'Wisdom and greatness in one place'
the Alexandrian trader Moses ben Judah and his circle
by Dotan Arad, Esther-Miriam Wagner, University of Cambridge. Faculty of Asia..., and Open Book Publishers
"The manuscript collections of the Bodleian Library contain a corpus of dozens of documents from the archive of Moses ben Judah. A leader of the Jewish community in Alexandria, he was also a prominent businessman and in contact with individuals from Cairo to Sicily. This collection of documents at the Bodleian likely did not emerge from the Cairo Genizah, but from another depository, and appears to have been buried at some point. The documents, which include letters and deeds, shed light on the world of the Jewish elite of a Mediterranean city at the end of the Middle Ages, their communal and business life, connections between Jewish communities, and intellectual trends and tastes among educated Jews. They improve our understanding of the lives of Alexandrian Jews in the late Middle Ages and provide new data about the local leadership and its relations with the Nagidate (the central Jewish leadership) in Cairo, the cantors, the poll tax and its effects, and more. We hear about tensions within this society and the growing presence of European (Italian, Greek, Iberian, and conversos) Jews within the complex social mosaic of Egyptian Jewry in the late Mamluk period. The documents inform us about Alexandria's Jewish community and the commercial networks of the Mediterranean world, in which Jews traded alongside Christians and Muslims. This volume makes an important contribution to the study of Judaeo-Arabic at a watershed moment. Sources from the late Mamluk period show Judaeo-Arabic at a linguistic border between Classical and Late Judaeo-Arabic. The volume will therefore further readers' knowledge of historical linguistics of Arabic in general, and Judaeo-Arabic in particular. The phrase 'Wisdom and Greatness in One Place' in the title of the book is a quotation from the Babylonian Talmud (Giṭṭin 59a), the meaning of which is that it is rare to find combined in one man political leadership and intellectual pre-eminence."--Publisher's website.
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'Wisdom and greatness in one place': the Alexandrian trader Moses ben Judah and his circle
2025, Open Book Publishers
electronic resource /
in English and Hebrew
1805110713 9781805110712
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Edition Notes
Available through Open Book Publishers.
At head of front cover: Cambridge Semitic languages and cultures.
At foot of cover: University of Cambridge, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 481-513) and indexes.
Open access resource providing free access.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. For more detailed information consult the publisher's website.
Chiefly in English with some Hebrew.
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