Letter: CUL Or.1080 J70 + CUL Or.1080 J179

Description

Letter(s) sent from Qūṣ to Fustat. Sender and addressee (called only Sayyidnā) remain unidentified. Two fragments, with another piece still missing in between them (if they are a join). In Judaeo-Arabic. Opens with eloquent blessings for the addressee, including a citation of Joshua 1:5. The sender reports that the addressee's letter finally arrived in Qūṣ 50 days after it was sent. From that letter, he learned about what happened to Abū l-Ṭāhir b. Nānū, perhaps the death of a son. In the lower fragment, he conveys condolences for two different people he calls Sayyidnā (one has multiple children and one has one son; one of them is presumably the addressee himself). In a postscript, he asks the addressee to convey his condolences to the Nagid David I Maimonides (active ca. 1237–1300), and to his brother, and to Rabbenu Ḥayyim. (Both the Nagid and Ḥayyim are also called Sayyidnā.) See Goitein's article and his edition of the lower fragment for a discussion of who the deceased might be. The fact that both the Nagid David and R. Ḥayyim receive condolences for the same individual suggests that they might have been in-laws. There might also be multiple bereavements. (Information in part from Goitein's attached notes.) Likely join: Alan Elbaum. NB: the join is not certain because it is not continuous; Amir Ashur and M. A. Friedman suspect that these are actually two different letters of condolence written by the same scribe, CUL Or.1080 J70 the upper part of a letter and CUL Or.1080 J179 the lower part of a different letter. The crease marks do show that the two pieces were folded up in different ways. The scribe may be the same as in T-S 18J4.7 (PGPID 8127), ENA 2727.26 (PGPID 11970) (where we learn his name Mufaḍḍal b. Abū Saʿd and that he wrote letters on behalf of other people), and T-S AS 170.233 (PGPID 38432).