Gender and the Art of Asking: Letters of Request to Distinguished Women Preserved in the Cairo Geniza

Summary

Some of the most exciting discoveries among that embarrassment of riches that is the Cairo Geniza, a rich collection of medieval texts discovered in the Ben Ezra Synagogue at Fustat (Old Cairo), are women's letters. Up until the early modern period, we have no text written by a Jewish woman preserved through traditional channels of transmission. Yet the “sacred trash” stored in this medieval synagogue preserves over two hundred letters composed by women in different languages and spanning several centuries. As Shelomo Dov Goitein, the great scholar of the Geniza, wrote:

In the Jewish books of the past, one learned about women from men. There was, however, one place where the female voice was heard directly and emphatically: in the papers of the Cairo Genizah. Here, Jewish women spoke for themselves.

While the notion of “the female voice” and the argument for its being unmediated certainly require re-examination, the importance of these sources cannot be overstated. In addition to the letters composed by women, usually to men, which have received the bulk of scholarly attention, the Geniza also preserved probably an even greater number of letters written by men to women, a small selection of which form the topic of this essay.

Around forty percent of these letters composed by women are petitions: that is, letters of request addressed to a figure of authority or one possessing means. Women's petitions in the Geniza are typically written to a communal leader with whom the petitioner does not have a close personal relationship, or to the Jewish community at large. Petitions have been at the centre of much research in Geniza studies in the past two decades. Mark Cohen and Marina Rustow have shown how Jews modelled their petitions according to the structure and graphic layout of Arabic petitions to high Fatimid officials. More than simply instruments for communicating need and requesting aid, petitions have also been studied as a key institution for cementing patron-client relationships, expressing recognition of social hierarchies and political legitimacy, as well as a form of social glue in the absence of formal corporations. Put simply, petitions were a key component of the language of power, legitimacy, and belonging, structuring social relationships within the Jewish communities of medieval Egypt as well as in the surrounding Islamic society.