Legal document: T-S 8J6.8 + T-S 13J30.3

Description

Fragment of a Hebrew deed in which witnesses testify that Ezra b. Shemuel b. Ezra, the representative of the merchants, came to them to complain about his sister, Mubāraka. He asked the witnesses to go and convince her to retract her claim to a share from her father’s inheritance. Hoping for the better settlement, she brought the case before the chief Ismaili qadi in Cairo. The Rabbanite communal leaders of Fustat attempted to settle the sister’s case preemptively by offering her the same inheritance she would have received in an Islamic court. Begins in the middle of the elders’ admonitions to the girl (Mubaaraka) not to seek redress in an Islamic court. Meanwhile, the military police of the Fatimids (rijjaala) took Mubaaraka’s brother to the qaadii to have him surrender her share, “and she mocked him,” or perhaps gloated over his defeat (the wording is unclear). “She, for her part, is standing by her word and in her audacity is demanding her father’s inheritance from her brother in a gentile court,” it continues. “She has roughly five men supporting her, and they are hardly God-fearing. What we know of the matter we have written in our testimony in order to bring him [her brother] to [justice in] the majlis of our lord, head of the academy, may his Rock sustain him, to do what will bring him closer to his Rock.” And thus they ordered Mubaaraka’s brother to be remanded to the court of Yoshiyahu b. Aharon Gaon, . Five signatures still remain on the document, four of people known from other documents to be involved in both Qaraite and Rabbanite affairs. (Oded Zinger, Women, Gender, and Law, 346, 349.) EMS. Join: Oded Zinger.