Thoth distribution@thoth.pub Google 20260408T202558

urn:uuid:e499979f-dcdb-4f06-87b0-4dee9c3d2530 03 15 9781805110729 00 EB E107 10 10 02 26326914 01 02 Semitic Languages and Cultures 01 01 'Wisdom and Greatness in one Place' The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle 1 A01 Dotan Arad Dr. Arad is a senior lecturer in the Israel and Golda Koschitzki department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry in Bar-Ilan University. Dotan has a PhD in Jewish History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on the Jews in Egypt, Syria and Palestine during the Mamluk and Early Ottoman period. Between 2012 and 2014 he published, with Prof. Shmuel Glick and other colleagues, a series of volumes containing responsa fragments of Jewish Sages in the Ottoman Empire, from the Cairo Genizah. His current research focuses on the Judeo Arabic letters of the Karaites in the Ottoman empire and on the social history of the Damascus and Cairo’s Jews during the Ottoman Period. 2 A01 Esther-Miriam Wagner Esther-Miriam Wagner is the Executive Director of the Woolf Institute. She is a Fellow of St Edmund's College and teaches the MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies: Muslim-Jewish Relations at the University of Cambridge. Miriam has written broadly on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics of Judaeo-Arabic and Yiddish, scribal practice, and Jewish-Muslim relations in Egypt and Muslim Spain as reflected in the Genizah sources. Her books include Linguistic Variety of Judaeo-Arabic in Letters from the Cairo Genizah (2010), Scribes as Agents of Language Change (2013), Merchants of Innovations. The Languages of Traders (2016) and A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic (2021). Her work has been featured on TV and Radio programmes, such as on BBC3 The Essay, in History Magazine and in documentaries on the Cairo Genizah. 01 eng 00 548 03 23 Archival material 12 BJ 23 Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures 04 DS135.E42 10 LCO011000 12 2CSR 10 FOR002000 23 Linguistics 23 Moses ben Judah 23 Egyptian Jewry in the late Mamluk period 10 FOR011000 12 JFSR1 23 Material Culture 12 2CSJ 10 HIS037010 23 Judaeo-Arabic 12 HBLC1 23 Late Middle Ages 12 HMC 23 Mediterranean trade 01 06 03 00 The manuscript collections of the Bodleian Library contain a corpus of dozens of documents from the archive of Moses ben Judah. A leader of the Jewish community in Alexandria, he was also a prominent businessman and in contact with individuals from Cairo to Sicily. This collection of documents at the Bodleian likely did not emerge from the Cairo Genizah, but from another depository, and appears to have been buried at some point. The documents, which include letters and deeds, shed light on the world of the Jewish elite of a Mediterranean city at the end of the Middle Ages, their communal and business life, connections between Jewish communities, and intellectual trends and tastes among educated Jews. They improve our understanding of the lives of Alexandrian Jews in the late Middle Ages and provide new data about the local leadership and its relations with the Nagidate (the central Jewish leadership) in Cairo, the cantors, the poll tax and its effects, and more. We hear about tensions within this society and the growing presence of European (Italian, Greek, Iberian, and conversos) Jews within the complex social mosaic of Egyptian Jewry in the late Mamluk period. The documents inform us about Alexandria’s Jewish community and the commercial networks of the Mediterranean world, in which Jews traded alongside Christians and Muslims. This volume makes an important contribution to the study of Judaeo-Arabic at a watershed moment. Sources from the late Mamluk period show Judaeo-Arabic at a linguistic border between Classical and Late Judaeo-Arabic. The volume will therefore further readers’ knowledge of historical linguistics of Arabic in general, and Judaeo-Arabic in particular. The phrase ‘Wisdom and Greatness in One Place’ in the title of the book is a quotation from the Babylonian Talmud (Giṭṭin 59a), the meaning of which is that it is rare to find combined in one man political leadership and intellectual pre-eminence. 04 00 Introduction Part I: Documents C: Communal Documents: The Public Affairs of Alexandria C.1: Letters from Solomon b. Joseph ha-Nagid C.2: Letter from Nathan Sholal ha-Nagid to Moses b. Judah C.3: Letter from David ibn Shams to Moses b. Judah C.4: Letter from Elijah Qarqūsa to Moses b. Judah C.5: Letter from a Certain Hārūn to Moses b. Judah C.6: Voucher for Collection of a Will by the Leaders of the Community of Alexandria C.7: Sample Letter, Based on a Letter to the Community of Cairo P: Private Letters: Moses b. Judah’s Circle P.1: Letter from Moses b. Judah (?) to Saʿīd ibn Muhaḏḏab P.2: Letter to Moses b. Judah, Probably from Nathan Sholal P.3: Letters from David ibn Shams to Moses b. Judah P.4: Letters from Ṣedaqah Nis to Moses b. Judah P.5: Letters from Elijah b. Elyaqim to Moses b. Judah P.6: Letter from Isaac Bayt ʿAṭṭān to Moses b. Judah P.7: Letter from Ṣuriel Dayyan to Moses b. Judah P.8: Letter from Mardūḵ Qarqūsa to Israel ʿAṭāʾīn and Yeraḥmiel ʿAṭāʾīn P.9: Letter from an Anonymous Scholar to Moses b. Judah P.10: Letter from an Anonymous Writer to Moses b. Judah P.11: Letter from an Anonymous Writer to a Certain Yedidiah P.12: Letter from an Anonymous Writer Part II: Literary Works W: Literary Works W.1: Qohelet Rabbah W.2: Mishne Torah, Sheḥitah Laws (Maimonides) W.3: Commentary on Kings (R. David Qimḥi) W.4: Mikhlol (R. David Qimḥi) W.5: Sefer ha-Yirʾah (R. Jonah Girondi) W.6: Commentaries on Talmud Bavli and Hilkhot ha-Rif W.7: List of Biblical Quotations for Use in Letters W.8: Unidentified Work Part III: Linguistic Analysis of the Judaeo-Arabic in the Corpus Abbreviations References Table of Orientation Indices Open Book Publishers 01 Open Book Publishers 04 01 20250722 02 WORLD 06 15 9781805110705 06 15 9781805110712 06 15 9781805110729 WORLD 09 Open Book Publishers 20 01