Letter from Sicily

Neither the sender nor the recipient of this Hebrew letter, sent from Palermo, Sicily, and recovered from the Cairo Geniza, can be identified. The document opens with praise for its recipient (although that section is badly damaged) and then recounts the suffering of the Jewish community of Palermo during a civil war and subsequent Byzantine invasion. While scholars first suggested that the document was sent to the tenth-century Spanish Jewish courtier Ḥasday Ibn Shaprūṭ, more recent studies have dated the letter to the eleventh century, a period that would better match the events described. The precarious position of the Sicilian Jewish community would certainly have been of interest to the high-ranking recipient of this text. Unbracketed ellipses indicate lacunae in the manuscript.