Literary text: ENA 2727. 4a

Description

Notes on the birth of a son, dating: 1129 or 1130. Written in calligraphic script on a special piece of paper. A space of about eight lines is left blank between the two notes. The happy father was Abī ʿAlī Ezekiel b. Nethanel Ibn al-Dimyāṭī, the brother of the scholarly India trader Ḥalfōn b. Nethanel. Ḥalfōn was a bachelor and took his nephew Abū l-Fakhr, the boy listed above, into his business. Since that happened in the 1140s, the date of the first note written above must have been 1129 or 1130, for only in those two years did the Muslim and Jewish months mentioned coincide. Abū l-Fakhr probably was named after his maternal grandfather; it is very likely that “Lady Overcoming” had stipulated this at her marriage. The erratic way in which these notes were written explains perhaps why so few of them have survived. From Med. Soc., III, 230–31, 475 fn. 47.