Legal document: CUL Or.1080 J290

Description

Legal document. Location: Cairo. Dated: end of Tishrei 1351 Seleucid (October 1039 CE). Ṭoviyya b. Yefet ha-Levi and ʿAllūn b. Faraj testify that on the eve of Passover 1350 Seleucid (April 1039 CE), they were present in the house of Sulaymān b. Isḥāq b. Meʾir in New Cairo, when the latter declared that the cantor Khalaf b. Ibrāhīm was free to serve the community and to act as ritual slaughterer, and that Khalaf was no longer subordinate to him. Sulaymān and Khalaf had previously had a legal agreement (qinyan) that Khalaf could not do anything without Sulaymān's permission. The witness ʿAllūn b. Faraj states that there was never a formal qinyan between Sulaymān and Khalaf but rather a muʿāmala; from the context, this must mean something like "informal agreement." A third witness—Salāma b. Nisan ha-Kohen—remembers the event as having taken place in another person's house; his testimony is witnessed by Naḥum b. Ḥayyim. The validation is signed by the judges Efrayim b. Shemarya, Avraham b. Mevasser and Yefet b. David. Goitein suggests that the Khalaf b. Ibrahīm mentioned in this document is the same one who appears in T-S 18J1.6 (PGPID 3523); Lieberman disagrees. (Information in part from Goitein's index card.) Lieberman understands this document very differently, interpreting the term mufāwaḍa as meaning "partnership" rather than "argument" and speculating that Sulaymān may have been the senior partner in an unspecified business partnership with Ṭoviyya, ʿAllūn, and Khalaf. He suggests that Ṭoviyya and ʿAllūn demanded a payout from the partnership, to be distributed by Sulaymān, who refused, claiming that Ṭoviyya and ‘Allūn have received their final settlements, and that Khalaf is free from his obligations to them. Sulaymān and Khalaf terminate their relationship, and the April document is given to Khalaf as proof. ‘Allūn's attestation that Sulaymān and Khalaf had “a joint enterprise (mu‘āmala) and not a qinyan”, complicating the understanding of partnership models in this period; the difference between a mufāwaḍa and a mu‘āmala (or between either of these and a qinyan) is unclear. Immediately below, in different handwriting, appears the testimony of Salāma b. Nissan ha-Kohen to Sulaymān that he (Salama) has made the same statement in a different location, at the home of an elder. In yet another handwriting, the document validates the signatures of Tuviyya and ‘Allūn in the permanent court in Fusṭāṭ some months after their initial testimony was recorded in the home of Sulaymān in Cairo. (Information from Lieberman, "A Partnership Culture", 281–84)