| dc.description.abstract | In this thesis, I examine legal documents of the Jewish community in the Cairo Geniza from c.1000 to 1150 CE to investigate the gap between loan agreements and actual repayment streams in medieval Egypt under Fatimid rule. I present a re-examination of five transcriptions and then provide original translations and analyses of a combination of loan agreements, a court record of debt settlements, and a debt acknowledgment document, all of which also served as witness testimonies. In this analysis, I highlight the asymmetry of silences in such documentary evidence to argue that these granular pieces of economic history are key to a more comprehensive picture of how everyday lived experiences of the Jews diverged from the normative Rabbinic laws in early eleventh- to mid-twelfth-century Islamic Egypt.
By interrogating Jewish socioeconomic and legal vocabularies drawing from Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Judeo-Arabic in these documents, I underscore the medieval Jewish legal system’s mediating role between debtors and creditors that leaned in favor of the latter. While previous scholarship has studied the medieval Rabbinic court’s “norm-educating” role in the context of medieval partnership contracts, indicative of the dominant voices in them, I scrutinize the legal documents’ formulaic and functional structures from the early to later Fatimid periods to account for the near voicelessness of the debtor in the documentary Geniza. I also emphasize the involvement of third parties in the settlement agreements in addition to the debtors and creditors. These include judges, witnesses, and ‘elders’ of the Jewish community, who typically had a more sympathetic attitude towards creditors.
The project thus traces a philologically and materially grounded history of the socially embedded nature of the geniza economy, where economic transactions were impacted by the social and legal nexus in place. Hence, examining the interstices of the recto and verso sides of the documents helps this thesis explore the archival silences in the Geniza. | |
