Legal document: Yevr. II A 463/1

Description

Legal document on vellum for the sale of properties in the Karaite quarter. In Hebrew. Location: Cairo. Dated: Final third of [Teve]t 5458 AM, which is 1697/98 CE. Tevet can be inferred given that no other AM month ends in ת, the only visible letter in the scan. One of the witness signatures is the Rabbanite scribe Gavriel Conforte. The document concerns the sale of a large qāʿa in the Qaraite neighborhood of Cairo and associated properties: half of a courtyard, an upper-story apartment within the building, a well, among other related real estate. The early lines reference a prior transaction connected to the properties between the seller Shemuʾel Arubas and buyer Moshe Kohen ʿElun, the latter appears in a variety of late seventeenth-century fragments: T-S K22.27, record #30 (PGPID 40969), T-S K22.27, record #15 (PGPID 40954). The witnesses to the prior document were Shemuʾel Ben-Naʿīm and Moshe Sho[mer?], perhaps the same scribe known elsewhere from the late 1600s in Cairo (BL OR 5542.1 - PGPID 6205). Moshe Kohen ʿElun now sells the properties to the brothers Yosef and Avraham b. Raḥamīm Zagadon for 15,000 medin. This document must have been the Zagadon brothers' copy given that Moshe Kohen ʿElun signs as the consenting party. It is unclear why this fragment found its way into the Dār Simḥa geniza, given that none of the associated legal parties are listed as members of the Karaite community (as is commonly the case with Rabbanite legal documents that were accidentally preserved at the Dār Simḥa Synagogue). MCD.