Letter to the Jewish Community of Fustāt (I)
About This Entry
This short declaration, written in Hebrew in a professional hand and intended to be publicly displayed, came from the Jewish community of Damascus as they sought to locate a husband who had abandoned his family and left them in dire straits. The Damascene Jews had heard that the wayward husband had turned up in Fustāt (Old Cairo), and they attempted to secure his return. As there was no confirmation that the husband had died, the wife remained an agunah, a woman who is unable to remarry. This document is of further interest because the husband had apparently also abandoned Karaism in favor of Rabbanite Judaism for unknown reasons, but perhaps to receive charity from the Rabbanite community in Egypt.
There is a woman [here] who has been “a widow in [her husband’s] lifetime” for more than three years now. We have heard that her husband is in Egypt. His name is Yosef, and with him is another man also named Yosef. He is a young man with reddish hair, and his distinguishing characteristic is that he was a Qaraite, one who does not acknowledge the words of our sages, and now has become a Rabbanite. She is an ‘aguna with four children who are dying of starvation. In your kindness, if he is there, tell him to return to his wife. And if he has left, or you have heard that he is verifiably deceased, please send her a letter here in Damascus [to that effect].
Source: JTS ENA 3787.10.
Translated by Marina Rustow.
Notes
Words in brackets appear in the original translation.
Credits
The Jewish Community of Damascus, “Letter to the Jewish Community of Fustāt” (I), trans. Marina Rustow, from Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), 255. Copyright © 2008 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.
Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 3: Encountering Christianity and Islam.
