Court Testimony (Egypt)

1063

About This Entry

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.

Amram ibn Sa‘id ibn Musa appeared [before the court] and reported that he was working in the apothecary practice of Abu’l-Faraj ibn Ma‘amar al-Sharabi and that there was a physician, Abu Ghalib, there who wrote out prescriptions for the apothecary. The aforementioned Amram ibn Sa‘id stated that he noticed a woman sitting rather frequently with this aforementioned doctor, Abu Ghalib, and thought her to be a Muslim woman since he saw her so often. After learning that she was a Jew, he inquired about her and found out that she was the daughter of Ibn al-Mashita. Some of the Muslims were seized with righteous zeal because of this and spied on her, suspecting her of having an affair with a Christian, the aforementioned doctor. This went on for about forty days, more or less. One day, she came to him and said “I would like you to come and take a ride with me to a patient.” And she stayed with him until he had finished work. Then he got up and rode with her, and they went away together. . . .

Source: CUL MS Or.1080 J93; see also T-S 8.130.

Translated by Friedrich Niessen.

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Notes

Words in brackets appear in the original translation.

Credits

‘Amram ibn Sa‘īd ibn Mūsā, “A Christian-Jewish Love Affair,” trans. Friedrich Niessen, from Benjamin M. Outhwaite, Melonie Schmierer-Lee, and Cayley M. Burgess, Discarded History: The Genizah of Medieval Cairo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 2017), 33. Used with permission of the publisher.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 3: Encountering Christianity and Islam.