THE VOICE OF the poor can generally be heard only through records and observations compiled by their literate social superiors, from the tax collector to the inquisitor’s clerk, and from the judge of criminals to the benefactor of the helpless.”¹ What the distinguished historian of poverty and charity, Brian Pullan, says about early modern Italy—an observation that holds true for most of premodern European history and for the Islamic world as well—makes the voices of the poor heard in this book almost unique. Though emanating from one of the marginal groups in world history, the documents translated here...

PRIVATE CHARITY, by its very nature, is not easily observed in other periods and societies in premodern times.¹ In the Islamic case, it can be tracked mainly for rulers and other members of the elite, whose beneficence toward the poor was often recorded in Arabic chronicles.² But the letters of the Geniza open a wide window on this subject and for a much broader range of society. Private charity was sought by people of means who “fell from their wealth” (yored mi-nekhasav, a rabbinic expression found frequently in the Geniza letters) as well as by the working poor who temporarily...

MEDIEVAL AND early modern European historians of the Annales school like to draw a distinction between two general categories of indigence. One is “structural poverty,” the other “conjunctural poverty.” The former pertains to those who live in permanent or chronic destitution, a “structural” state of deprivation in which, for one reason or another, such as ill-health, physical disability, widowhood, or old age, they cannot find work or other dependable means of sustenance. Most beggars fall into this category.

The second type encompasses those for whom poverty or need arises under specific, intermittent circumstances, the result of what the Annalistes call...

MANY OF THE previous letters emanate from foreigners. Jews from outside of Fustat, wayfarers passing through and immigrants, regularly wrote for assistance. Their numbers included refugees from war or other depredations elsewhere, captives ransomed at the port of Alexandria or other cities in the country, proselytes from Christian lands, and simply down-and-outs attracted to Egypt and especially Fustat because of its community’s renown for generosity and its responsive system of public poor relief.

In the nature of things, most of these people had left families back home and lacked in their new locale the succor of the kinship group. To...

AS IN ISLAM, where captives constitute one of the eight classes of people to whom payments are due from the alms tax (zakāt; Sura 9:60); and as in Christianity, where, in the Gospel parable of the Last Judgment (Matthew 25:31–46), aid to captives constitutes one of the six charitable acts ensuring salvation;² so too in Judaism, ransom of captives is considered a paramount charitable miṣva. Captives were especially in need of charity because their fate if not ransomed was slavery, if not worse. Their suffering is already cited in the Talmud as reason for deeming their ransom a preeminent...

DEBT WAS A CHRONIC affliction of the poor in the European Middle Ages, “the poisonous remedy for poverty,” as Michel Mollat calls it.² Like captives, debtors constitute one of the eight categories in Islam to whom the poor-due is to be paid (Sura 9:60), and the Muslim is enjoined to be patient with hard-pressed debtors, even to the extent of remitting what they owe as a charitable act (Sura 2:280).

The documents from the Geniza exhibit the same nexus between debt and poverty among the Jews. We have already seen in several previous letters of the poor how debt and...

TO WHAT EXTENT did Jewish women in medieval Egypt, by virtue of their gender, become victims of poverty, and what strategies did they employ to deal with their plight? The Geniza provides ample opportunity to investigate these questions, particularly because through the letters preserved in this treasure trove we are able to hear the voices of women themselves. These kinds of data are almost entirely absent from Islamic historical sources, where we hear—if we hear at all—about upper-class Muslim women, but virtually nothing about women from the underclass of society. The Geniza, of course, gives us only a...

THOUGH BEST documented in the alms lists and donor registers, which appear in the next two chapters, the Geniza letters also reveal much about the public charity of the community. At the outset it must be noted that public charity in the Geniza world was not nearly so well-differentiated from private philanthropy as was public poor relief in early modern European countries, where population growth, hard economic times, expanding numbers of the urban poor—accompanied by an intensified fear of public begging and vagabondage—as well as new proposals by both Protestants and Catholics to improve social welfare, gave birth...

THE ALMS LISTS and donor lists in the Geniza complement the letters and form, like them, a unique source for social history. Very little of this type of material has survived for other societies in a comparable period.¹ The voices of the poor and of those who helped relieve their poverty resound here as they do in the letters, though they are silent voices that can be made audible with a little historical imagination and thick description. Inert though they appear, the lists divulge much about the dynamics of the Jewish public welfare system.

The documents fall into two categories,...

Dating from the first part of the thirteenth century, this is a typical record of collections (Arabic:jibāya) for public charity. Like accounts of income and distribution (see no. 73), it gives the name of the collector and the week according to the liturgical cycle (the Torah portion). Twenty-seven contributors give a total of 36 1/2 (waraq dirhems). Collections were normally based on pledges. A huge list of 127 individual, household, and business pledges including eleven of the names found on this register shows that some people gave exactly what they pledged there, while others gave more.² Goitein attributes this...

DISPERSED AMONG the Geniza collections is a cache of letters emanating from the office of the nagid Joshua Maimonides, the great-great grandson of Moses Maimonides and head of the Jews of Egypt in the first half of the fourteenth century (he died in 1355).¹ He lived in (New) Cairo and his letters are addressed to the community of Fustat. About twenty of them deal with charity, illustrating aspects of poor relief and the role of the leadership of the community in this enterprise especially in the late period, when the community was economically and otherwise much reduced in significance and...