Woman on Fatimid bowl - (Smithsonian)
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Today, the topic is a story that reaches us through a particular trove of historical documents, something I’ve touched on among the bonus episodes but not, I think, here on the main podcast. Those documents were part of a collection referred to in the late 19th century as “a battlefield of books, a battle in which the literary productions of many centuries had their share.” One observer describing its contents, said that “For centuries, whitewash has tumbled upon them from the walls and ceiling; the sand of the desert has lodged in their folds and wrinkles; water from some unknown source has drenched them; they have squeezed and hurt each other.”
That same collection was described rather more recently as “a kind of holy junk heap.”
There were many steps, many intriguing figures, in the story of how that collection was—I will not say discovered, for there were certainly those who knew it was there—how it was brought to light and brought to be studied, and that story is a good one, but it’s not one we’ll focus on today. That “holy junk heap,” located in Fustat, Egypt, was what is known as the Cairo Geniza, a kind of storehouse of all kinds of documents, and our story today is one of many that have emerged from it.
It’s a story of an uncommon business woman whose life reaches us in textual bullet points, tantalizingly few of them, but enough to show us something of her great wealth, her spirit, generosity, and strength, enough to paint us a picture that is quite unique.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, which is to say that this is the history podcast that generally follows those journeys through that world and the history around them. And it is a podcast with a Patreon, one on which you can find extra, ad-free, and early listening, all for as little as a dollar a month, or as much as makes sense for you. Today, I want to particularly thank newest patrons Oscar Rodriguez and Rich Clark for their generous support.
And now, back to the story.
Today, that story is one that by necessity takes shape out of pieces. There is no fully fleshed narrative to easily take up, no detailed record or writing left by our subject themselves from which to work. Instead, there are snapshots. There are legal documents found in the Cairo Geniza there among that vast collection, and I do mean vast, with 400,000 documents being the number that is sometimes given. The geniza of the Ben Ezra Synagogue was a collection of sacred writings, holy writings, as such a place would generally hold, but in this case also correspondence, contracts, court records, merchants’ accounts, scholarly exercises, and literary material, really anything of Hebrew lettering, much of it incomplete, fragmented, but of such great quantities as to communicate a wealth of information about Jewish life in the medieval period and beyond, and not just strictly in Egypt or even in that period, going as far for forward and afield as an 1879 Bombay divorce, though that is not what this episode is about.
Today, our story takes us to late-11th and early-12th-century Fustat, to old Cairo. That places us in the political centre of the Fatimid Caliphate there, and into its final hundred years. By the end of the 12th century, Maimonides would be there. Salah ad-Din would be there and the Ayyubid Dynasty too, putting an end to Fatimid rule, but not yet as we reach the city. The Fatimid Dynasty, claiming its origins in the house of Ali, still reigned and ruled over Egypt, but it was in decline, no longer stretching west along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa to Morocco, no longer stretching across the water to Sicily, no longer reaching up the coast of Palestine and Syria or down that of Arabia.
Recent history had seen the steady encroachment of the Seljuks, an assault that had been turned back before the even more recent First Crusade that had torn Jerusalem among other holdings from Fatimid control. Our main character would have been born in the time of the long-reigning Fatimid Caliph al-Mustansir Billah, but she would see the 7-year reign of his son, and then see rule passed to his son, only 5 years old at the time, power held in this later period by the vizier al-Afdal. But our story today is not so much about the doings of kings, caliphs, or viziers.
Today, our story is about a Jewish woman named Wuhsha al-dallala, though that was not the name she was born with.
Wuhsha had been brought into this world as Karīma, meaning “the dear one,” and she was brought into a quite comfortable place in that world. Her father was an Alexandrian banker named ‘Ammār, the son of Ezra the Rosh ha-Qahal, or Head of the Community, but that didn’t leave her with as much initial wealth as one might expect. Perhaps that was because her father also had two sons and at least two other daughters to provide for.
The name she would come to be known by, the one by which I introduced her, carried its own meaning. “Wuhsha” was a term of endearment meaning “the desired one” or “one without whom one feels lonely.” “Al-dallala” was a term referring to her work, “the broker,” though she seems as much as anything to have been a banker, a lender, or, as she’s described in Hoffman and Cole’s book Sacred Trash a, quote, “sort of private pawn broker.”
Her life, as I mentioned, comes through to us in splinters, bones around which we might imagine a full-bodied life. Fortunately, there are at least a few of those splinters, and S.D. Goitein, foremost expert on these sources, did a great deal of work to locate them and bring them together for us.
We know for example that Wuhsha did not remain in Alexandria, for we have her marrying in Fustat to a man named Arye ben Yehudah. He was a stranger to Fustat himself, a Sicilian, and apparently a man of few means, for he brought only a very small gift to the marriage, even given the low expectations for the man entering a marriage when compared to bride’s dowry. Goitein wondered if her inclination to be, quote, “too independent” might already have lowered her chances for a better, or at least richer, marriage. Perhaps that same independence had already allowed her to achieve such a position that she did not particularly care if the groom had his own wealth, though I have elsewhere seen it supposed that the marriage was on some sort of emergency basis.
We know that in any case the union would not last, ending in early 1095, for we have the fragment of a transaction that refers to her as a divorcee and a document that tells us of Arye then marrying another woman, though, again, not for very long. We know that Wuhsha’s marriage to Arye would result in a daughter, perhaps the cause of the marriage itself, a girl named Sitt Ghazāl, or “Lady Gazelle,” who we later see buying half a house in 1132 and referred to there as the daughter of al-Wuhsha. Documents long after Wuhsha’s death would tell of her relations, even distant ones, by their connection to her, for such was her impact on her immediate world. Such are the sort of pieces in which her life is sketched out for us.
Enough of these documents, these pieces, have come down to us to paint something of a picture of Jewish women’s lives in medieval Fustat. Letters, including one written to Maimonides from his sister Miriam. Marriage contracts, details as to brides’ possessions or divorces, court appearances, wills, gifts, transactions, domestic disputes, and more. You see a little of the work of other Jewish women of Wuhsha’s time and place: spinning, weaving, dying, working within the home, and the selling of these textiles, the business of the marketplace. They engaged in commerce, generally on a small scale, in money lending, medicine, and in limited cases, in the trade. You see a dealer in Hebrew books. You see women in disputes with their husbands over control of their own income.
But among this collection of sources from the Cairo Geniza, none appear so often as Wuhsha does. None, understanding “absence of evidence…” and so on, appear so successful as she was. She was a fascinating figure, enough so that the family of Goitein, the scholar who I mentioned before, remembers him frequently talking about her, every bit as if he had just run into her in town that morning and had fresh gossip to pass along. Certainly, there was plenty to gossip about.
There was, to start with, her conspicuous financial success. Her status as a woman working as an independent broker did not make her uncommon, but her status as an incredibly wealthy one certainly did. By the time of her last will, we see that she’d amassed nearly 700 dinars, a very substantial amount given that just 2 would make for a comfortable monthly income, given that this then amounted to enough for nearly three decades of life in retirement. Some 300 of these dinars were actually in gold that she kept hidden at home, some 60 left deposited with a woman named Ikhtiyār.
As for how she made at least part of that wealth, we see in that will that she was owed money by those she’d given loans, and in a court record from 1104 we see a snapshot of some of her other business activities. The document mentions a trading venture in which she was involved, one from which 22 camel loads had already arrived, but it was more directly concerned with another bit of business.
One of her brothers had been part of a 3-merchant and 800-dinar venture to Gujarat, India, to purchase lac resin, the product of insect secretion used in wood finishing, dyes, and cosmetics. They took a well travelled route, increasingly so for Mediterranean Jewish traders from about the 10th century onward, bringing spices, dyes, metals, textiles, aromatics, and vessels of brass and bronze, but it was not without risk, not without many possibilities for trouble at sea or on land, and her brother and another merchant had never returned, both murdered on their journey home in the Red Sea port of Aydhab. Wuhsha had been an investor in her brother’s portion of the expedition, a common enough practice, and to claim her share would sue the only surviving merchant of the trio, a well-known trader by the name of Joseph Lebdi. 300 dinars of the purchased goods had since been sold, and three years had passed.
This lengthy delay was likely caused by the difficulty of extracting the dead men’s goods from the government of Aydhab, which would certainly have claimed the possessions of any foreign merchants dying in their territory. There was also the issue that the three merchants had carried a wide variety of goods with them and there was some uncertainty as to whether these were also included in the partnership, a complication that would again raise legal questions another three years later regarding the belongings of the second dead merchant, the one not related to our protagonist.
Something of Wuhsha’s wealth, we see in records such as these and in her will. Something of her dealings with money, we see in a 1098 court document concerning an encounter at the synagogue that was witnessed by a teacher named Moses, and by the sextant’s brother, among others. In the spring of that year, Wuhsha had presented herself and asked to see the judge, for she’d been summoned, she said, and she wanted to know why. For what reason had she been troubled? A man named ‘Ulla ha-Levi had appealed against her, she was told, or rather she was reminded. She’d been asked already to appear with him before the court, and having failed to do so, she was told, she “deserved a public notification and warning.”
At this, Wuhsha scoffed. She waved it away with impatience. As was witnessed, written down, and signed to as truth, she dismissed such minor matters as a waste of her time. “What do I owe to Mr ‘Ulla that he should make such a claim against me?” she asked. “All that is due to him from me is five qīrāts. For five qīrāts he makes such a fuss.”
The matter was too trivial for Wuhsha to bother with. One might wonder if it was not simply convenient for her to behave as if it were, it always being a lot easier to laugh off a debt as unimportant and unworthy of your attention when you’re the one owing the money, but in this case her imperiousness does seem to reflect her disdain for the smallness of the matter at hand, even perhaps for the authority of the judge that summoned her. Evidently, Mr ‘Ulla, known through his frequent appearance elsewhere in these sources as one of the more prominent members of the community, still thought it worth pursuing.
Her public performance of a carefree attitude to money aside, the document is an example of her friction with authority, but not friction that results in her portrayal as being stubborn or insolent, something that was a fairly commonplace occurrence in the records of women who appear before the court in these sources. This was a society in which Maimonides would soon be writing that a woman should perhaps only leave the home about two times a month, the sort of restriction or normative suggestion of modesty, or hiddenness, that seems not to have affected Wuhsha herself all that much.
The document is also interesting in that it shows us she was known to the three judges who were present. Otherwise, as Goitein points out, such a record would certainly have included the standard phrase, “after the establishment of her true identity,” but in her case, that preliminary step was completely unnecessary. There was no need to establish her identity, for everyone knew who she was already.
As to why that was, we’ll get into that after this short break.
…
Our Wuhsha wasn’t widely known just because of that earlier divorce of hers, something which was not totally uncommon. It was in part because of her position as a very publicly active businesswoman who went most of her life unmarried, and was, in addition this, because of a hint of scandal about her personal life, a publicly known hint and enough to reach us now in writing. Something which was to have happened about the time of her divorce.
It comes to us from yet another court record, this one from years after Wuhsha’s own death, this one concerning her son Abū Sa’d. He had not been born from her brief marriage to Arye, and he had sought to establish that his birth, while irregular, was not of the sort to disqualify his own marriage to a Jewish woman. Two witnesses had been brought forth to tell his story, the story of a man named Hassūn from Ascalon, a city fallen to the first crusade, and the story of Wuhsha herself, who, it seems, anticipated that something of the sort might one day happen and was entirely capable of handling matters on behalf of that son as yet unborn.
The first witness was a man, by that time an elder, named Abu ‘Alā Japheth. He remembered a day, clearly many years earlier, when he had sat in the company of the cantor Hillel ben Eli, since dead. It was the cantor who Wuhsha had come to see, for she had long known him, the man who had written her marriage contract and would also write her will, the man whose son in law would, years later, take down this very record.
Wuhsha had wanted advice. She had had an affair with Hassūn, she said, the “affair” sometimes characterized in translation more along the lines of a “falling in with,” a “getting stuck with,” a “quagmire,” or simply a “slept with.” Either way, she was pregnant. They had contracted a marriage before a Muslim notary, but she was worried that he would deny that the child, soon to be her son Abū Sa’d, was his. What, she had come to ask the cantor, should she do, and the cantor had practical advice. He had told her that what she required was witnesses to support her assertions, people who might then take her side should it come to it. He had told her that she should gather such people and have them “surprise” her with Hassūn so that they could verify what she said. The second witness, the ritual slaughterer Abu Sa'id Halfon ha-Kohen, tells the court how it went when she followed this advice.
“I was living in the house of Hibat Allah ibn al-Sukkarī—may God accept him with favour,” he said, the family name he referenced a common one referring to a maker and seller of sugar. I was living “on the ground floor for many years,” he went on, “while al-Wuhsha, the broker, had her domicile in the uppermost part of the house. In those days she came down once to one of the tenants, namely Abū Nasr, the Kohen, the cantor ibn al-Kāmukhī [meaning the son of the preparer of vinegar sauce], and to Abraham the Jerusalemite, known as the son of the Murahhit, [the performer of a type of poetry], and said to them ‘Please, come up to my place for something.’ The two of them went up with her and found Hassūn sitting in her apartment …”
And with that the manuscript breaks off into illegibility with some mention of “wine and perfumes,” details as to the circumstances in which they found Hassūn, perhaps among others since lost, but even with what survives, it’s a document with much to tell us, not least of which is of her housing situation, there in that apartment building above the second witness, something which was quite unusual for a woman of her financial means. It was maybe even enough so to say “eccentric,” but it does allow us the opportunity to imagine the scene as something of a sitcom, a few of the characters gathering around in one of their apartments and then another rushing in from hers to announce that she had a problem that needed solving, the group trooping upstairs to find Hassūn in his “wine and perfumes.”
That first witness went on to speak of how her pregnancy with Hassūn was thus confirmed, a pregnancy he described as resulting from “illicit relations,” though not so illicit that the boy born from it should be ineligible for Jewish marriage. It is that illicit relationship that then explains what he goes on to say. He recalls that she had later been in attendance at the synagogue on Yom Kippur, and that when she had been noticed, she had been expelled, had been very publicly banished from the synagogue by the man who was also head of the Jews in the Fatimid Empire until 1094, maybe a year or so prior to these events.
So there was that hint of scandal I mentioned, that irregularity in her personal life that had led her to marry before a Muslim notary. It’s worth noting here, as something of an aside, that Jews, including Jewish women, of this period and place did have the option of bringing cases and concerns before the Muslim authorities, an action that would sometimes bring results other than appealing to their own. As for this case of the Muslim notary, it is something that is often read as meaning that Hassūn had another wife back in Ascalon, in which case he still could have married again with permission of the first wife, which she either refused to give or was not asked for. Sometimes, it has been read as meaning that she lied about marrying Hassūn at all, leading many writers to describe her as having her child “out of wedlock.” She would, unless she had already then divorced him by that point, have had to include him in her will, something which she certainly didn’t do.
In any case, this was evidently not the sort of irregularity that led to ostracization, not by the cantor she’d asked for advice, a court scribe no less, and not, it seems, by the others, the members of the community who willingly aided her in establishing her son’s legal standing. Not, quite probably, by the community of that synagogue which she’d been publicly expelled from, for she would leave it a healthy contribution in her will, a document which, fortunately for us, we have.
The will is undated, but the date of its creation is not a complete mystery to us, and is generally estimated at around the turn of the century. There’s what we know of the man who recorded the document, the cantor Hillel who also advised her on her pregnancy and whose writing features frequently in the geniza documents in the years just prior to 1100 but never from then on, when, given what is known of when his career started, he is thought to have died. There’s the information it contains about her son not yet having begun to learn his prayers, something he would have done by 5 or 6, though the will may have been produced when he was much younger than that.
The will, as a document, consists of 4 pages, 70 short lines of Arabic detailing who should get what and what should be done. “Main points of the will of Wuhsha, the Broker,” it begins. “To my brother shall be given one hundred dinars from the objects given to me as security, as well as a pair of fiver rings and a [fine linen] robe,” the rings in question thought to have had five parts.
To her sister, went 50 dinars from those objects given to her as security along with a few garments including a mourning dress and half mantle common to bridal outfits, to her paternal uncle’s daughter, 5 dinars, some clothes, a pair of silver rings, and her bed, to her other sister only 10 dinars, the disparity between sisters perhaps an indication of a recent gift that Wuhsha had already given one of them, of their having separate mothers, or of something else.
From the debts that were owed to her, detailed in other documents, charity was to be given. To the cemetery, a very substantial 25 dinars, quite separate from her own funeral costs. To the synagogues of Fustat, 20, and to others 5, the money set aside for lamp oil to aid in study. To the poor of Fustat was to go 20, to someone’s wife, maybe the widow of her other brother, 5, to that woman’s brothers, 5 each, and to a relative of Wuhsha’s, an orphaned girl, 2 dinars.
For her funeral itself, Wuhsha spared absolutely no expense. There may have been some defiance in her choices, a desire to publicly assert herself, to not allow herself be forgotten easily after her death. 50 dinars were to be set aside for expenses, which was an unusually high number, an “exorbitant sum” in Goitein’s assessment, and enough for just over two years of modest middle-class life, here spent on an itemized list including the pallbearers, coffin, brocade, and fine garments for six, any remaining money to be distributed among the cantors who were to follow her coffin. It was an expensive funeral but certainly one she could afford and definitely not the main focus of her will.
By far, her will was mostly focused on her child, not on her children, notice, for there was nothing there for her daughter, no mention of “Lady Gazelle” from whom she was perhaps now estranged. All her attention was directed to the future of her son, Abū Sa’d, and to what his future might hold.
There was money, of course, the roughly 300 she had on hand and the 60 deposited elsewhere, “in addition to all [she possessed] in cash and kind, in rug and carpets.” There was education, in scripture and the prayer book, “to the degree it [was] appropriate that he should know them”—she didn’t need for him to be a scholar—and there were provisions for a teacher, who she named, a blanket and sleeping carpet so that he may remain at hand and provide nighttime instruction, and five dirhams per week, a very modest wage indeed, totalling to just over a quarter of the modest monthly income I referred to before.
Should Abū Sa’d reach maturity, all of this should be his, but there were arrangements for if he did not, if, quote, “God forbid, death overt[ook] him before.” In those sad circumstances, the money was to be split half and half, one going to the synagogues and poor of Cairo, the other going to her family, to her brother, sisters, and the daughter of her uncle. As for her son’s father, Hassūn of Ascalon, quote, “not one penny shall be given, except that two promissory notes concerning a debt of 80 dinars which he owes me, shall be handed over to him” and forgiven.
I found an interesting response to this document in the book “Charity and Giving in Monotheistic Religions,” in which Miriam Frenkel writes this.
Quote:
“Besides the sweet personal revenge that al-Wuhsha took on Hassūn, her lover and the father of her son, the most striking feature of this will is the extravagant sums dedicated to charity. In spite of her impressive commercial career, al-Wuhsha remained an outsider and could not really penetrate the massive walls set up by the male elite. Ostensibly, she was not bound by the ethical code of the elite group. The codes of honour and proper conduct did not obligate her and indeed she ignored them in personal conduct as was manifested in having a child out of wedlock and by her extraordinary behaviour at the court of law.”
However, Frenkel went on to emphasize, Wuhsha strove to learn and adopt that ethical code, and charity was part of that. It was one of the instruments that, quote, “forged binding reciprocal links between the members [of the elite] and as such” was central to “the economy of symbolic goods.” Charity, Frenkel concludes, “as enlarged and distorted in al-Wuhsha’s mirror, shows itself to be a basic component of the economy of real as well as symbolic goods.” Wuhsha, it’s important to remember, was not producing this will on her deathbed, when she would not really be around for any of this to matter much. She had some life still to live, some in which to jostle for status and position, if indeed, as Frenkel asserts, she was looking to do so with the composition of this will.
As Goitein nicely sums up Wuhsha’s life, quote:
“Al-Wuhsha certainly made an impression on her contemporaries because, on the one hand, she was an exceptionally successful businesswoman, her estate being about five times as large as her marital outfit, and, on the other hand, remained unmarried most of her life; on top of it, she had a love affair which produced for her an heir. She, her husband, and her lover all were strangers in Fustat. She was unique also in that she appears as a contributor to a public appeal—the only woman in over a hundred such lists.”
But as he goes on to remind us, we shouldn’t get carried away with ourselves and with this idea of Wuhsha as some kind of unicorn. Our sources for her time and place, while relatively bountiful, are also painfully finite. We don’t know everything, don’t know, indeed cannot know, every one of her contemporaries or those around her era, even with the incredible opportunity to encounter so many of them in the documents of the geniza, and it does not lessen her status as a figure of immense historical interest to admit that we do not know exactly how representative a picture our sources present. That said, she certainly stands out, for her immense wealth, her charitable generosity, whatever ends it may have achieved, and her strength in representing her own interests and those of her son.
I hope you have enjoyed her story today. We will leave it there.
Sources:
Abramson, Henry. "Wuhsha the Broker Jewish Women in the Medieval Economy." December 6th, 2012, lecture.
Frenkel, Miriam. "Charity in Jewish Society of the Medieval Mediterranean World." In Charity and Giving in Monotheistic Religions, edited by Miriam Frenkel & Yaacov Lev. Walter de Gruyter, 2009.
Goitein, S. D. A Mediterranean Society, Volume III: The Family. University of California Press, 1978.
Goitein, S. D. “A Jewish Business Woman of the Eleventh Century.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 57 (1967): 225–42.
Goitein, S. D. & Friedman, Mordechai Akiva. India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza. Brill, 2008.
Hoffman, Adina & Cole, Peter. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. Knopf, 2011.
Zinger, Oded. Women, gender and law: Marital disputes according to documents of the Cairo Geniza. Princeton University, 2014.