ثيقة شرعيّة: NLI Ar. 722

الوصف

Arabic legal deed confirming the sale of half of a house from a father to his son, and the son's daughter. The sale was made on Shaʿbān 839 AH (March 1436), and the confirmation was on 3rd Dhū al-Qaʿda 841 (April 1438). The house stands in "Ḥārat Zuwayla, in the alley of Ibn Samīḥ in the ʿĀshūrīyya". The property borders the wall of the Madrasa al-ʿĀshūrīyya. The name of the alley, Ibn Samīḥ, is after the Qaraite synagogue located in the said alley, near the madrasa, as is known from other documents and from al-Maqrizi’s Khitat. On the back side are further notices confirmed in court of further ownership of the asset – in 1468 the daughter bought from her father his share, so she owns now half of the entire asset; she immediately sold her entire share to ʿAbd Allah b. Ibrahim b. Ṣadaqa known as Ibn Ṣafar, the Rabbanite Jew; in 1499 this owner sold the house to his son and to his nephew in equal parts, they are identified as Qaraite Jews (the nephew then transfers his part to his sister); in 1506 the sister sold her part, half of the house, to another Qaraite woman named Sarah bnt. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq b. ʿAbd al-Wāḥid known as Ibnat al-Ḥawwāsh; in July 1517 the same woman bought the second half of the house from the son of Ibn Safar mentioned above in 1499; in 1535 she sold the house to two other Qaraite women. A note on verso in later Judeo-Arabic script describes the property as "in the alley of Dār Samīḥ, known by the Synagogue and the madrasa al-ʿĀshūrīyya" (פי זקאק דאר סמיח וישהר באלכניס ובאל מדרסה אלעאשוריה). The document was in the possesion of the Qaraite community of Cairo in the Dār Simḥa synagogue in Ḥārat Zuwayla and was documented there by D. S. Richards in 1969, who later published the description of all the documents he found there in his 1972 article (as document no. VI). It is fully transcribed in the appendix of the article. Today the document is at the National Library of Israel.