Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt (review)

Poverty has been a permanent feature of past reality and it will presumably stay with us for quite a while. In this respect, Jewish communities everywhere were no exception and had their own poor. Already some years ago, S. D. Goitein, calculated that in the middle of the twelfth century, of an estimated total of 3,300 Rabbanite Jews of Fustat (Old Cairo), about one in four was on the public dole. Fear of death from starvation is commonplace in the Cairo Geniza, by now the most famous “graveyard of discarded pages.” At the beginning of the thirteenth century economic hardship increased as a result of plagues and famine, as well as migration from Fustat to Cairo, which left behind the poorest of the community. By the fourteenth century impoverishment was in full swing, as reflected in about twenty Geniza “decrees” regarding the poor that were issued by the office of the Nagid.

In its social construction, poverty in the Geniza world was, generally speaking, no different from other societies. There were the chronically poor—those living on the margins who failed to make ends meet, the sick, women, orphans, and foreigners—and there were those who “fell from their wealth” and experienced a crisis. Now Mark Cohen of Princeton, a leading Geniza scholar, has published a pioneering book-length attempt to go beyond such generalizations and comprehensively probe the experience of the poor of the Geniza world and the mechanism developed for their support. On the basis of close to 900 documents, among them more than 300 alms and donor lists, he has produced an excellent and erudite work which is most likely to remain the best research on poverty and charity in the Islamic world of premodern times.

Who were the Jewish poor in medieval Fustat? In the lack of agreed-upon criteria for drawing the dividing line between the poor and non-poor and an ability to apply it to specific individuals, one has to go by the definitions of the Geniza people themselves as echoed in the documents. Thus, when a Jewish man writes that he may have to sell his prayer shawl (talit), it is clear how desperate he was. Obviously, lack of basic food, as complained by one impoverished teacher who could not buy even one loaf of bread, and similar statements about hungry families in petitions coming from the needy, are indisputable evidence. Lack of clothing is another repeated complaint.

Most vulnerable to sudden impoverishment were those who lived at the margins of subsistence, the underclass or low-paid “working poor.” Cohen provides a profile of their occupational composition (pp. 55–59). The onerous annual poll tax imposed by the Islamic state was levied on an individual basis and failure to pay, as in the case of one Hiba b. Zafran, could result in corporal punishment (p. 40). Hence, subsidies for the poll tax were high on the community’s philanthropic agenda and a recurring element in private charity for the poor.

The largest category of the poor featuring on the lists of beneficiaries was that of foreigners hoping to find support in the Fustat community, which was famous for its munificence. The foreign Jewish presence in the city has to be considered in a wider context, since from the mid-eleventh century nearly all the chief communal personalities in the Egyptian capital were newcomers or descendants of recent immigrants. The sheer quantity of names with foreign toponymics, accompanied by the evidence of the letters of the foreign poor, attests to the constant influx of outsiders who found no work with which to sustain themselves and their families. As Cohen points out, the Geniza case emerges more strikingly when compared with early modern England before...