Geniza Lab

Letter from the physician Yosef, in Alexandria, to the physician Abū l-Faraj b. Abū l-Barakāt (c/o Abū l-Faraj al-Sharābī), in al-Sūq al-Kabir, Fustat. In Judaeo-Arabic, with the address in both Hebrew script and Arabic script. Dating: 13th century, according to Goitein. The sender calls himself the son of the addressee, but this is not literal. Goitein surmised that the sender and the addressee were paternal cousins and that the sender was married to the addressee's sister (thus his own paternal cousin)—but Goitein did not explain his reasoning. The subjects discussed include: (1) obtaining books from the addressee's warehouse; (2) the capitation tax; (3) an incident translated by Moshe Yagur as follows: "As for what happened on the Day of ʿArava [last day of the Feast of Tabernacles]: Yaʿqūb b. al-Muʿalim argued with his crossed-eyed son and beat him in the middle of the market with his shoe. And so the boy cried out [in the name of] Islam, and the Muslims gathered in his support (wa-ʾinna al-muslimīn taʿaṣṣabū maʿahu), and they took him [the father] and brought him before the governor. He [probably the boy] said to them, “The punishments of Islam (ḥadd) are not applicable, since I am not mature yet.” The qāḍī Ibn Ghāriḍ deliberated [the matter] and ratified his conversion to Islam (rajaʿa jaddada ʿalayhi al-islām). And there were many debates concerning this, [which] will be too long to elaborate"; (4) lancets (ruwayshāt) for bloodletting that the addressee promised to send; (5) a report that friends and family speak well of the addressee (he had asked to be told what people were saying behind his back); (6) a bakers' strike translated by Goitein as follows: "On the second day of the Sukkot feast there were great disturbances in Alexandria because of the bread, which could not be found all over the city, until God brought relief by the end of the day; the governor (al-amīr) and the superintendent of the markets (al-muḥtasib) rode out and threatened to burn down [the houses of] the bakers because of the bread, after they had inquired with the people at one oven in the east and one in the west. At the end there remained fifty hundred weights of bread in the ovens that night. So do not worry"; (7) the sender's brother has been sending letters asking everyone he knows to pray for him (likely because he is about to depart on a journey). (Information from Goitein's index cards, Med Soc IV, p. 238, and Yagur, "Several Documents from the Cairo Geniza Concerning Conversion to Islam" (2020).)