1. T-S 8J6.8 + T-S 13J30.3. The document is dated to 1234 CE, however, it is clear that the scribe made an error and the year 1034 was intended.

2. The Muslim chief judge was Abū al-Fatḥ ʿAbd al-Ḥākim al-Fāriqī; see Walker, Paul, “Another Family of Fatimid Chief Qāḍīs: The al-Fāriqīs,” in Fatimid History and Ismaili Doctrine (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), chap. 4, 11–12Google Scholar.

3. Throughout this study, I translate dine goyyim (and equivalents like dine ʾummot ha-ʿolam) as “Muslim courts.”

4. Goitein, S. D., A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley: California University Press, 1967–93), 3:20–24Google Scholar and 2:399.

5. Familiar with only the lower half of the document, scholars have long suspected that the dispute involved a mixed Karaite-Rabbanite family because three of the six signatories are either Karaites or are known to have signed Karaite legal documents. After connecting the two fragments and learning the full name of Mubāraka and her brother, it is clear that they came from a Karaite family. See the full discussion in the edition noted in the appendix. For the variety of Karaite views regarding daughters' inheritance, see the sources in Olszowy-Schlanger, Judith, “Early Karaite Family Law,” in Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources, ed. Polliack, Meira (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 287 n. 53Google Scholar. Regardless of whether she was Karaite or Rabbanite, it is also possible that Mubāraka claimed that her father bequeathed her some property and her brother denied this; see T-S 18J2.5 for such a case in a Rabbanite family. As will be shown below, Jewish fathers occasionally secured a share of the inheritance for their daughters through Muslim legal documents.

6. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 2:374, and Goitein, , “The Interplay of Jewish and Islamic Laws,” in Jewish Law in Legal History and the Modern World, ed. Jackson, Bernard S. (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 61 and 66Google Scholar. See also the sources cited in Cohen, Mark R., Maimonides and the Merchants: Jewish Law and Society in the Medieval Islamic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 197 nn. 16–17Google Scholar.

7. “We learn from the sources that almost all the Jews—apart for some exceptions—used Jewish courts to settle their affairs. Jewish law dominated the diasporic communities and everyone were judged according to the law of the Talmud.” Assaf, Simḥa, Tekufat ha-geʾonim ve-sifrutah (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1955), 19Google Scholar. “The Jews were a part of the general economic system and were in daily contact with their non-Jewish surroundings, but they were nevertheless self-centered. Though they took on the outward signs of Muslim culture by way of language, manners and even dress, an enormous chasm lay between the two worlds in everything concerning their Weltanschauung and daily customs. A marked indication of this isolation was the severity with which they observed the principle of not applying to Muslim courts in civil matters, such as inheritances, and the like.” Gil, Moshe, A History of Palestine, 634–1099, trans. Broido, Ethel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 491 §728Google Scholar.

8. The literature on Jewish use of Muslim venues is extensive. For studies of earlier periods, see Libson, Gideon, “'Otonomyah shiputit u-feniyah le-ʿarkhaʾot mi-ẓad bene ḥasut ʿal pi mekorot muslemim bi-tekufat ha-geʾonim,” in Ha-’islam ve-ʿolamot ha-shezurim bo: Koveẓ maʾamarim le-zikhrah shel Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, ed. Ilan, Naḥem (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2002), 334–92Google Scholar; Simonsohn, Uriel, A Common Justice: The Legal Allegiance of Christian and Jews under Early Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Rustow, Marina, “At the Limits of Communal Autonomy: Jewish Bids for Intervention from the Mamluk State,” Mamluk Studies Review 13 (2009): 133–59Google Scholar. For later periods see Cohen, Amnon, Jewish Life under Islam: Jerusalem in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 110–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his many Hebrew volumes with Elisheva Ben-Shimon-Pikali; Shmuelevitz, Aryeh, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century: Administrative, Economic, Legal and Social Relations as Reflected in the Responsa (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 11–80Google Scholar; Hacker, Joseph, “Jewish Autonomy in the Ottoman Empire: Its Scope and Limits: Jewish Courts from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Jews of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Levy, Avigdor (Princeton, NJ: Darwin, 1994), 153–202Google Scholar; al-Qattan, Najwa, “Dhimmīs in the Muslim Court: Legal Autonomy and Religious Discrimination,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (1999): 429–44Google Scholar; Richard Wittmann, “Before Qadi and Grand Vizier: Intra-Communal Dispute Resolution and Legal Transactions among Christians and Jews in the Plural Society of Seventeenth-Century Istanbul” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2008); Marglin, Jessica, Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; and Shaham, Ron, “Jews and the Sharī’a Court in Modern Egypt,” Studia Islamica 82 (1995): 113–36Google Scholar. After the submission and revision of this article, Gideon Libson shared with me his forthcoming article titled “ʿAl ʾissur peniyah le-ʿarkhaʾot ve-haṭalat ḥaramot,” to be published in a volume on Maimonides and the Geniza edited by Mordechai Akiva Friedman. Regrettably, I could not integrate his interesting findings into this study.

9. A couple of Geniza studies have noted in passing the tendency of Jewish women to make use of Muslim legal forums in specific topics; see Bareket, Elinoar, “Pinkasim shel bet din ha-yerushalmim min ha-genizah ba-maḥaẓit ha-risho'nah shel ha-meʾah ha-’aḥat ʿesre,” Hebrew Union College Annual 69 (1998): 55Google Scholar, and David, Yeḥezkel, “Yalde ha-gerushah le-’or teʿudot ha-genizah ha-kahirit: Haḥzakatam, mezonotehem ve-ḥinukham,” Sinai 139 (2007): 18Google Scholar. The gendered aspects of use of Muslim legal venues received more attention in studies of the Ottoman and modern periods, see Wittmann, “Before Qadi and Grand Vizier,” 119–28; Ben-Naeh, Yaron, Jews in the Realm of the Sultans: Ottoman Jewish Society in the Seventeenth Century (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 240Google Scholar; Lamdan, Ruth, “The Mercies of the Court: Jewish Women Seeking Divorce in Sixteenth-Century Palestine, Syria and Egypt,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues 1 (1998): 60–64Google Scholar.

10. Hughes, Diane Owen, “Toward Historical Ethnography: Notarial Records and Family History in the Middle Ages,” Historical Methods Newsletter 7, no. 2 (1974): 61–71Google Scholar.

11. In order to avoid spreading out too broadly, this study focuses on the situation in medieval Egypt and Palestine as can be seen from Geniza documents and contemporary responsa. In the notes I point to several illuminating parallels and suggest lines of promising comparisons with other locations and periods. Similarly, while this study is geared to a Jewish studies audience, its findings are also part of the broader study of women and courts in the premodern Islamic world. For a few noteworthy studies, see Tillier, Mathieu, “Women before the Qāḍī under the Abbasids,” Islamic Law and Society 16 (2009): 280–301Google Scholar; Shatzmiller, Maya, Her Day in Court: Women's Property Rights in Fifteenth-Century Granada (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Peirce, Leslie, Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

12. See Jordan, William Chester, Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. In a companion study, I present seven edited, previously unpublished documents from the corpus, and approach women's use of Muslim legal venues from individual cases; see Oded Zinger, “Jewish Women in Muslim Legal Venues in Medieval Egypt: Seven Documents from the Cairo Geniza,” in Language, Gender and Law in the Judeao-Islamic Milieu, ed. Amir Ashur and Zvi Stampfer, to be published in Brill's Cambridge Geniza Studies Series.

14. An important exception is P. Prag. I 3 fr. d recto, a 1001 CE Muslim legal record, probably from al-Ashmūnayn, testifying that a Jewish woman took an oath, probably in a synagogue, while touching bayt al-tawrāh, either the case containing the Torah scroll (usually called tīq from the Hebrew) or the holy ark (usually called haykal from the Hebrew hekhal): fa-waḍaʿat al-yad ʿalā bayt al-tawrāh; I would like to thank Naïm Vanthieghem for pointing out this interesting document to me and sharing with me his and Alain Delattre's forthcoming edition. I also used Islamic documents from Khan, Geoffrey, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

15. For the attitudes of the Muslim jurists, see Libson, “'Otonomyah shiputit.” The attitude of some judges can be deduced from the several cases in which they returned cases brought to them to Jewish venues. Thus, they seem to prefer strengthening Jewish institutions rather than weakening them. See, for example, T-S 13Ja1.1, T-S Ar. 50.197, or Maimonides, Responsa, ed. and trans. Blau, Joshua, 4 vols. (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass, 1986 ²)Google Scholar, no. 73 and 196, and the discussions in Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 2:402; Ben-Sasson, Menahem, Ẓemiḥat ha-kehilah ha-yehudit be-’araẓot ha-’islam, Kayrawan 800–1057 (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1997), 312Google Scholar; and Cohen, Maimonides and the Merchants, 127–28. In doing so, Muslim authorities of this period differ from their counterparts in the Ottoman period; see Hacker, “Jewish Autonomy.”

16. This graph displays the division of cases according to who brought or threatened to bring them before the Muslim forum. It must be remembered that the corpus does not include the likely much larger number of cases in which men brought cases against other men in Muslim legal forums. This graph does not include the twenty-one cases mentioned in the following paragraph.

17. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 2:400.

18. The five cases of debt are: ENA 2727.18d; Mosseri VII.131; Bodl. MS Heb. d 68.104; T-S J3.47v; and Maimonides, Responsa, no. 193. The six cases of gift or inheritance are: T-S Misc. 22.285; T-S Ar. 38.98; T-S 18J2.5; T-S 13J3.3; NLR Yevr. – Arab I 1700, 13r; and T-S 12.558 (I read in lines 6–8: ושרטת אנהא תכאתב אבנתהא בעידי גוים עלי הדא אלנצף). The five cases of sale are NLR Yevr. – Arab I 1700, 9; T-S NS J485 + T-S 8J20.16 + T-S NS 283.96; T-S Ar. 53.66; and Maimonides, Responsa, nos. 70 and 371. The one case of nonmonetary rights is Mosseri VII.7v, where a father conducts an agreement with his son-in-law and one of the conditions is that if the son-in-law does not come back from a commercial journey in the appointed time, his wife would be able to divorce. I include this case because it seems to fit the general pattern observed. The four cases in which men either held a monetary right recorded in Muslim deed or were granted permission to sue in Muslim court are: T-S 20.32; T-S Misc. 28.234; NLR Yevr. – Arab I 1700, 22v; Bodl. MS Heb. b.3.7–8. For cases outside the geographic limits of this study, see Assaf, Simḥa, Teshuvot ha-geonim (Jerusalem: Mekiẓe Nirdamim, 1942), 73–74, no. 66Google Scholar; Harkavi, Avraham Eliyahu, Zikaron le-risho'nim ve-gam le-’aḥronim (Berlin: Zvi Hirsch, 1887), 249, no. 491Google Scholar; and Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā al-Wansharīsī, Al-Miʿyār al-muʿrib wa-l-jāmiʿ al-mughrib ʿan fatāwā ahl Ifrīqīya wa-l-andalus wa-l-Maghrib, 13 vols., ed. Ḥajī, Muḥammad (Rabat: Wizārat al-awqāf wa-l-shuʾūn al-islāmīya, 1981–1983), 10:128–30Google Scholar, and see Lehmann, Matthias B., “Islamic Legal Consultation and the Jewish-Muslim ‘Convivencia’: Al-Wansharīsī’s Fatwā Collection as a Source for Jewish Social History in al-Andalus and the Maghrib,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 6 (1999): 51Google Scholar.

19. For the distinction, see Simonsohn, Common Justice, 57–60, 184–87, and 193–95.

20. For women transferring wealth to their husbands, see Oded Zinger, “Women, Gender and Law: Marital Disputes according to Documents from the Cairo Geniza” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2014), chap. 3.

21. This aligns nicely with the argument that the stipulations found in marriage agreements do not reflect a policy of the communal leadership to protect women, but rather reflect demand from brides' families. See Krakowski, Eve and Rustow, Marina, “Formula as Content: Medieval Jewish Institutions, the Cairo Geniza, and the New Diplomatics,” Jewish Social Studies 20 (2014), 122 and 131–32Google Scholar. See also Assis, Yom-Tov, “Yehude Sefarad be-ʿarkhaʾot ha-goyim (ha-meʾot ha-13 ve-ha-14),” in Tarbut ve-ḥevrah be-toldot Yisraʾel bi-yeme ha-benayim: Koveẓ maʾamarim le-zikhro shel Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, ed. Ben-Sasson, Menahem, Bonfil, Robert, and Hacker, Joseph R. (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1989), 422Google Scholar.

22. This phenomenon of Jewish parents securing monetary rights for their daughters in Muslim documents can be seen also outside the Geniza. In a query submitted to the Muslim Andalusi jurist Ibn Sahl (d. 1093), we learn about a Jewish father who set up a pious foundation through a Muslim venue for his daughter; see al-Wansharīsī, Al-Miʿyār, 7:59–60, and Lehmann, “Islamic Legal Consultation,” 49.

23. Rustow, “At the Limits of Communal Autonomy,” 138. See also Libson, “'Otonomyah shiputit,” 349–50, and Simonsohn, A Common Justice, 175, 202, and 211.

24. T-S 10J7.10. Goitein suspected that this was a lie on her part “in order to make her alliance a bit more respectable.” See Mediterranen Society, 3:351.

25. T-S 13Ja1.1. The couple was betrothed but the marriage has not been consummated (i.e., there were ʾerusin but not nisuʾin). It is possible that the woman meant that she would throw herself down a well if the man would use the government to force her to marry him in a Jewish marriage.

26. Maimonides, Responsa, no. 349.

27. Maimonides, Responsa, no. 15, and see Friedman, Mordechai Akiva, “The Ransom-Divorce: Divorce Proceedings Initiated by the Wife in Mediaeval Jewish Practice,” Israel Oriental Studies 6 (1976): 295 n. 35Google Scholar. In another responsum (no. 218), Maimonides is concerned lest forbidding a widow considered to be ‘a killer wife’ from remarriage would risk the daughters of Israel “falling into evil ways” (לצאת לתרבות רעה), probably meaning converting to Islam.

28. Rylands A 1043. Another case involving conversion is found in an entry in a 1221 court notebook, see ENA 2560.6. The wife of Ephraim al-Damīrī converted to Islam and he had not given her a get. She married a certain Abū ʿAlī in Muslim courts. Since the offspring of this later marriage is considered a mamzeret, it appears that Abū ʿAlī was also a Jew, presumably also a convert to Islam, since Islamic law forbids the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim man. However, if they were both converts to Islam, why would the Jewish court bother to keep record of them and their progeny? Did they still circulate in Jewish circles? Could it be that she first married in Muslim courts and only then converted?

29. T-S NS J102. The exact nature of this kitāb ṣidāq is not clear: Was it only a monetary agreement or was actual marriage conducted? In another case, we have a draft for an Arabic script tadhkira of a Karaite couple's betrothal; see T-S J3.47v (read tadhkira as the first word). In seventeenth-century Fez, a rabbinical enactment was passed requiring Jews to register marriage agreements (צודאק) in Muslim courts, see Avraham ben Mordekhai Ankawa, Kerem ḥemer, 2 vols. (Livorno: Elie Benamozegh Press, 1869–71), 2:9a–b, nos. 52–55Google Scholar. I am grateful for Jessica Marglin for bringing this to my attention.

30. Mosseri VII.27; see on this case below.

31. T-S Ar. 40.96.

32. T-S 18J3.2 (first half of the eleventh century) and ENA NS 7.43.

33. For examples of Christians arranging marriages in Egyptian Muslim legal venues, see Lev Weitz, “Syriac Christians in the Medieval Islamic World: Law, Family and Society” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2013), 130–31. For cases of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman period, see the relevant studies mentioned in the notes above, and Gradeva, Rossitsa, “Orthodox Christians in the Kadi Courts: The Practice of the Sofia Sheriat Court, Seventeenth Century,” Islamic Law and Society 4 (1997): 37–69Google Scholar.

34. Central to the attempts of the Jewish leadership was Maimonides's stance, expressed in Mishneh Torah, Sanhedrin, 26:7 and in his 1187 takkanah; see Cohen, Maimonides and the Merchants, 135–38. The connection between the rise of the Ayyubids and a more stringent supervision of communal autonomy has been discussed in different ways in Rustow, Marina, “Patronage in the Context of Solidarity and Reciprocity: Two Paradigms of Social Cohesion in the Premodern Mediterranean,” in Patronage, Production and Transmission of Texts in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Cultures, ed. Alfonso, Esperanza and Decter, Jonathan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 33–34Google Scholar, and Ackerman-Lieberman, Phillip, “Legal Pluralism among the Court Records of Medieval Egypt,” Bulletin d'études orientales 63 (2014): 87–89Google Scholar. Goitein, however, thought that “the dangerous practice of turning to the Muslim government … became rampant in Ayyubid times.” See Mediterranean Society, 2:406. Beyond the sources cited in these studies, there is much documentary evidence for an increasing opposition to using Muslim legal venues. For example, see ENA NS 16.32, ed. Frenkel, Miriam, “Ha-’ohavim ve-ha-nedivim”: ʻIlit manhigah be-kerev yehude 'Aleksandriyah bi-yeme ha-benayim (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2006)Google Scholar, doc. 15; T-S 10J18.3 (unpublished); T-S 10J17.25 (unpublished); and Bodl. MS Heb. b 3.7–8 (unpublished). A more complex picture on the situation in Jerusalem is attested in ll. 52–56 and 72–76 of the letter published in Shweka, Roni, “U-ve-khol yom ʿosim maḥlokot’: Parashah mi-toldot ha-yeshuv ha-yehudi bi-rushalayim ba-meʾah ha-shlosh ʿesre ʿal pi ʾiggrot R. Yeḥi'el ha-Ẓarfati,” Sefunot: Studies and Sources on the History of Jewish Communities in the East 25 (2017): 13–55Google Scholar. Finally, it is telling that our core corpus contains nine cases from Maimonides's responsa but only two from his son's.

35. On sulṭān, see Tor's, D. G. entry in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought, ed. Bowering, Gerhard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 532–34Google Scholar and the further readings mentioned there; Yanagihashi, Hiroyuki, “The Judicial Functions of the Sulṭān in Civil Cases According to the Mālikīs up to the Sixth/Twelfth Century,” Islamic Law and Society 3 (1996): 43–45Google Scholar; Heijer, Johannes den, “The Martyrdom of Bifām ibn Baqūra al-Ṣawwāf by Mawhūb ibn Manṣūr ibn Mufarrij and Its Fatimid Background,” Medieval Encounters 21 (2015): 475–76 n. 49Google Scholar; and Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents, 487. These studies suggest that sulṭān can mean the government, the ruler (used more by the Ayyubids than by the Fatimids), the vizier, or the local governor. Goitein noted that sulṭān usually does not signify the person of the ruler but often translated sulṭān as “Muslim authorities” which seems to me to blur the distinction between qāḍī courts and the government; see Goitein, S. D., Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden: Brill, 1966), 197Google Scholar. Similarly, in translations to Hebrew sulṭān is often left as sultan, which prudently leaves the word in its original form but at least for the Fatimid period seems misleading as readers might think that a person titled sulṭan is meant (thus, in these cases, shilton is preferable). As Heijer remarks, a comprehensive study of the different uses of sulṭān would be highly welcome.

36. NLR Yevr. – Arab. I 1700, 3 (Fustat 1156 CE) and T-S 13J8.1 (Fustat-Cairo, 1052 CE), respectively.

37. In T-S 12.16 (around 1020 CE).

38. Maimonides, Responsa, no. 106. Further examples can be provided.

39. The term maẓālim is rare in the documentary Geniza. For one occurrence, see T-S 18J1.10, recto line 8, ed. Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents, 193–94, doc. 32. A very interesting report on maẓālim justice as administered by a sulṭān (here meaning a ruler, probably Saladin) is found in a letter of Mevorakh b. Nathan: “My brother, know that after you left, the Sultan, may God make his reign eternal, sat and wrote rescripts to the general public. Anyone could come to him and he (i.e., the sultan) examined the injustice done to any oppressed.” See ENA NS 19.31, ll. 24–25.

40. Contrary to the findings in a later period; see Nielsen, Jørgen S., Secular Justice in an Islamic State: Maẓālim under the Baḥrī Mamlūks, 662/1264–789/1387 (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Institut, 1985), 46–47Google Scholar. See also Simonsohn, Common Justice, 66–67 and 87–88. However, since Jewish women almost always first approached Jewish courts and only afterwards turned to Muslim venues (see below), it is quite possible that women framed cases of inheritance and personal status as complaints against Jewish legal institutions, which were considered by the Muslim government as part of its administration of justice.

41. T-S Ar. 40.96, and Maimonides, Responsa, no. 9 and 90.

42. The emphasis on the variety of venues used by non-Muslims is one of the important contributions of Wittmann, “Before Qadi and Grand Vizier.” For how the different venues facilitated choice and therefore agency, see the remarkable testimony found in T-S 16.231, ed. Frenkel, Ha-’ohavim ve-ha-nedivim, doc. 29, partially translated in Goitein, Medieterannean Society, 2:371. Writing during the reign of Saladin, the writer reports how he contemplated his best course of action against a fellow Jew. Since he did not know the Muslim governor (wālī), he wrote down a petition (waraqat al-mam(lūk) fulān yuqabbil al-arḍ) but did not know whether to send it to the Muslim judge (qāḍī) or governor. Then it occurred to him to send it to the supervisor of the markets (al-muḥtasib). The letter goes on to report how the supervisor of the markets passed the matter to the governor who ruled that the man should be flogged and publicly denounced around the Jewish neighborhood.

43. It is often difficult to identify the social stratum of actors in Geniza documents. Here are some of the cases where it can be known: wealthy or well-connected women: T-S 13J30.3 + T-S 8J6.8; T-S 10J7.10; T-S Ar. 49.33; T-S 13J3.3; NLR Yevr. – Arab. I 1700, 3; NLR Yevr. – Arab. I 1700, 9; T-S 10J20.21. Poor or socially weak women: T-S 18J3.2; Bodl. MS Heb. d 66.133; T-S 13J19.13; ENA NS 7.43; and Maimonides, Responsa, no. 15, 106, and 193. At least four of these latter cases involve a threat to use Muslim forums.

44. Bodl. MS Heb. d 66.133. “Enormities” (ʿaẓāʾim) may mean she threatened to convert to Islam.

45. An important aspect that eased the ability of Jews to access Muslim legal forums was that these forums seem to have been willing to accept Jewish legal documents, even Jewish marriage agreements that were written at least partially in Aramaic and in accordance with Jewish formulas; for the time being, see Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 3:120, and Cohen, Maimonides and the Merchants, 198 n. 27. Another way Muslim judges tried to increase their accessibility to non-Muslims was to hold sessions in their private homes or at the entrance of the mosque, see al-Kindī, , The Governors and Judges of Egypt, ed. Guest, Rhuvon (Leiden: Brill, 1912), 351Google Scholar; ʻUmar ibn ʻAbd al-ʻAzīz al-Khaṣṣāf, Kitāb sharḥ adab al-qāḍī, 4 vols., ed. Sarḥān, Muḥyī Hilāl (Baghdad: Wizārat al-Awqāf, 1977–1978), 1:309Google Scholar; and Müller, Christian, “Non-Muslims as Part of Islamic Law: Juridical Casuistry in a Fifth/Eleventh-Century Law Manual,” in The Legal Status of Ḏimmī-s in the Isalmic West, ed. Fierro, Maribel and Tolan, John (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 39Google Scholar.

46. NLR Yevr. – Arab. I 1700, 3. See more on this case below.

47. For another Jewish woman who retained her connections at the government administration even after her husband was dead, see T-S 24.78, line 56, translated in Goitein, S. D., “The Tribulations of an Overseer of the Sultan's Ships,” in Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of Hamilton A. R. Gibb, ed. Makdisi, George (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 270–84Google Scholar.

48. We see the role of patronage relationships in securing government involvement in other documents. In T-S Ar. 50.197 a father in eleventh-century Qayrawān sought the aid of the government “because he had with it (ties of) patronage” (ʿināya: on this term see Rustow, “Patronage in the Context of Solidarity and Reciprocity,” 31 n. 35). Above we have seen how not knowing the Muslim governor featured the writer's deliberations. See also Rustow, Marina, “A Petition to a Woman at the Fatimid Court (413–414 A.H./1022–23 C.E.),” Bulletin of the School of African and Oriental Studies 73 (2010): 5–6Google Scholar; Fuess, Albrecht, “Ẓulm by Maẓālim? The Political Implications of the Use of Maẓālim Jurisdiction by the Mamluk Sultans,” Mamluk Studies Review 13 (2009): 131Google Scholar; Simonsohn, Common Justice, 153–54 and 172.

49. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 1:71

50. For a modern anthropological account, see Bahloul, Joëlle, The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria 1937–1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

51. ENA NS 7.43. It seems that the wife mentions the assistance of her Muslim neighbors by way of a hinted threat that she has other options.

52. T-S 13J19.13. Later they apparently recovered and made a successful appeal to the head of the Jews.

53. Mosseri IV.81 + T-S 12.591. The join was suggested by the Genazim software.

54. In Bodl. MS Heb. b. 12.16 there is a reference to “the daughter of the qāḍī known as Ibn Shaʿra” in a legal act involving a certain Sitt al-Tujjār and Shabbtai. However, the document is too fragmented to understand her role.

55. See Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 3:357–58; Calderini, Simonetta, “Sayyida Raṣad: A Royal Woman as ‘Gateway to Power’ during the Fatimid Era,” in Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras V, ed. Vermeulen, U. and D'hulster, K. (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 27–36Google Scholar; and Cortese, Delia and Calderini, Simonetta, Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 33, 52–53, 95, and 109–27Google Scholar. In al-Kindī, The Governors and Judges of Egypt, 497–500 and 613–14, we come across a fascinating account of how the same chief judge from the story of Mubāraka with which we opened this study pursued a woman for her wealth, but she threw herself before the vizier's slave girls, who informed their master, who saved the day by punishing the immoral judge. For ties between Jewish men with the women of the Fatimid court, see Bodl. MS Heb. c. 28.26, discussed in Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 2:604 n. 32; ENA NS 18.38, line 17, ed. Gil, Moshe, ʾEreẓ Yisraʾel ba-tekufah ha-muslemit ha-risho'nah (634–1099), 3 vols. (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1983), doc. 439Google Scholar; and T-S 24.72, recto l.9, translated to English in Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 5:174–78.

56. Green, Monica H., “Conversing with the Minority: Relations among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 106–7Google Scholar, and Lauer, Rena, “Jewish Women in Venetian Candia: Negotiating Intercommunal Contact in a Premodern Colonial City,” in La cohabitation religieuse dans les villes européennes, Xe - XVe siècles, ed. Boissellier, Stéphane and Tolan, John (Turnhout: 2014), 293–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57. For giving formal permission see, for example, ENA 4010.67 and, from a later date, ENA 2559.1, ed. Cohen, Mark R., “Correspondence and Social Control in the Jewish Communities of the Islamic World: A Letter of the Nagid Joshua Maimonides,” Jewish History 1 (1986): 39–48Google Scholar.

58. There was also a common clause that declared the agreement to be valid in both Jewish and non-Jewish courts. On both validating and prohibiting clauses, see Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 2:400–402. These clauses are at the center of Olszowy-Schlanger, Judith, “‘Israël et Nations du monde’: Loi et identité dans les formules des actes juifs médiévaux,” Revue de l'histoire des religions 234 (2017): 255–71Google Scholar.

59. ENA 4010.26, ed. Bareket, Elinoar, Shafrir Miẓrayim: Ha-hanhagah ha-yehudit be-Fusṭaṭ ba-maḥaẓit ha-risho'nah shel ha-meʿah ha-’aḥat-ʻesre (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1995), 245–46Google Scholar.

60. T-S 12.120, transcribed in Gershon Weiss, “Legal Documents Written by the Court Clerk Halfon Ben Manasse” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1970), no. 39.

61. Such imbalance is found also in legal documents between Muslims, see T-S Ar. 38.43, recto ll. 11–13, ed. Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents, doc. 36.

62. This is probably also her kunya: Umm Samuel.

63. This passage is a composite translation from two documents constructed from eight Geniza fragments: Mosseri VII.43 + T-S Ar.53.53 and T-S AS 145.299 + T-S AS 135.261 + T-S AS 104.178 + T-S NS 145.160 + T-S NS 324.75 + T-S 6J2.26. For the nature of this joint Karaite-Rabbanite session, see the edition.

64. See T-S 13J8.1: “Banned with her name” apparently as opposed to a “general ban” (ḥerem setam). However, it is possible that the “general ban with a name” (ḥerem setam be-shem) is intended, see Libson, Gideon, “‘Ḥerem setam’ bi-tekufat ha-geonim u-vereshit yeme ha-benayim,” Shenaton ha-mishpat ha-ʿivri: Annual of the Institute for Research in Jewish Law 22 (2001–4): 146Google Scholar, 226 and see also Friedman, Mordechai Akiva, “Telunah la-sulṭan ʿal R. Avraham ben ha-Rambam,” Zion 81 (2016): 367Google Scholar n. 188.

65. Mosseri VII.131.

66. Earlier in the document it is explained that Abū al-Rabīʿ will hold the gift in trust for his sisters until they reach the age of majority according to Islamic law. At that time, each sister will release her brother and receive the gift from him. See Eve Krakowski, “Female Adolescence in the Cairo Geniza Documents” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012), 37–38.

67. NLR Yevr. – Arab. I 1700, 3.

68. Maimonides, Responsa, no. 193. See also Migash, Ibn, Sefer sheʾelot u-teshuvot Rabenu Yosef ha-Levi Ibn Migash, ed. Ḥasida, Simḥa (Jerusalem: Lev Sameaḥ, 1991), no. 118Google Scholar.

69. T-S 20.32.

70. Mosseri VII.131; Bodl. MS Heb. d 68.104; and T-S 8J4.17 (in 17B, line 13 read באק]יה] rather than באר]אה]).

71. T-S 8J6.8 + T-S 13J30.3.

72. T-S 18J2.5 (Fustat, second half of eleventh century).

73. T-S 10J20.21 (second half of twelfth century). The letter continues: “Once you read these lines, investigate this matter. If she leaves him alone and returns to the fold (that is best). If she continues in the same manner, place a ban over her.”

74. An exception to this trend is T-S 12.16, in which a man, his sister, and her son contested the ruling of a Jewish judge in an inheritance case with the Muslim judge and later with the government. As a result, we are told that the man and the son of his sister were placed under the ban, but we do not hear about the sister being banned.

75. For examples of men who used or threatened to use Muslim legal venues and were depicted negatively see T-S 20.163, ed. Gil, ʾEreẓ Yisraʾel, doc. 102; T-S 12.115, ed. Bareket, Shafrir Miẓrayim, doc. 2; and T-S 13J16.3, ed. Frenkel, Ha-’ohavim ve-ha-nedivim, doc. 66.

76. This is a reference to M. Kiddushin 14:1.

77. Mosseri VII.27 recto.

78. Mosseri VII.27 verso.

79. It is remarkable that Abū Ṭāhir is called the “master of the deceased.” Not only was the deceased a freedwoman, but it was his father who manumitted her; see Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 1:146.

80. Islamic law indeed preserves a link between a master and his manumitted slave (walāʾ), which is passed on to agnatic heirs, see Brunschvig, Robert, “Un système peu connu de succession agnatique dans le droit musulman,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 28 (1950): 23–34Google Scholar.

81. T-S 8J16.4.

82. Ben-Sasson, Ẓemiḥat ha-kehilah ha-yehudit, 315.

83. De, Rohit, “The Two Husbands of Vera Tiscenko: Apostasy, Conversion, and Divorce in Late Colonial India,” Law and History 28 (2010): 1014 and 1036Google Scholar; Kasper-Marienberg, Verena, “Female Litigation at Early Modern Courts,” New Perspectives on Gender & Jewish Life, Frankel Institute Annual (2014): 23Google Scholar. See also Kasper-Marienberg, , “Jewish Women at the Viennese Imperial Supreme Court: A Case Study from the Eighteenth Century,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 21 (2014): 176–92Google Scholar.

84. My presentation here mirrors Simonsohn's “advantages inherent in Islamic judiciary” and “weakness of the Jewish Judiciary”; Simonsohn, Common Justice, 174–81. Simonsohn's “social environmental factor” has been explored above, in a sense. See also Rena Lauer, “Venice's Colonial Jews: Community, Identity, and Justice in Late Medieval Venetian Crete” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014), 243–57.

85. It is often very difficult to decide whether a case should fall under one category or the other. Occasionally, I resorted to dividing a case into two categories.

86. The prominence of matters of inheritance in incidents when Jews turned to Muslim courts can also be seen in a letter of Shelomo Gaon b. Yehuda, the head of the Palestinian academy from 1025–1051, in which he admits that many Jews turn to Muslim courts and specifically mentions matters of inheritance; see T-S 13J33.12, line 8. This document (ed. Gil, ʾEreẓ Yisraʾel, doc. 122) joins with T-S NS 311.31 (ed. Moshe Gil, “ʾEreẓ Yisraʾel ba-tekufah ha-muslemit ha-risho'nah (634–1099): Miluʾim, heʿarot, tikkunim,” Teʿudah 7 (1991): doc. 137a. The join was suggested by the Genazim software.

87. Legal difference occasionally underlines cases in the other categories, see for example Maimonides, Responsa, no. 349 and Rylands A 1043.

88. To give three examples: In T-S 12.16 we see the Jewish and Muslim authorities making the same ruling. In ENA 2348.1 two married sisters seized the inheritance of their two unmarried sisters in Muslim courts. In T-S 28.19 the complicated dynamics of the inheritance dispute never revolve around a difference between Jewish or Islamic law.

89. T-S 8J16.4.

90. Enforceability here also includes “softer” exercise of state power, like when a litigant turns to a higher authority in the hope that it will decide to supervise the procedure in a lower authority or empower the rulings of the lower authority; see Baldwin, James E., “Petitioning the Sultan in Ottoman Egypt,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 75 (2012): 499–524Google Scholar. I plan on discussing “amassing of authoritative documents” as a legal strategy (see pp. 516–17) in a separate study.

91. In Zinger, “Women, Gender and Law,” 245–50, I present evidence both for the power and powerlessness of communal enforcement and argue that the question should not be whether communal institutions were powerful or weak, but how people operate in an environment where the combination between legal ruling and political power was inherently variable and uncertain.

92. Indeed, in a case where the Muslim authorities pressured a Jewish husband to give his wife the bill of divorce after the Jewish court concluded that he should divorce her, there is no criticism about involving the Muslim authorities. However, even in this case, the mother of the bride turned to the qāḍī to force the Jewish court to reach a verdict in the first place; see Maimonides, Responsa, no. 196.

93. Zinger, “Women, Gender and Law,” chap. 1.

94. Ibid., chap. 3.

95. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 2:312.

96. For a similar argument in a Christian context, see Lauer, “Venice's Colonial Jews,” 257–58.

97. This might have been especially effective since it seems that being the one to bring the case before a legal forum imparted a certain advantage; see Zinger, “Women, Gender and Law,” 112–13, and see the “power of the first word” in Lauer, Rena, “Jewish Law and Litigation in the Secular Courts of the Late Medieval Mediterranean,” Critical Analysis of Law 3, no. 1 (2016): 128Google Scholar.

98. See the articles of Kolsky, Elizabeth, Sharafi, Mitra, De, Rohit, Mallampalli, Chandra, and Merry, Sally Engle in the “Maneuvering the Personal Law System in Colonial India” forum in Law and History Review 28 (2010): 973–1071Google Scholar.

99. As a resource that can be used for resisting pressures in the Jewish court and at home, Jewish women's recourse to Muslim legal venues should also be examined in context of the other resources and modes of action available to Jewish women. I plan to pursue this in chapter 4 of the book I am currently writing.

100. For this approach in other regions and periods, see Bryen, Ari Z., “Judging Empire: Courts and Culture in Rome's Eastern Provinces,” Law and History Review 30 (2012): 771–811CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his “Law in Many Pieces,” Classical Philology 109 (2014): 346–65Google Scholar; Humfress, Caroline, “Law in Practice,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Rousseau, Philip (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 377–91Google Scholar; Smail, Daniel Lord, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

101. They certainly appear to be more successful than the women explored in Sharafi, Mitra, “The Marital Patchwork of Colonial South Asia: Forum Shopping from Britian to Baroda,” Law and History 28 (2010): 981–82Google Scholar and 1008–9.

102. Baumgarten, Elisheva, “‘A Separate People’? Some Directions for Comparative Research on Medieval Women,” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 212–28Google Scholar. For the latest and most nuanced discussion of Jewish women's freedom of movement in medieval Egypt, see Krakowski, “Female Adolescence,” 129–45.

103. See also Cohen, Maimonides and the Merchants, 127.

104. This despite the idea, in both Islamic and Jewish normative texts, that the court is no place for a proper woman; see Tillier, , “Women before the Qāḍī under the Abbasids,” 294–300, and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “The Ethics of Medieval Jewish Marriage,” in Religion in a Religious Age, ed. Goitein, S. D. (Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies, 1974), 92–93Google Scholar. In Maimonides, Responsa, no. 211, a Muslim judge offered a formerly Christian slave owned by a Jew to convert to Islam. However, she responded: “I am a Jewess daughter of a Jewess!” This was clearly a lie, because if she were a daughter of a Jewish woman she could not have been a slave in a Jewish household. The “supplementary documents” section of the appendix lists three other cases in which female slaves in Jewish households were brought (or threatened to be brought) before a Muslim judge.

105. Rustow, “Patronage in the Context of Solidarity and Reciprocity.”

106. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Servants of Kings and Not Servants of Servant: Some Aspects of the Political History of the Jews (Atlanta, GA: The Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Emory University, 2005). Yerushalmi deals with the Jews in the medieval Islamic world in a single footnote by referring to two articles about Jewish attitudes toward the Islamic state. To substantiate Yerushalmi's thesis, however, it is not enough to look at the relationship between Jews and the state, one also needs to prove that it came at the expense of horizontal alliances. Goitein's broader oeuvre shows that in medieval Egypt the vertical alliances did not come at the expense of horizontal ones. Jews from various walks of life developed horizontal ties with their non-Jewish neighbors, business contacts, and fellow government officials. For an illuminating episode testifying to horizontal ties at the highest echelons of the Fatimid state, see Walker, Paul E., “Social Elites at the Fatimid Court,” in Court Cultures in the Muslim World: Seventh to Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Fuess, Albrecht and Hartung, Jan-Peter (London: Routledge, 2011): 116–19Google Scholar. For less risqué elite horizontal ties in the Ayyubid state, see Goitein, S. D., “The Moses Maimonides – Ibn Sanāʾ Circle (A Deathbed Declarations from March 1182),” in Studies in Islamic History and Civilization on Honour of Professor David Ayalon, ed. Sharon, M. (Jerusalem: Cana, 1986), 399–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

107. Benton, Lauren, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 148–49Google Scholar. A similar observation has been made about women's litigation in late medieval France: “Widows thus tended to instigate legal actions that had the effect of augmenting the role of centralized royal justice.” See Miskimin, Harry A., “Widows Not So Merry: Women and the Courts in Late Medieval France,” in Upon My Husband's Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe, ed. Mirrer, Louise (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 212Google Scholar.

108. Tillier, Mathieu, “The Qāḍīs of Fusṭāṭ-Miṣr under the Ṭūlūnids and the Ikhshīdids: The Judiciary and Egyptian Autonomy,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 131 (2011): 207–22Google Scholar, and “Judicial Authority and Qāḍīs’ Autonomy under the ʿAbbāsids,” Al-Masāq 26 (2014): 119–31Google Scholar.

109. After all, the jurists often insisted that in cases of injustice (Arabic, ẓulm) between dhimmīs, the Muslim judge must interfere and judge the case; see, for example, Müller, “Non-Muslims as Part of Islamic Law,” 39.

110. Liʾanna akthar al-mutaẓallimīn ḍuʿafāʾ ṣaʿālīk wa-ḥuram munqaṭiʿāt; see ʿAlī b. Munjib Ibn al-Ṣayrafī, Al-Qānūn fī dīwān al-rasāʼil wa-l-ishārah ilā man nāla al-wizāra, ed. Sayyid, Ayman Fuʼād (Cairo: al-Dār al-miṣrīya al-lubnānīya, 1990), 39–40Google Scholar. For a later period, see the observation of a Venetian merchant living in Egypt quoted in Fuess, “Ẓulm by Maẓālim?,” 133–34. I explain my understanding of ḥuram munqaṭiʿāt as women without effective male kin rather than “single women” (as translated in Nielsen, Secular Justice in an Islamic State, 10) in a study titled “‘I Am a Woman without Connections’: On the Interplay between the Social and Cultural Capital of Jewish Women in Medieval Egypt,” to be published in a collection of articles on Jewish women's cultural capital under Islam edited by Fran Malino and Moshe Rosman that will be published by Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in cooperation with Liverpool University Press. For the time being, see my talk on the subject at https://youtube/GUcASpaWedk (starting around 6:30).

111. Zinger, “Women, Gender and Law,” 92–93. The fact that it constitutes a topos can be seen by the cases when it is manipulated, as in the anecdote told about both al-Ḥākim and al-ʿAzīz where they encountered a mannequin dressed as a woman seeking to present a petition to the caliph; see sources in Sayyid, Ayman Fuʾād, La capitale de l’Égypte jusqu’à l’époque fatimide al-Qāhira et al-Fusṭāṭ: Essai de reconstitution topographique (Beirut: in commission by Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998), 135Google Scholar, and Cortese and Calderini, Women and the Fatimids, 228 n. 48 (for another relevant anecdote see p. 37).

112. A hint of this may be found in a petition to a Muslim judge that specifically stresses his “good deeds to the members of minority communities and the dhimmīs.” See T-S 28.8, doc. I, l.13, ed. Khan, Arabic and Administrative Documents, doc. 98.

113. For Salome, see Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.5.4. On the geonic rebellious woman enactment, see Brody, Robert, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 62–63Google Scholar and see Brody's Hebrew study mentioned there in n. 41. This geonic enactment is often seen as the quintessential example of the phenomenon of Jews turning to Muslim courts. While it can be used to support my argument for the gendered aspects of using Muslim legal venues, I chose not to discuss it because even if we read nitlot ba-goyyim to mean something like turning to legal venues, it is highly problematic to speak about Islamic law or Islamic legal institutions in mid-seventh-century Iraq; see also Simonsohn, Common Justice, 179. On the other end of the historical spectrum, when in 1920 the British tried to expand the authority of the rabbinical courts in Palestine and to prevent Jewish women from bringing inheritance cases to Muslim courts, the Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in ʾEreẓ Yisra'el resisted and demanded to set up a secular Jewish court for family matters. See Shilo, Margalit, Ha-maʾavak ʿal ha-kol: Neshot ha-yeshuv u-zekhut ha-beḥirah 1917–1926 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2013), 276–79Google Scholar. I thank Margalit Shilo for pointing to me this fascinating episode. When I presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2015 “Language, Gender and Law in the Judaeo-Islamic Milieu” conference at Cambridge University, one could not help but notice many illuminating parallels with the ways Muslim women access Israeli civil courts today, as was presented by attorney Bana Shoughry in a fascinating paper.

114. Lauer, “Jewish Law and Litigation,” 114–32.

115. Following the European model, maẓālim justice was called “secular” in Nielsen, Secular Justice in an Islamic State. See, however, the critique of the use of “secular” in Tillier, Mathieu, “Qāḍīs and the Political Use of Maẓālim Jurisdiction under the ʿAbbāsids,” in Public Violence in Islamic Societies: Power, Discipline, and the Construction of the Public Sphere, 7^th–19^th Centuries CE, ed. Lange, Christian and Fierro, Maribel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 59Google Scholar.

116. Even if we include them as evidence against the gendered use of Muslim venues, a quick look at fig. 1 shows that their effect would be negligible.