The Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon (c. 1100) was a communication written by six elders of the Karaite Jewish community of Ascalon and sent to their coreligionists in

Alexandria Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandria ...

nine months after the fall of Jerusalem during the

First Crusade The First Crusade (1096–1099) was the first of a series of religious wars, or Crusades, initiated, supported and at times directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The objective was the recovery of the Holy Land from Islamic ru ...

. The contents describe how the Ascalon elders pooled money to pay the initial ransom for pockets of Jews and holy relics being held captive in Jerusalem by the Crusaders, the fate of some of these refugees after their release (including their transport to Alexandria, contraction of the

plague Plague or The Plague may refer to: Agriculture, fauna, and medicine *Plague (disease), a disease caused by ''Yersinia pestis'' * An epidemic of infectious disease (medical or agricultural) * A pandemic caused by such a disease * A swarm of pes ...

, or death at sea), and the need for additional funds for the rescuing of further captives.Goitein, S.D. ''A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. Vol. V: The Individual: Portrait of a Mediterranean Personality of the High Middle Ages as Reflected in the Cairo Geniza.'' University of California Press, 1988 (), p. 374-379 It was written in

Judeo-Arabic Judeo-Arabic dialects (, ; ; ) are ethnolects formerly spoken by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Under the ISO 639 international standard for language codes, Judeo-Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage under the code jrb, encomp ...

, Arabic using the

Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet ( he, wikt:אלפבית, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew languag ...

.Kedar, Benjamin Z. "The Jerusalem Massacre of July 1099 in the Western Historiography of the Crusades." in ''The Crusades'' ( Vol. 3). ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar and Jonathan S.C. Riley-Smith. Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004 (); p. 60, footnote #146; p. 64, footnote #161 This and other such letters related to the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem were discovered by noted historian

S.D. Goitein Shelomo Dov Goitein (April 3, 1900 – February 6, 1985) was a German-Jewish ethnographer, historian and Arabist known for his research on Jewish life in the Islamic Middle Ages, and particularly on the Cairo Geniza. Biography Shelomo Dov (Fritz ...

in 1952 among the papers of the

Cairo Geniza The Cairo Geniza, alternatively spelled Genizah, is a collection of some 400,000 Jewish manuscript fragments and Fatimid administrative documents that were kept in the '' genizah'' or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat or Old Cairo, Eg ...

. Goitein first published his findings in ''Zion'', a Hebrew journal, and then presented a partial English translation of the letter in the ''Journal of Jewish Studies'' that same year. Since then, it has been retranslated in several other books pertaining to the

Crusades The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these Crusades are those to the Holy Land in the period between 1095 and 1291 that were in ...

. Goitein's final and most complete English translation appeared in his final book posthumously published in 1988.

References

External links

*University of Michigan
The letter based on Goitein's incomplete 1952 English translation
(

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

). Retrieved 20-08-2007.
First Crusade Manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza Medieval Jerusalem Christian antisemitism in the Middle Ages Jews and Judaism in Egypt Jews and Judaism in Jerusalem Jews and Judaism in the Kingdom of Jerusalem Judeo-Arabic literature Karaite Judaism Letters (message) 1100 in Asia 1100 11th-century Judaism 11th century in the Fatimid Caliphate {{Crusades-stub

See also

References

External links