Hybrid Judeo-Persian and Arabic Correspondence: Eight Documents from the Cairo Genizah, edited by Ofir Haim, Andreas Kaplony, Maximilian Kinzler, and Ludwig Paul, has been published. This 115-page volume presents an analysis and critical edition of eight manuscript documents that had previously remained unpublished and are part of the Cairo Genizah collection.

“Cairo Geniza” are named the more than 300,000 documents, which were presented in the late 19th. were found in a storeroom of the Ben Esra Synagogue in Old Cairo and today become part of the manuscript collections of important libraries in St. Petersburg, Cambridge, Paris etc. Among other things, they contain important documents on the history of medieval Judaism and the social and economic history of the Mediterranean in 10-13. century. In addition to thousands of private and business letters written in Arabic (Hebrew and Arabic scripts), there are also approx. 25 documents in Jewish-Persian, that is, in Persian written in Hebrew. Due to the immense difficulties of their philological indexing, only a few of these have been published so far. This publication edited eight of these documents, which were previously largely unpublished. They are partly dated to the time around the turn of the millennium (991–1002 n.) and contain place names such as e.g. Baghdad and Basra. They contain two sides of a Jewish-Persian and Arab trader notebook and several letters, of which two petitions are particularly interesting, since it is a Jewish-Persian version and its almost literal translation into Arabic. The mixture of Jewish-Persian and Arabic in all eight documents gathered here provided the occasion to publish them in a joint volume. This mix of languages also reflects that the authors of the letters belonged to a wide network of Jewish and Arab merchants, which included the Tustari and Ibn Awkal families.

The table of contents of the book is as follows:

INTRODUCTION

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

EDITIONS

L4r: Two Judeo-Persian and Arabic Entries from a Merchant’s Notebook

L4v: An Arabic Table on the Arrival of Merchandise

L5r: A Judeo-Persian Letter to the Leaders of the Congregation, to Force a

Business Partner to Pay an Outstanding Amount

L5v: An Arabic Letter to Two High-Ranking Persons, to Force a Business Partner to Pay an Outstanding Amount

L6r: An Arabic and Judeo-Persian Business Letter

L6v: Two Arabic Entries from a Merchant’s Notebook

L8r: A Judeo-Persian and Arabic Business Letter Asking to Resume Business Relations

L12rv: A Judeo-Persian and Arabic Report to a Business Partner

APPENDICES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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