Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issue 63 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in April 2012, by Oded Zinger:
One of the pleasures of Genizah research in Cambridge is the way one stumbles across fascinating human stories while leafing through the Collection. Though my dissertation research revolves around marital disputes in the Genizah, when examining some of the documentary... Read Morepetition
Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 9 Dec 2021
Has tags: Abraham Maimonides, agunah, Genizah Fragments, Mosseri, petition, widow
Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 25 Nov 2021
Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issue 56 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in October 2008, by Marina Rustow:
No one has satisfactorily explained why the Cairo Genizah preserved Arabic texts from the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk chancery (dīwān al-inshā), the bureau charged with, among other tasks, receiving petitions from Egyptian and Syrian subjects and issuing decrees in response to them. To date, 135 such documents have been... Read MoreHas tags: Chancery, Fatimid, Genizah Fragments, petition
Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 23 Sep 2021
Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issues 10 and 11 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in October 1985 and April 1986, by Geoffrey Khan while he was a Research Associate in the GRU:
The vast majority of Genizah fragments are written in Hebrew characters. This is not surprising, since reverence for the Hebrew script was the chief motivation for placing manuscripts in the Genizah. The language of well over half of them,... Read MoreHas tags: Arabic, Fatimid, Genizah Fragments, legal, Muslim-Jewish relations, petition
Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Oded Zinger
on Wed 14 Jul 2021
Oded, what are you working on at the moment?
I’m currently working on several court notes (for example Mosseri VII.207.1 and Mosseri VII.189.2). Mosseri VII.207.1 is a small note written by the court clerk (probably Hillel b. Eli or Halfon b. Manasseh in his early years) to the judge. A woman presented a bill of divorce which appeared suspicious. It was dated according to the calendar of deeds (shetarot) though the writer claims that it was not the custom of the judge to use this type of dating, and the bill of divorce also lacked the legal formula on its verso that... Read More
Has tags: agunah, divorce, dowry, Firkovich, Genizah Fragments, legal, Mosseri, petition, Q&A