Cairo Genizah : Letter

Cairo Genizah

<p style='text-align: justify;'>Letter from Alexandria describing the writer’s attempts to have a man punished by the Muslim authorities for offending Jewish religious sensibilities. After deliberating whether to bring the case to the qadī or the wālī, the writer sent a secret message to the muḥtasib (to whom he was not personally known) asking that the offender be lightly punished. The muḥtasib then had the offender brought before the wālī, who ruled that the man should be publicly flogged. He was then dragged around Qamra, a Jewish quarter of Alexandria, while the wālī’s messengers announced his crimes against religion to the public. Ca. 1240 CE.</p>