Geniza Lab

Legal document. Partnership agreement. Dating: Mamluk period (1250–1517), per Goitein. This document preserves a partnership agreement between two teachers, Raḍī b. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz b. Raḍī and Yeshu‘a Dukhān, in the manufacture and sale of cheese and other dairy products, for an unspecified fixed period. Each partner contributes both labor and capital: Raḍī is to be responsible for manufacture in the cheesemaking courtyard, bringing fifty qintār of halloumi cheese to the partnership. Yeshu‘a is to be responsible for sales, remaining in the shop and investing 1,000 silver half-dirhems, to be brought by Yeshu‘a in payments according to a schedule (see lines 10-12). Raḍī is to keep accounts. Profits and losses are to be divided equally, including rent for both the shop and the courtyard. Line 13 refers to the trustworthiness of the partners, important in this case since the two partners will not be working side by side. (Information from Lieberman, "A Partnership Culture," 188)

Legal document from a qāḍī court. Dated: 15 Dhū l-Ḥijja 870 AH (Sunday 29 July 1466 CE). The raʾīs al-yahūd, Yūsuf b. Khalīfa, and his deputy, Shemuʾel b. Naṣr, promise not to prevent the physician Manṣūr b. Ibrahīm b. al-Abraṣ (son of the leper, or possibly the redhead) from entering the synagogue in Zuwayla, the Jewish neighborhood in Cairo. The trigger for the conflict was a motion to renovate the synagogue, a fraught issue during the Mamluk period: in 859 AH (1454–55), under the relatively permissive Sultan Īnāl, a court authorized the repair of the old Rabbanite synagogue in Zuwayla and two Rabbanite synagogues in Fusṭāṭ, as well as the Qaraite synagogues in Cairo and Fusṭāṭ (a copy of this permit, from 18 January 1456, survived in the Qaraite archive in Cairo); under Qāʾitbāy, there was apparently a request to repair some synagogues, but the community objected, fearing that Muslims would destroy them, as they had threatened or sought to do in other cases. The judge is Shams al-Dīn al-Sulamī. Goitein discovered T-S Ar.38.131 and discussed it briefly in Med. Soc.; Rustow found the join with T-S Ar. 42.212 in 2014 using the joins suggestions in FGP; meanwhile Dotan Arad discovered a Judaeo-Arabic court document referring to the same case, BL Or. 4856.2. Arad published both documents in an article that was forthcoming as of June 2021. MR

State document, Mamluk period, 1442. Draft of a petition from the Jewish community of Fustat to the Mamluk government concerning the malpractices of ‘Abd al-Latif the physician, head of the Jews, who is reported to have sold portions of pious foundation properties and leased others below their value, imposed high fiscal penalties, and confiscated property of the Jews, among a litany of other harmful acts. The document requests his removal from office. (Mark Cohen, "Jews in the Mamlūk Environment: The Crisis of 1442 (A Geniza Study)," BSOAS, 1984, 431-4) EMS

Marriage contract. Location: Fustat. Dated: Sunday, 20 Sivan 1609 Seleucid, which is 1298 CE. The bride agrees to live wherever (in Egypt) her husband chooses, to observe the laws of menstrual purity, and to free her husband from the obligation to provide her with clothing on the condition that all she earns be her private property. Signed: Seʿadya b. Yehuda and Yoel b. [...].(Information in part from Med Soc III, 455 n. 86 and Goitein's index card.) Joins: Alan Elbaum.