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Chapter 16 - Family Life in Genizah Society

from Part II - Social and Institutional History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2021

By
Miriam Frenkel
Edited by
Phillip I. Lieberman
Phillip I. Lieberman
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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Summary

This chapter deals with family life in the Jewish society of the medieval Islamic world, which is mainly reconstructed on the basis of Genizah finds. It starts with a short survey about the ways in which family, kinship, and pedigree were conceived in this society, and then it goes on to speak about the functions expected and fulfilled by family members. The next paragraph examines the boundaries of the family, focusing on the special role occupied by domestic slaves. Thereafter, I will examine the institution of marriage: its roles, the legal processes required to establish and to end it, and its structure, including a short discussion about polygyny. The chapter ends with a description of the relations between family members as they surface in Genizah documents: spousal relations, relations between parents and children at various ages, and among siblings.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Judaism , pp. 540 - 568
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

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Frenkel, Miriam. “Adolescence in Jewish Medieval Society under Islam,” Continuity and Change 16, 2 (2001), 263–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Friedman, Mordechai A. “The Ethics of Medieval Jewish Marriage,” in Goitein, S. D., ed., Religion in a Religious Age (Cambridge, 1974), 83–102.Google Scholar
Friedman, Mordekhai A. “The Ransom Divorce: Divorce Proceedings Initiated by the Wife in Medieval Jewish Practice,” Israel Oriental Studies 6 (1976), 288–307.Google Scholar
Friedman, Mordekhai A. Jewish Marriage in Palestine: A Cairo Geniza Study, 2 vols. (New York, 1980).Google Scholar
Friedman, Mordekhai A. Jewish Polygyny in the Middle Ages: New Documents from the Cairo Geniza [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1986).Google Scholar
Friedman, Mordekhai A. “On Marital Age, Violence and Mutuality as Reflected in the Genizah Documents,” in Reif, Stefen C., ed., The Cambridge Genizah Collections: Their Contents and Significance (Cambridge, 2002), 160–77.Google Scholar
Goitein, S. D. A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley, 1967–93).Google Scholar
Krakowski, Eve. Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perry, Craig. “The Daily Life of Slavery and the Global Reach of Slavery in Medieval Egypt 969–1250 CE” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2014).Google Scholar
Zinger, Oded. “Women, Gender, and Law: Marital Disputes according to Documents from the Cairo Geniza” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2014).Google Scholar

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