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  • Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt
  • James William Brodman
Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt, by Mark R. Cohen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 312 pp. $39.50.

This illuminating study of private and public charity centers upon the large Jewish community of medieval Cairo at the height of its size and prosperity, 969–1250. While using material drawn from European Christian, Middle Eastern Islamic sources, and Jewish biblical and post-biblical writings, the evidentiary heart of this monograph is a collection of nearly nine hundred documentary fragments from the Cairo Geniza that record the inner workings of private and public charity within this community. The author, Mark Cohen, argues that this evidence (published separately as The Voice of the Poor in the Middle Ages: An Anthology of Documents from the Cairo Geniza, 2005) allows him to probe "the lived experience of the poor and the mechanics of charity."

The eight chapters begin with a taxonomy of charity that makes a fundamental distinction between structural or chronic poverty and temporary or conjunctural need. This reflects two fundamentally different categories among the poor: those of good family or reputation who sought limited assistance and a class of the permanent poor who had to rely upon a public dole. Cohen next turns to community priorities that departed from the biblical preference in favor of the stranger for practices that privileged family and friends. Yet, given its size and prosperity, Cairo was, nonetheless, a magnet for a variety of outsiders who are the subject of Chapter Two. In Chapter Three, the captive, [End Page 188] often a victim of pirates or Crusaders, emerges as the victim most worthy of assistance, although not for the reasons that Jarbel Rodriguez has discovered among medieval Christians. If the latter were concerned about the possibility of apostasy, medieval Jews worried about the maltreatment and enslavement of their coreligionists. Refugees and proselytes (mostly converts to Judaism from Christianity) were also preferred recipients of charity among those foreign to the Cairo community.

Chapter Four identifies debt and the poll tax levied upon all Jews by the Muslim state as significant reasons for episodic poverty. The tax was a particular burden upon the working poor as well as upon the aged and disabled because in Cairo its payment was the responsibility of the individual and not the community. Further, despite the rulings of Muslim jurists, the poor were often not exempted from the obligation of payment. The poverty of women is addressed in Chapter Five, this condition often a byproduct of widowhood or divorce. Because husbands often failed to provide the contracted marriage portion, women would be forced on the public dole absent a father or brother willing to support them. Chapter Six describes the meager diet consumed by the poor, their urgent need for clothing, and the inadequacy of the public dole as the sole source of support for any individual.

Chapter Seven takes up the prejudice against begging and the community's efforts to afford the individual a more dignified path to assistance. The letter of petition, which Cohen argues was seen by contemporaries as both honorable and dignified, afforded victims of episodic poverty a discreet method to seek temporary help from private individuals, while the public dole assured a minimum sustenance even for the very destitute without the shame of begging.

The variety of charitable assistance is described in Chapter Eight: anonymous gifts, wills, pious foundations, public collections for victims of captivity, responses to personal appeals. Absent from this list, however, are the sort of private associations, such as confraternities, that were common in Europe, even within some Jewish communities. Given the relatively compact size of the Cairo community, however, there was a great deal of interplay between private charity and the public dole, which was supported by quasi-voluntary contributions from everyone in the community except the chronically poor themselves.

In the final chapter, Cohen assesses the continuity of these customs with Jewish tradition and the impact that the dominant Muslim society might have had upon them. Most basically, Cohen sees an abiding continuity with both the biblical and post-biblical commitment to charity and to...

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