We know you've all been waiting for the next episode of "Cathetergate": @OdedZinger and I have found all but one of the joins! Seven different pieces, and now we know the name of the rogue doctor: Berakhot b. Yeshuʿa. Never loan him a urinary catheter.
geniza.princeton.edu/en/docu…
ALT screenshot of 7 different fragments of medieval paper with Hebrew writing, assembled together like a puzzle
Judaeo-Arabic legal document in which a man named Hibatallāh of Mosul recruits Abū l-Bishr to shake down a rogue doctor who borrowed his urinary catheter(!) and never returned it ⚕️. Old Cairo, 1100–38 CE
Left:
geniza.princeton.edu/en/docu…
Right: google.com/books/edition/Mar…
ALT Medieval manuscript with Hebrew characters on it, and one word boxed ("catheter")
ALT Encyclopedia entry on the term Qathatir ("it is the Greek instrument which makes the discharging of urine possible")
New Geniza article alert! With editions of six Judaeo-Arabic letters from an overbearing father in early 13th-century Alexandria, desperately trying every trick in the book to bring home a runaway son.
researchgate.net/publication…geniza.princeton.edu/en/docu…
ALT ALAN ELBAUM & ODED ZINGER
How to Write a Desperate Letter: Structure versus Spontaneity in Six Letters from an Abandoned Father in Ayyubid Alexandria
You persisted in disobedience and went to Damietta, (and) we sent you twenty letters. Have you no shame? Acquiesce and come! You went up to Fustat, (and) we sent you another twenty letters. (1)
Sometime in the early thirteenth century CE, a young Jewish man named Abū l-Naǧm defied his father Manṣūr b. Sālim and set off from Alexandria, leaving behind him a family business in disarray, an ailing mother, and a father’s pride wounded. From the forty letters that Manṣūr claims to have written to Abū l-Naǧm, three made their way into the Cairo Geniza. Three further letters of Manṣūr addressed to different Jewish notables in Fustat and dealing with his son’s escapade have also been identified in the Geniza. (2) Manṣūr’s letters, probably sent over a period of weeks, are single-minded in their purpose: bringing his son home. The fact that we hav
ALT medieval manuscript covered with Hebrew script
(New publication): University of Pennsylvania Press, will be released on January 17, 2023
"Living with the Law: Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt"
by: Oded Zinger