Cohen Mark R. Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World)

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upon the urgency of redeeming captives.

A letter of appeal from a

“poor man” describes how he was seized for failure to pay the poll tax

and beaten severely in the sight of six upright Jewish elders from Cairo

(who could therefore testify to the events, and to the writer’s urgent need

for assistance).

In the long letter of appeal to the Jewish government of-

ﬁcial Yair b. Elazar, from which we quoted at length in our discussion of

the foreign poor, the needy petitioner alludes to debts, to rent he owed,

and to his liability to the poll-tax collector. He colorfully compares himself

to captives: “My master the illustrious elder, may God lengthen your days,

knows that people redeem captives and they get out of prison and accom-

plish in this world what they can to do good, and a great deal more.”

Linkage between debt and captivity is reﬂected as well in alms lists and

donor registers. “List of the Captives—may God help to rescue them”

reads the heading of an alms list.

Another carries the heading “Addition

(al-mutaakhkhar) to [the collection for] the ‘captives.’”

But the latter

(and by analogy the former) cannot be captives of pirates or war. The

sums are too small and the names are those of known, that is, local people.

Goitein, accordingly, concluded these were “captives” of debt and ac-

cordingly translates shevuyim as “prisoners” rather than “captives.” We

may be certain, too, that many on the alms lists in general were there be-

cause they had become impoverished by debt. Collections to help indi-

gents defray their annual capitation tax were designed precisely to avoid

the untoward consequences of nonpayment.

Letters of appeal describing imprisonment for debt or anticipating it

with anxiety exhort would-be benefactors in the same way captives were

wont to do. We saw this in the letter of Nathan b. Mevorakh, the Ascalon

judge, appealing for assistance for a family whose lady of the house was

about to be imprisoned on account of her husband’s debt while he was

hiding out in Egypt.

Using the language of captives, a teacher named

Joel requests aid from the well-known pietist Abraham he-hasid and

his brother (early thirteenth century), expressing his plight in colorful,

learned rhymed Hebrew prose: “When I recall the tax (mas) my heart

melts (yimmas) inside me (be-tokh qirbi u-meayim), when the collectors

seize my wrists to bind my feet in iron (bi-nehushtayim). Debt at high in-

134 CHAPTER 4

Bava Batra 8b. And recall Maimonides’ restatement of the Talmud: “The ransoming of

captives has precedence over the feeding and clothing of the poor. Indeed there is no reli-

gious duty more meritorious than the ransoming of captives, for not only is the captive in-

cluded in the generality of the hungry, the thirsty, and the naked, but his very life is in

jeopardy.” Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot mattenot aniyyim 8:10.

TS 6 J 9.7.

*TS 24.46, lines 64–65.

BM Or 5549.8, Med. Soc., 2:455, App. B 58 (1040–80).

BM Or 5566B.33v, Med. Soc., 2:486, App. C 38, ed. Gil, Foundations, 412–15.

See chapter 2 at note 85.

terest owed to powerful (Muslim) people comes to mind like a pair of

walls (homotayim).”

Similarly, a letter of recommendation relates that

the son of the letter-bearer was imprisoned in (New) Cairo. A pledge

drive had raised ﬁfteen dirhems, but he still owed more than twenty.

“His son is in great distress in the prison,” the writer adds.

When we read that someone is “imprisoned” (mahbus) it often means

under house arrest and speciﬁcally for nonpayment of a debt, either to a

private person or to the government poll-tax collector. “I inform you that

I am poor, indigent, and naked, I and my family....I am imprisoned on ac-

count of the poll tax (mahbus min al-jizya) and dying from hunger, I and

my family,” laments a cantor writing to three brothers and two cousins.

This “house arrest” was known as tarsim, after the payments, rusum,

that had to be made to the guardsman to cover his wages. The term also

applied to the warrant that preceded imprisonment, requiring payment

for each day it was in effect before the debt was discharged.

Mahbus, of

course, could have a more general connotation. The man who wrote “I

have been imprisoned in my house ﬁfty-ﬁve days” had become paralyzed

in one hand and could not earn money for food or to pay the poll tax,

which had just come due. Two friends (no more, he says) had come by his

house and given him ﬁve dirhems each. He gave a bribe of ﬁve dirhems to

the tax collectors, we may surmise to grant him an extension of time to

pay the levy, and spent the other ﬁve. We do not know whether he was

under house arrest or simply trapped at home by his malady. We may as-

sume that if he was not under detention yet he would be soon.

Many are the letters that describe needy people who owed money.

But information about debt and its relief through charity is also con-

tained in the lists. The payroll for community ofﬁcials and needy persons

DEBT AND THE POLL TAX 135

TS 20.148, lines 19–22. Cf. Med. Soc., 5:80.

The manuscript has a kaf (= 20), followed by an unreadable letter.

ENA NS 2 I.18, lines 9–12.

TS 10 J 12.4, lines 21–23; cf. Med. Soc., 1:352. When a petitioner for charity writes,

“were he no[t] conﬁned to the house, unable to go out on account of the poll tax, and had

he not been sick for eight months, [he] would have been able to earn a living,” it can mean

either that he was under house arrest for nonpayment of the jizya or that he did not want

to be caught by the tax collector in the street or the marketplace. *ENA 2738.37.

Med. Soc., 2:372.

TS NS Box 321.11.

*TS 8 J 18.25, lines 4–5: “we are in dire straits on account of debts we have, childcare,

and sureties on our behalf”; TS 6 J 7.18: “the creditors are ruining me”; TS 13 J 18.17: a

man who owed rent and loans to Muslims; *TS 12.122, ed. Golb and Pritsak, Khazarian

Hebrew Documents, 1–71: a Jew from Kiev seeks money to pay a debt back home for

which he had stood surety; TS 18 J 3.1, cf. Med. Soc., 2:386: a man who had lost his riches

asks for one dinar to pay the balance of a debt of twenty dinars; TS AS 145.4: a man who

has heavy debts; ENA 4020 I, loose leaf, cf. Med. Soc., 2:106: a man seeks money collected

for him in a pledge drive over a month earlier so he can pay his creditors, who are pressing

mentioned above as registering a proselyte may also list a “captive of

debt,” if we take the word al-mahbus that way. He received ﬁfteen

(dirhems, apparently), the largest sum apportioned (the proselyte got the

same, as did a cantor from Tyre).

Debt, captivity, ransom of captives, and echoes of the talmudic ha-

lakha resonate together in the letter, cited above, appealing for help for a

member of the pietist circle of the nagid Abraham Maimonides. Among

other things, he was in arrears for his poll tax and needed money to pur-

chase the tools of his trade. “I ask you please to help by (fulﬁlling) this re-

ligious duty (misva), which is a great religious duty (misva rabba), because

a legal writ is only as good as its signatures, and there is not in the world

a greater religious duty than this one: helping to marry an orphan to an

orphan girl, and paying someone’s poll tax, which is tantamount to ran-

soming of captives.”

Captivity in the form of imprisonment for failure to pay debts was so

common in medieval Egypt that Maimonides, following his teachers,

classiﬁed debtors among those to whom the cardinal religious duty of

ransoming of captives applied.

If the debtor has movables or landed property, but there are bonds outstand-

ing against him in the hands of heathen creditors, and he says, “All my prop-

erty is obligated to the heathen creditor and if the Israelites will levy upon it for

their debts, the heathen creditors will imprison me for theirs, and I will be a

captive,” my teachers ruled that no heed is to be paid to his plea; let the

Israelite creditors levy upon the property. If the heathen creditors should come

and imprison the debtor, it is incumbent upon all Israel to redeem him.

The Poll-Tax Burden

As the Geniza documents we have thus far discussed and many others

show, for the poor and those living on the margin of solvency, the annual

poll-tax obligation was an onerous burden.

We hear about it mostly

when people were in arrears, in debt. We recall Goitein’s estimate that

one in four Jewish breadwinners lived in poverty in Fustat in the middle

136 CHAPTER 4

him. *TS 10 J 6.17: a newcomer under house arrest for a debt appeals for assistance in his

predicament. He had been paying interest for nine months, in addition to the guardsman’s

salary.

TS Box K 15.70, line 5 (on the same line as the cantor from Tyre).

TS 12.289, lines 20–23, ed. Goitein, Tarbiz 33 (1963–64), 189–92.

Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot malveh ve-loveh 1:6, English trans. Jacob J. Rabinowitz, The

Code of Maimonides, Book Thirteen (New Haven and London, 1949), 79–80.

See especially Med. Soc., 2:380–92, 5:91–92.

of the twelfth century.

Those people suffered a great hardship each time

the poll-tax season rolled around.

Islamic jurists were divided on the questions of whether the poor

should be exempt from the poll tax and on what deﬁned the poverty line.

The Geniza documents illustrate vividly that the poor (and the invalid

and the old, who also usually were poor) were not released from this an-

nual obligation, either in the Fatimid or the Ayyubid period.

The memo

to the Egyptian government concerning poll-tax payments of the poor

mentioned at the beginning of chapter 2 puts it clearly. “The impover-

ished of the people of Fustat and Cairo who cannot pay anything, whose

payment must be postponed until the beginning of the year: One hundred

and ﬁfty. Those whose condition does not allow more than two dinars to

be taken from them in installments: one hundred and ﬁfty.”

Even the

young were liable, as we learn from many a father’s complaint that he

was overextended because he had to pay the tax not only for himself but

for his sons.

Or, we hear the plaintive voice of a poor, blind widow with

a small orphaned son, also blind, that “they dem[anded from me] the

p[oll ta]x and we two do not even have br[e]ad.”

Since family members

were held responsible for each other’s poll-tax payment, the levy proved

broadly burdensome in a mobile society in which male members of a

family often traveled far and for a long time, not to mention when they

ﬂed to escape physical harassment or imprisonment.

The burden of the poll tax was felt all the more personally and directly

because in Egypt Jews paid as individuals. Things were different in

nearby Palestine, at least in Jerusalem and apparently also in Tiberias,

DEBT AND THE POLL TAX 137

Med. Soc., 2:139–40.

Med. Soc., 2:381 and a thorough article on the subject by Eli Alshech, “Islamic Law,

Practice, and Legal Doctrine: Exempting the Poor from the Jizya under the Ayyubids

(1171–1250),” Islamic Law and Society 10 (2003), 1–28.

TS Arabic Box 38.95, ed. Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents, 493–95.

Discussed by Goitein, Med. Soc., 2:468, App. B 110, where he translates slightly differently:

“Indigents in Fustat and Cairo: Entirely destitute, to be deferred to next year—150 persons.

Others whose state is unknown, but from whom not more than 2 dinars can be taken, and

this only in installments—150 persons.”

Med. Soc., 2:382–83.

*TS12.303, lines 11–12, ed. and trans. Cohen, “Four Judaeo-Arabic Petitions of the

Poor,” 456–59. I do not think she was referring to the poll tax for herself, as women were

exempt according to all schools of Islamic law.

“I have come from Alexandria in great distress,” writes a man in Hebrew, evidently a

newcomer to Egypt from Europe. “I owe ﬁfteen dinars [Hebrew: zehuvim, lit. “gold coins,”

equivalent to the budget of a middle-class family for seven months], and I left in my house

four daughters and two sons, starving, naked, and lacking everything, with the tax collec-

tors harassing them on my account. I have come here [to Fustat] seeking sustenance to get

out of debt . . . and return to my children. . . . Send us to our home country, that we may re-

turn to our place.” TS 13 J 17.9, lines 12–17, 22, ed. Bareket, Teuda 16–17 (2001), 367.

where the government collected the tax from the community as a whole.

On the other hand, for that very reason, communities in Palestine often

fell into debt to moneylenders and needed “charity” themselves.

The

tax authorities collected the money with ﬁerce regularity and hounded

evaders, while rapacious collectors might try to extort more than the

canonical due. It is true that there were occasional alleviations for the poor,

and it seems that in the countryside rates were lower. There were also

towns and villages outside the main cities where, for some unstated rea-

son, one could avoid having to pay altogether.

In general, however, the poll tax was the only discriminatory obligation

imposed on the non-Muslims that was rigorously and regularly enforced,

even when most other disabilities, especially in the Fatimid-Ayyubid period

in Egypt, were not. Moreover, Jews (as well as Christians) knew that pay-

ment of the tax was the key to the protective guarantees of the dhimma

system. So it was stated—echoing an opinion in Islamic law—in a tenth-

century anecdote about Jewish life in Baghdad: “the poll tax is in defense

of a person’s life, and by force of it the Jew observes his religion, his

Sabbath, festivals, and Day of Atonement, and all else he chooses to do in

his religion, and no one disturbs him.” This statement is also echoed in a

Geniza letter from the ﬁrst half of the fourteenth century.

What follows

from this, of course, is that the poor lived in apprehension and fear of the

consequences when they could not afford to pay or when individuals or the

community were slow to take up the slack. In general, however, subsidies

for the poll tax of the poor were high on the community’s philanthropic

agenda and constituted a recurring element in private charity for the poor.

138 CHAPTER 4

Gil, Palestine, 144–54. A letter reports about a joint Karaite-Rabbanite collection of just

over 133 dinars made in the capital of Egypt (and more was on the way from other parts)

for the Jewish community of Jerusalem, which was hard-pressed by Muslim moneylenders.

*TS 13 J 8.14, Med. Soc., 2:472, App. C 4 (ﬁrst half of the eleventh century). Cf. also Med.

Soc., 1:257. On the method of collection see also Alshech, “Islamic Law, Practice, and Legal

Doctrine,” 10.

Med. Soc., 2:387–89. An example of a small village where the poll tax was not collected:

TS 18 J 3.1, line 27 to verso line 1, cf. Med. Soc., 2:386 and 611n24 (man yaskun fiha la

yazin jaliya). In a petition to an Ayyubid Sultan (found in the Geniza), a needy Jew asks to

be transferred to a lower poll-tax rate. TS Box H 15.62, ed. Khan, Arabic Legal and

Administrative Documents, 369.

Tenth-century anecdote: Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 71; fourteenth-century letter:

ENA NS 21.12, lines 1–4, trans. Goitein, Tarbiz 54 (1984–85), 89–90. Goitein notes that the

same letter quotes Isaiah (60:17), ve-nogsayikh sedaqa, which is understood as “those who

oppress you [by taxing you] treat you charitably [by not harming you].” Opinion found in

Islamic law: “God ordained to impose one dinar on every adult and did not draw a distinc-

tion [between people]. Since the jizya is paid so the payer’s life is spared (li-haqn al-dam—

the same language used in the tenth-century Jewish anecdote), and in return for living in Dar

a-Islam, the rich and poor are equal with regard to sparing life and the interest to live [in Dar

al-Islam].” Quoted in Alshech, “Islamic Law, Practice, and Legal Doctrine,” 24n75.

Chapter Five

WOMEN AND POVERTY

E HAVE ALREADY encountered indigent women as foreign-

ers, as captives, and as debtors. Here we address the problem

of poor women in terms of their gender, asking to what extent

Jewish women in medieval Egypt became victims of poverty by virtue of

being women and what strategies they employed to deal with their plight.

The Geniza provides ample opportunity to investigate these questions,

particularly because through the letters preserved in this treasure trove

we are able to hear the voices of women themselves. These kinds of data

are almost entirely absent from Islamic historical sources, where—if we

hear about women at all—they are usually upper-class women. We hear

very little about Muslim women from the underclass of society.

It must be stated at the outset, however, that the Geniza gives us only a

partial picture of women and poverty. The needy women who appear in

the Geniza records are mainly those who were not able to ﬁnd succor in

the bosom of their families. Those who did did not leave a documentary

trail.

Indigent Widows, Divorcées, and the Quest for Private Charity

While we hear in some responsa from medieval northern Europe about

widows who achieved a certain power and ﬁnancial success after the death

of their husbands,

the Geniza, with its hoard of letters of appeal and alms

lists, paints the other and more typical side of the picture.

Goitein writes:

“[F]or the wife, the death of her husband was a disaster. She lost her sup-

port and even her domicile and could rely only on the remnants of her

dowry, her other possessions, and the promised late marriage gift, all of

which were often uncertain and insufﬁcient assets. Indigent widowhood

Cheryl Tallan, “Opportunities for Medieval Northern European Jewish Widows in the

Public and Domestic Spheres,” in Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature

and Histories of Medieval Europe, ed. Louise Mirrer (Ann Arbor, 1992), 115–27.

As depicted for European Christian women, for instance, in David E. Vassberg, “The Status

of Widows in Sixteenth-Century Rural Castille,” in John Henderson and Richard Wall, eds.,

Poor Women and Children in the European Past (London and New York, 1994), 180–95.

was a calamity for the woman concerned and an imposition on the

community.”

The “poor widow,” of course, constituted the classic group

of female poor in most societies, singled out, for example, in prologues and

epilogues to ancient Near Eastern law codes, in the Hebrew Bible, and in

early Christian works, alongside the other classic “weak” person, the or-

phan.

In an entirely different time and place, they show up in abundance,

often with children in tow, in pauper letters from early industrial England.

Through the Geniza papers we learn about the plight of widows at-

tempting to collect the debts owed them by stipulation in their marriage

contracts. We witness struggles over property between widows and the

heirs and business partners of their deceased husbands. We read about

widows as executors and guardians of their husbands’ estates. We ob-

serve their valiant attempts to feed and clothe their minor children with

often paltry child-support allotments. We are privy to stories about difﬁ-

culties women experienced ﬁnding and keeping adequate domicile.

The

stories are not conﬁned to widows, and so we cast a wider net in what

follows, embracing other women as well in their role as suppliants for

charity. The anecdotal evidence is moving.

A representative and particularly fascinating story of a woman in need

is related in a pair of petitions (one written two months after the other),

addressed by the widow of the cantor Ben Nahman to the head of the

Jews, hadrat ha-geonut (several heads with this Hebrew title are known

in the twelfth century). She owned a share of a house that had been left

to her by her late husband. She lived in the upper story and sustained her-

self and her son with the rent from another apartment her husband had

bequeathed to her. But her stepson, with the support of his aunt (her late

husband’s sister), threw her out onto the street without her belongings.

When she tried to reenter the house, the stepson attacked her on the

street. He beat her so badly that he would have killed her had someone (a

Turk) not fortuitously been passing by while she was crying for help. The

deed of ownership to the apartment was not in her possession. Her in-

laws, who lived in the same courtyard, had taken the document from her

some time earlier when it had been necessary to make repairs to the sur-

rounding wall. Her sister-in-law, the stepson’s aunt, owed her ﬁve months

rent on an apartment in the same compound that her late brother had

given to his widow. Little wonder the aunt supported her nephew in his ag-

gressive action to deprive the widow of her right of ownership. Our widow

140 CHAPTER 5

Med. Soc., 3:250. We hear little about widowers.

Norbert Lohﬁnk, “Poverty in the Laws of the Ancient Near East and of the Bible,”

Theological Studies 52 (1991), 34-37; Deuteronomy 24:19 and elsewhere; Brown, Poverty

and Leadership, 58. Surprisingly, the widow as a needy person does not appear in the Quran.

Sokoll, Essex Pauper Letters, Index, s.v. widows.

Med. Soc., 3:250–60.

could not rely on her brothers for help, she writes. They were unable to ap-

pear in public because they were evading the poll-tax collector.

The peti-

tions of the widow of the cantor Ben Nahman vividly illustrate the

impoverishment of wives who lost their husbands and could not get help

from their families. Instead, their strategy was to appeal for outside help.

In their susceptibility to indigence, divorcées (and divorce was frequent

in the Geniza world)

were not much better off than widows. Both had

claim to the “delayed” marriage payment promised by their husbands in

the marriage contract and to the principal amount of the dowry they had

brought with them into the marriage. But then, as now, women could not

always easily collect, or collect everything. Even when the money was

there, widows and divorcées alike had to hope their husbands or their

husbands’ heirs would pay up. (In divorce, a wife could waive these rights

in order to “initiate” termination of an unhappy marriage.)

Jewish law

did not automatically award widows any additional part of their hus-

bands’ ﬁnancial estate. They were, however, eligible under certain condi-

tions for maintenance for themselves as well as for their children after

their husbands’ death and sometimes took possession of other property

of their husbands if the latter had speciﬁcally stipulated this in their will

or made a gift to their wives prior to their death (often with the condition

they not remarry).

Depending upon the amount of their husbands’ con-

tractual obligations and their own success collecting, widows and divor-

cées might suffer greatly from the loss of their marriage.

For divorced women of the lower classes, impoverishment or near im-

poverishment could result when their former husbands failed to pay

monies due them or their children. The following illustrates. A divorcée

came to me complaining and crying about what the husband who divorced

her had done to her. [She had] a little girl who was suckling and she was com-

pletely destitute. She said that he had alloted to her for [her daughter some-

thing] each month. She had prostrated herself at the house of my master the

parnas (Eli b. Yahya?) and asked him to [help] her retrieve her clothing, which

he did. But she has now gone eight months without him (her ex-husband)

giving her any money. This is a permanent catastrophe. He allots the little

girl a quarter din(ar) each month, but she gets nothing.

WOMEN AND POVERTY 141

*TS 10 J 16.4, cf. Med. Soc., 3:259 (Goitein means “head of the Jews” when he writes

“nagid”) and TS 13 J 13.6, both ed. Cohen, “Four Judaeo-Arabic Petitions of the Poor,”

459–64.

Med. Soc., 3:260–64.

Med. Soc., 3:267, and Mordechai A. Friedman, “The Ransom-Divorce: Divorce Proceedings

Initiated by the Wife in Medieval Jewish Practice,” Israel Oriental Studies 6 (1976), 288–307.

Med. Soc., 3:251.

CUL Or 1080 J 192, lines 7–11. Cf. *ENA 40.11.17: a divorcée is awarded as child-support

We recall, too, the poor divorcée from Palestine who arrived in Egypt

with her infant daughter and wanted to go home. Luckily, she obtained

a letter of recommendation from the nagid Abraham Maimonides ad-

dressed to the community of Alexandria asking them to provide her with

a travel subsidy.

The Jewish court, and by extension the community, served both in legal

theory and in practice as “the father of orphans and the judge of the wid-

ows.” This mandate was based on a description of God in Psalms (68:6;

cf. Deut 10:18) and is amply attested in the Geniza. Rabbinic literature

speaks mainly of orphans (“the court is the father of orphans”): the com-

plete biblical phrase, “father of orphans and judge of widows,” is not very

common.

But the Geniza demonstrates that the court (and community)

took the part of both, trying to assure that widows as well as orphans re-

ceived their due.

The halakhic protection assumed even broader appli-

cation in our period, as even deserted or neglected wives expected help

from the authorities on this basis.

Even an impoverished divorcée who

had not yet collected her delayed marriage payment and whose seven-

year-old son lived with her in Fustat, far from her ex-husband’s home in

Alexandria, could invoke the phrase in Arabic translation when appealing

for assistance to the nagid, the chief judicial authority of the community.

The full biblical phrase appears once as the epigraph to a Geniza peti-

tion: “[In the name of Go]d, the merciful and compassionate, father of

orphans and judge of widows.” A foreign widow with children relates

142 CHAPTER 5

for her daughter a larger amount than that allowed by Jewish law and is enjoined hence-

forth to stop bad-mouthing her ex-husband.

CUL Or 1080 J 34. Cf. Med. Soc., 2:136.

I found it once in postbiblical literature in the Bar Ilan database, in the responsa of the

Mabit (Moses b. Joseph Trani, Safed, Palestine, sixteenth century), vol. 3, no. 99. The ﬁrst

part of the biblical phrase, standing for the responsibility of the court as “father of or-

phans,” fulﬁlling responsibilities of the deceased father, appears commonly. I discuss the

matter in my article, “Halakha and Reality in Regard to Charity in the Documents from the

Cairo Geniza” (Hebrew), in Ha-islam ve-olamot ha-shezurim bo (Intertwined Worlds of

Islam: Essays in Memory of Hava Lazarus-Yafeh), ed. Nahem Ilan (Jerusalem, 2002), 328–

32. In a parallel from medieval Christian society, eccleciastical legal sources (canon law) in-

corporated the concept of “furnishing widows, as well as orphans and indigents, with legal

counsel and representation, and, thus, assist them in protecting their personal and property

interests.” James A. Brundage, “Widows and Disadvantaged Persons in Medieval Canon

Law,” in Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval

Europe, ed. Louise Mirrer, 193–206; quotation from p. 195.

Med. Soc., 2:36, in connection with the nagid, the chief Jewish judicial authority (“the

judge of the widows and father of the orphans”), and ibid., 3:295 regarding the practice of

the courts undertaking the care of orphans.

Med. Soc., 2:529n64.

TS 8 J 22.2, line 13: liannaka abu al-aytam wal-aramil.

her woes. They hadn’t eaten bread for three days. “You take the part of

men and those who are able,” she says in her appeal to the elders of the

community, “and I would appreciate it if you would take my part and

provide something I can sustain myself with for the journey. I would then

get up and go to my family in Palestine (Sha’m).”

“A Widow during His Lifetime”: Wives of Absent Husbands

“My husband le[ft me and f]led to Alexandria and left me a ‘widow dur-

ing (his) lifetime’ (armalat al-hayat),” writes a woman whose plight is

emblematic of women thrust into poverty by desertion (Goitein devotes

fully ten pages to “the runaway husband”).

The times were hard for

everybody, she adds. This presumably explained her husband’s ﬂight. She

was nearly blind (“I cannot [dis]tinguish night from day”) and had a

three-year-old daughter. A docket in the margin identiﬁes the case by its

most salient fact: “The wife of Maani who has ﬂed.”

The unusual Arabic locution “a widow during (his) lifetime” is not

unique to this letter, but reﬂects a common situation. Found in Hebrew in

the Bible (almenut hayyut, 2 Samuel 20:3), it stands in for the normal

rabbinic expression, aguna, literally, “anchored,” that is, to the missing

husband because his death cannot be attested—like the English “grass

widow.” A Hebrew letter of recommendation on behalf of an abandoned

wife says she has been “in widowhood during the lifetime (of her hus-

band) (be-almenut hayyut) more than three years.” The “widow” lived in

Damascus (where the letter was penned) and had four children to sup-

port (they are “dying from hunger,” she says). Her husband had con-

verted from Karaism to Rabbanite orthodoxy and had headed for Fustat

for a handout (hence the letter was sent there). She wants him to come

home, or, if he has moved on or is rumored to have died, wants a letter to

that effect. Two eyewitnesses to his death would free her from being “an-

chored” to her marriage and permit her to remarry.

WOMEN AND POVERTY 143

ENA NS 22.7r, cf. Med. Soc., 5:89 and 530n220. Goitein suggests the letter was sent to

the Karaite community, where one turned to the elders, as here, rather than to the judge.

Med. Soc., 3:195–205.

*TS 13 J 18.18.

ENA 3787.10, ed. M. Friedman, Leshonenu 40 (1976), 296–97 (reproduction in Marina

Rustow et al., Scripture and Schism: Samaritan and Karaite Treasures from the Jewish

Theological Seminary Library [New York, 2000], 80). Cf. Med. Soc., 3:199 and 5:371. See

also in a legal document in which a woman testiﬁes about her husband who left her “in wid-

owhood in his lifetime” (be-almenut hayyut); CUL Or 1080 Box 4K.15, lines 4–5.