Wisdom and Greatness in One Place: the 15th-c. Alexandrian Trader Moses Ben Judah and His Circle

Dr Esther-Miriam Wagner has been working on Mamluk Alexandria. Together with her colleague Dr Dotan Arad (Bar Ilan University), a historian specialising in the Mamluk period, she has prepared an edition of mercantile letters from 15th-century Alexandria, which are part of the manuscript collections in the Bodleian.

Composed in Judaeo-Arabic and Hebrew, they paint a vivid picture of the economic situation in Mamluk Egypt, the commercial connections between Southern Europe and the Middle East, the relations between Jewish and non-Jewish merchants, and the integration of Jews in the wider Egyptian society, in particular as compared to their situation in the earlier Fatimid and Ayyubid empires.

Publication (submitted)

2021 Wagner, Esther-Miriam and Arad, Dotan. Wisdom and Greatness in One Place: the 15th-c. Alexandrian Trader Moses Ben Judah and His Circle (Leiden: Brill) (submitted)