in Egypt, making Egyptian independence from Palestine complete. As already noted, we still await a comprehensive diachronic study of the Jewish communities of Egypt after the eleventh century.94 Yet it is nonetheless possible to identify a trend of increasing administrative activity, centralization, and professionalization in Jewish communal services in the twelfth century. For example, when we compare pages from notebooks of the Jewish court in Fustāt from the eleventh century to the twelfth century _ _ we find that the later records are more professionally executed in terms of script, layout, and use of legal formulas. Furthermore, while in the earlier notebooks the scribe and the court personnel often change from one session to the next, in the later notebooks they are more consistent, suggesting a more professional and centralized daily practice of the courts.95 The charitable operations of the Jewish community also developed and expanded. For example, the number of documents of the 93 94 95 (II),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 3 (1972), 210–15. See also an Ayyūbid letter of appointment for a Jewish leader in Syria from 1193 in Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge, 1993), 460–66, doc. 121. Though it is likely that there were fluctuations in this regard as well. David b. Daniel b. Azariah was married to a Karaite woman from a wealthy courtier class and thus had strong connections with the Karaites. The Heads of the Jews who followed him did not have such strong ties to the Karaite community and, in any case, the diminished visibility of the Karaite community in twelfth-century sources makes it difficult to know much about the community. See Elinoar Bareket, “Karaite Communities in the Middle East during the Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries,” in Meira Polliack, ed., Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources (Leiden, 2003), 237–52. The only community to have been the subject of such a study is Alexandria; see Miriam Frenkel, “The Compassionate and Benevolent”: The Leading Elite in the Jewish Community of Alexandria in the Middle Ages [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2006). For editions of documents of the pious foundations, see Moshe Gil, Documents of the Jewish Pious Foundations from the Cairo Geniza (Leiden, 1976). Unfortunately, Gil’s study organizes his documents chronologically but provides no diachronic analysis. Fragments of court notebooks from the first half of the eleventh century are published in Elinoar Bareket, “Books of Records of the Jerusalemite Court from the Cairo Geniza in the First Half of the Eleventh Century” [Hebrew], Hebrew Union College Annual 69 (1998), 1–55. The much larger corpus of twelfth-century notebooks has not been studied systematically. For two further studies on court notebooks, see Gideon Libson, “The ʻCourt Memorandumʼ (Mahd ar) in Saadiahʼs Writings and the Genizah and the Muslim Mahd ar” [Hebrew],_ _Ginzei Qedem 5 (2009), 99–163; and Judith Olszowy_ _ archives médiévales dans la genizah du Caire: registres des tribunaux Schlanger, “Les rabbiniques et pratiques d’archivage reconstituées,” Afriques: Débats, méthodes et terrains d’histoire 7 (2016), 1–16. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 156 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger Jewish pious foundations that survived in the Genizah increases sharply during the twelfth century.96 In 1150, the Head of the Jews and the senior judges appointed Isaiah ha-Levi to a new position of a general administrator of the Egyptian pious foundations.97 Around this time we also see new attempts to monitor and regulate the institution of marriage, whether by assuring that the bride was not a minor or that neither spouse was involved in an existing marriage.98 These developments can be viewed as the ripple effects of the earlier consolidation of the office of the Head of the Jews. They may also be connected to the noticeable decrease in Jewish economic activity from the eleventh to the twelfth centuries.99 In other words, with the relative decline of the wealthy Maghribī mercantile elite, the administrative operations of the Jewish community not only grew in size and importance, but were conducted in a more formalistic manner. The culmination of this process (which remains yet to be verified and substantiated) may be seen in the leadership of Moses Maimonides in the last three decades of the twelfth century. Maimonides’ political career in Egypt has received a great deal of attention, but still even the basic questions of what position he held and when remain unclear. We have direct evidence that he was the Head of the Jews around 1171–72 and there are strong indications that he held this office again sometime after 1196 until his death in 1204.100 However, between these two periods we find him deeply involved in communal welfare services, responding to legal queries, upholding bans, and promoting new legislation (Hebrew, 96 97 98 99 100 See the table of contents in Gil, Documents of the Jewish Pious Foundations. Gil, Documents of the Jewish Pious Foundations, doc. 49. Amir Ashur, “Engagement and Betrothal Documents from the Cairo Geniza” [Hebrew], (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2006), 170–76 and 329–35. At 185, Ashur points to the development of the office of the Head of the Jews in Egypt alongside the growth in the India trade as instrumental to the development of the engagement contract in the twelfth century. However, in later work on the subject, Ashur attributes this primarily to the Indian Ocean trade: see Amir Ashur, “The India Trade and the Emergence of the Engagement Contract: A Cairo Geniza Study,” The Medieval Globe 3 (2018), 27–49. The Indian Ocean trade may have been the economic mainstay of the Jews of Egypt in the twelfth century, but it is highly doubtful that it could replace the intensive Mediterranean trade of the eleventh century. In any case, Genizah documents reveal a substantial decrease in Jewish involvement in the Indian Ocean trade in the thirteenth century. For key studies, see Menahem Ben-Sasson, “Maimonides in Egypt: The First Stage,” in Arthur Hyman, ed., Maimonidean Studies II (New York, 1991), 3–30; Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “Maimonides: Rayyis al-Yahud [Head of the Jews] in Egypt,” in Uri Ehrlich, Howard Kreisel, and Daniel J. Lasker, eds., By the Well: Studies in Jewish Philosophy and Halakhic Thought Presented to Gerald J. Blidstein (Beer Sheva, 2008), 413–35; and Friedman, “Maimonides Appoints R. Anatoly.” Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 157 taqqanot). In matters of both legal and communal welfare, Maimonides strove to unify and regulate Egyptian practice and to centralize communal administration. While his methods were certainly innovative (and often at odds with those of his political opponent), their goal and substance seems to fit the trend suggested above for the twelfth century as a whole.102 Maimonides’ style of leadership was continued by his son Abraham, who served as Head of the Jews in Egypt until his death in 1237.103 Alongside leading a pietistic circle engaged in prostrating and kneeling in prayer and in supererogatory ascetic practices such as nightly vigils, fasting, and social seclusion, Abraham strove to reform the customs of the Palestinian synagogue of Fustāt and align it with the Babylonian practice. In this he was trying to unite_ _the diverging customs and claimed he was continuing the legacy of his father.104 After Abraham, some five 101 101 102 103 104 For Maimonides’ involvement in the communal welfare operations, see Menahem BenSasson, “Maimonides, Charity and Pious Foundations” [Hebrew], Zion 84 (2019), 335–87. For Maimonides’ legislation and declaration of bans, see Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “Maimonides, Zuta and the Muqaddams: A Story of Three Bans” [Hebrew], Zion 70 (2005), 473–528. For a recent innovative study of Maimonides’ legislation on women’s menstruation, see Eve Krakowski, “Maimonides’ Menstrual Reform in Egypt,” Jewish Quarterly Review 110 (2020), 245–89. I am grateful to Krakowski for sharing with me her study before its publication. Important evidence in this regard is a taqqanah that has not received much attention from scholars as it was only mentioned in letters en passant. Maimonides seems to have legislated that he alone would answer legal queries; see S. D. Goitein and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, Abraham Ben Yijū: India Trader and Manufacturer (Jerusalem, 2010), 401 and 403. Ben-Sasson, “Maimonides, Charity and Pious Foundations,” 372–74. Much has been written on Abraham Maimonides in recent years; see Elisha RussFishbane, Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt: A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Times (Oxford, 2015); and Paul B. Fenton, “Sufis and Jews in Mamluk Egypt,” in Stephan Conermann, ed., Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Middle Islamic Period: Jews in the Ayyubid and Mamluk Sultanates (1171–1517) (Bonn, 2017), 41–62 (with references to his earlier studies). Mordechai Akiva Friedman dedicated many studies to Abraham Maimonides, his movement, and his reforms. For the three latest ones in Hebrew, see Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “The Appointment of a Prayer Leader and His Dismissal according to Maimonides and His Son Rabbi Avraham,” in Moshe Bar-Asher, Yehuda Liebes, Moshe Assis, and Yosef Kaplan, eds., Benayahu Memorial, Volume 1: Studies in Talmud, Halakhah, Custom and Jewish History (Jerusalem, 2019), 275–327; Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “Pietistic Criticism: Remonstration among Abraham Maimonides’ Devotees” [Hebrew], Teʿuda 30 (2018), 253–85; and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “The Shabbat Evening Prayer in the Palestinian Congregation of Fustat in Abraham Maimonides’ Times” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 85 (2017), 145–99. For two English studies, see Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “Abraham Maimonides on his Leadership, Reforms and Spiritual Imperfections,” Jewish Quarterly Review 104 (2014), 495–512; and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “Abraham Maimuni’s Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 158 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger generations of Maimonides’ descendants occupied the office of the Head of the Jews for the following two centuries – a dynasty combining political and scholarly activity without parallel in Jewish history.105 Maimonides’ own quick (and short-lived) rise to power around 1170–71 must have been related to the equally meteoric (but much longer-lasting) rise of Saladin to power in Egypt at the very same moment. By 1174, Saladin had disposed of the Fātimid caliph; for the next seven decades, _ descendants, the Ayyūbid sultans. The Egypt was ruled by Saladin and his Ayyūbids styled themselves as the restorers and champions of Sunnī orthodoxy and periodically performed this role by proclaiming legislation against non-Muslims. These legislations were mostly regarding distinguishing clothing and appearance (Arabic, ghiyār), higher customs tax rates, and employment restrictions in the state bureaucracy. However, it is difficult to assess the degree and the length of time in which these regulations were enforced and observed.106 We know of many Jews who were employed in the Muslim government under the Ayyūbids, whether as officials or as physicians;107 likewise, evidence for the implementation of the ghiyār is also inconclusive.108 Higher customs rates were imposed but were later retracted causing “no lasting detrimental effect on the economic or social position of the non-Muslims.”109 Scholarly study of non-Muslims in the Ayyūbid period has focused on the reign of Saladin, but without systematic study it is difficult to determine the extent to which events in 105 106 107 109 Prayer Reforms – Continuation or Revision of His Father’s Teachings,” in Carlos Fraenkel, ed., Traditions of Maimonideanism (Leiden, 2009), 139–54. Menahem Ben-Sasson is currently engaged in a long-term study of the Maimonidean dynasty. See, for the time being, his “The Maimonidean Dynasty: Between Conservatism and Revolution,” in Jay M. Harris, ed., Maimonides after 800 Years: Essays on Maimonides and His Influence (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 1–17; “Tradition and Change in the Pattern of Controversy of the Descents of Maimonides,” in Joshua Blau and David Doron, eds., Heritage and Innovation in Medieval JudeoArabic Culture [Hebrew] (Ramat Gan, 2000), 71–94; and “The ‘Libraries’ of the Maimonides Family between Cairo and Aleppo,” in Yom Tov Assis, Miriam Frenkel, and Yaron Harel, eds., Aleppo Studies I [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2009), 51–105. Nathan Hofer points out that in the Mamlūk period such anti-dhimmī legislations were often proclaimed at the start of a ruler’s reign. Thus, they should not be read as indicating permanent state policy but as “formal enunciations of power”; see Hofer, “The Ideology of Decline,” 110n59. This insight, which Hofer attributes to Tamer elLeithy, may apply to the Ayyūbids as well. See also Oded Zinger, “‘One Hour He Is a Christian and the Next He Is a Muslim!’ A Family Dispute from the Cairo Geniza,” alMasāq 31 (2019), 25n30. 108 Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:374. Zinger, “One Hour,” 24–25. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:289. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 159 the beginning of the period represent the Ayyūbid period as a whole.110 While Goitein saw the Ayyūbid period as essentially continuing the generally favorable conditions for Jews under the Fātimids, he also noted _ a “spirit of mounting religious strictness, if not intolerance” that heralded the worsening conditions that were to come under the Mamlūks.111 One important process begun by the Ayyūbids that was to have an unforeseen detrimental effect upon non-Muslim communities has to do with the Ayyūbids’ ties with madrasas and Sunnī scholars (the ʿulamāʾ). As a military elite, the Ayyūbids needed to reinforce their religious legitimacy, which they achieved by endowing madrasas and supporting the ʿulamāʾ. Many of the growing numbers of ʿulamāʾ emerging from these madrasas sought government employment, and competition with non-Muslim elites for such positions was probably the reason for the appearance of works arguing against the employment of non-Muslims in the government.112 Competition within the ʿulamāʾ also likely contributed to the aforementioned “spirit of mounting religious strictness” as each scholar sought to demonstrate his piety by adopting a more stringent line when it came to discussions of the ghiyār, attacks on churches and synagogues, social interaction with non-Muslims, and using their physicians. All this led to the emergence in the thirteenth century of an anti-dhimmī literature which greatly expanded in the fourteenth century.113 Periodic campaigns by Crusaders from the North against Egypt and the threat of a Mongol invasion from the East may also have contributed to animosity against non-Muslims.114 110 111 112 113 114 I am not aware of any study specifically on the Jews under the Ayyūbids, except for the brief study of Mohamed Hawary, “Muslim-Jewish Relations in Ayyubid Egypt, 1171–1250,” in Moshe Maʿoz, ed., The Meeting of Civilizations: Muslim, Christian, and Jewish (Brighton, 2009), 66–73. For studies about Saladin, see, for example, Eliyahu Ashtor-Strauss, “Saladin and the Jews,” Hebrew Union College Annual 27 (1956), 305–26; Yaacov Lev, Saladin in Egypt (Leiden, 1999), 190–93; and Anne-Marie Eddé, Saladin (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 397–417. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:38. See also ibid., 6:13 (index). This is the argument presented in Luke Yarbrough, “The Madrasa and the NonMuslims of Thirteenth-Century Egypt: A Reassessment,” in Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Messler, eds., Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia, 2017), 93–112. Yarbrough revises the influential earlier contribution of Gary Leiser, “The Madrasas and the Islamization of the Middle East: The Case of Egypt,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 22 (1985), 29–47. Tamer El-Leithy, “Sufis, Copts, and the Politics of Piety: Moral Regulation in 14thCentury Upper Egypt,” in Adam Sabra and Richard McGregor, eds., The Development of Sufism in Mamluk Egypt (Cairo, 2006), 76. Yarbrough, “The Madrasa,” 94. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 160 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger The Ayyūbids were replaced by the Mamlūks in 1250, who secured their rule for the next two and a half centuries with their victory over the invading Mongols in 1260. The Mamlūk period is one of the more neglected periods in the study of Egyptian Jewry. The first two Hebrew volumes of Eliyahu Ashtor-Strauss’s History of the Jews in Egypt and in Syria under the Rule of the Mamluks, published in 1944 and 1951, are still the only comprehensive treatment of this period.115 The neglect is partially due to the dearth of Genizah documents from after 1250.116 Another reason is that the Mamlūk period stands in the shadow of the Fātimid period, _ overall one of remarkable economic activity and relative individual and communal security, as evidenced by Egypt’s attractiveness to Jewish immigrants mentioned above. A famine in 1201–2, followed by further famines and epidemics, substantially reduced the numbers of Jews in Egypt.117 The economic situation of the remnant also deteriorated, continuing a process underway in the twelfth century. With the aforementioned “spirit of mounting religious strictness” came governmental anti-dhimmī decrees combined regularly with (often S ̣ūfī-led) popular violence against houses of worship (the two most famous outbreaks took place in 1301 and 1354).118 Despite this, it should be noted that the Jews – the less-conspicuous minority in Egypt – suffered less from these tribulations than the Copts.119 Jews developed various ways to cope with these worsening conditions.120 Such strategies included keeping a low profile, developing legends about the antiquity of houses of worship, disguising oneself as Muslim, 115 116 117 118 119 120 The third volume of Ashtor-Strauss’s work, published in 1970, includes editions of some seventy-four Genizah documents from the Mamlūk period. However, see the review by S. D. Goitein, “Geniza Documents from the Mamluk Period” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 41 (1971), 59–81. See also S. D. Goitein, “The Twilight of the House of Maimonides” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 54 (1984), 67–104; Donald S. Richards, “Arabic Documents from the Karaite Community in Cairo,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 15 (1972), 105–62; and Dotan Arad, “Jews in 15th-Century Alexandria in the Light of New Documents” [Hebrew], Peʿamim 156 (2018), 167–84. The dwindling number of Genizah documents in the Mamlūk period is usually explained by the fact that most Jews moved from Fustāt, which had been descending _ _Cairo, where there must have into ruin from the end of the Fātimid period, to nearby _ been another genizah which did not survive. Russ-Fishbane, “Earthquake, Famine, and Plague.” See also Mark R. Cohen, “Jews in the Mamlūk Environment: The Crisis of 1442 (A Geniza Study, T-S. AS 150.3),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 47 (1984), 425–48. El-Leithy, “Sufis, Copts, and the Politics of Piety,” 75–120. Nathan Hofer recently decried what he sees as “the ideology of decline” in the study of Jews in Ayyūbid and Mamlūk Syria; see Hofer, “The Ideology of Decline” (which also discusses the same approach to Egyptian Jewry). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 the maghrib and egypt 161 establishing pious foundations (Arabic, awqāf; sing. waqf) to protect estates from being seized by the state, and amassing documentation to defend one’s rights.121 These challenges should not obscure from us some of the other interesting features of this period, such as the aforementioned Egyptian pietistic movement that reached its prominence under the leadership of Abraham Maimonides in the Ayyūbid period but continued with his descendants well into the Mamlūk period.122 Furthermore, religious creativity did not cease and the Maimonidean dynasty produced and curated an impressive series of works stretching for several generations.123 The Jewish communities of Egypt were to be invigorated by immigrants fleeing the Spanish exile of 1492. Their arrival, combined with the Ottoman rule that replaced Mamlūk control in 1517, spelled a profound change for Egyptian Jewry. CONCLUSION The genizot of Cairo and geonic responsa shed a dazzling light on the Jewish communities of North Africa and Egypt. Through them, scholars can reconstruct in detail the intercommunal structure, local politics, economic activities, family life, Jewish learning and scholarship, and complex engagements with different Islamic regimes of these communities. While North Africa and Egypt were linked through the various ties explored above, there were also substantial differences that set them apart. The strong agrarian base provided by the Nile valley meant that Egypt resisted more successfully the processes of tribalization and nomadization that took place further west. This not only meant that for most of our period Egypt was the basis of a strong and centralized empire, but it also facilitated the persistence of a substantial nonMuslim population, in the form of the Copts. The existence of another (and significantly larger) non-Muslim group protected the Jews of Egypt from some of the harsher treatments that Jews received in places where they became the sole non-Muslim community (such as in Yemen and the Maghrib). Egypt and North Africa were also set apart in their relationship to other Jewish centers in Palestine and Babylonia. As explained above, Egypt 121 122 123 Dotan Arad, “Being a Jew under the Mamluks: Some Coping Strategies,” in Stephan Conermann, ed., Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Middle Islamic Period: Jews in the Ayyubid and Mamluk Sultanates (1171–1517) (Bonn, 2017), 21–39; and Hofer, “The Ideology of Decline,” 115–20. Fenton, “Sufis and Jews in Mamluk Egypt.” Ben-Sasson, “The ‘Libraries’ of the Maimonides Family.” Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008 162 menahem ben-sasson and oded zinger maintained a marked Palestinian orientation and was under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian yeshiva until the latter declined following the Seljūq conquest and the Crusades. The Maghrib, however, fell outside the zones of direct jurisdiction of either center, but maintained a functional and later ceremonial relationship with the Iraqi center. The Maghrib was also closely connected with Spain, with its strong Babylonian orientation. The difference in how these communities interacted with the long-standing centers goes a long way in explaining the efflorescence of rabbinic scholarship in the local academies of the Maghrib compared to the relative weakness of Egyptian Jewry in this regard. It would be interesting to explore the broader ramifications of this difference beyond the academies – for example, in the everyday work of the courts or in the role of scholarship as a prerequisite for communal leadership in both regions. The riches of the Cairo genizot and geonic responsa promise to reward future scholars engaged in such comparative work. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY the maghrib Abramson, Shraga. Ba-Merkazim u-va-Tefusot bi-Tequfat ha-Geʾonim _ (Jerusalem, 1965). Ben-Sasson, Menahem. 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D., and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (‘India Book’) (Leiden, 2008). Russ-Fishbane, Elisha. Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt: A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Times (Oxford, 2015). Rustow, Marina. The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton, 2020). Sijpesteijn, Petra M. “Visible Identities: In Search of Egypt’s Jews in Early Islamic Egypt,” in Alison Salvesen, Sarah Pearce, and Miriam Frenkel, eds., Israel in Egypt: The Land of Egypt as Concept and Reality for Jews in Antiquity and the Early Medieval Period (Leiden, 2020), 424–40. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on 24 Aug 2021 at 08:03:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139048873.008