Court Testimony (Egypt)

This court record preserves charges by two Muslims against a Jewish woman that she had a sexual relationship with a Christian doctor. The story is not preserved in full, but the extant text illustrates how members of society attempted to enforce norms about interreligious relationships. The text of this document is in Judeo- Arabic, but the signatures of the Jewish witnesses (‘Allān ibn Nāḥūm, ‘Allān ibn Ibrāhīm, and Ibrāhīm ibn Yusuf ibn ‘Ānānnot) are in Arabic characters, possibly so that a Muslim judge could verify the signatures after hearing the document read aloud. It survived in the Cairo Geniza perhaps because the Jewish judge chose not to move forward with the case.