Women’s Labor and Property in the Cairo Genizah

Jewish women in medieval Cairo occupied a marginal position in broader society, due to their dhimmī (non-Muslim) status and their gender. Yet, this did not preclude individual Jewish women from being sources of economic stability for the men in their lives. In times of need, women’s property — both with and against their will — could become crucial for keeping families afloat. Moveable goods, often those acquired through dowries, could be pawned. Real estate holdings served as collateral for husbands’ debts.

This paper will examine a number of legal documents and letters from Fāṭimid and Ayyūbid Egypt that attest to women’s property being used by their husbands and brothers. Most of these sources are legal documents: wills, testimonies, and depositions in front of the court.

Scholars cannot understand an economy if they only look at the work of male laborers, rather than including women, property, or intergenerational wealth. Researching women’s property as collateral fits into my broader dissertation project, which investigates women’s labor and property together to build a fuller picture of women’s economic power and standing in the tenth to fourteenth century Mediterranean. My dissertation will be the first work of scholarship solely devoted to women’s economic activities in the medieval Islamicate world. I will be building on the work of S. D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society, Yossef Rapoport’s Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society, Eve Krakowski’s Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt, and the dissertations of Oded Zinger and Craig Perry. I will also benefit from recent work on the taxation and labor structures of medieval Egypt by Lorenzo Bondioli.