This is an edition and analysis of a corpus of letters of Jewish merchants from Ottoman Egypt that have been preserved in the Cairo Genizah. They are written in Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew letters). The corpus is an important source both for the linguistic description of late Judaeo-Arabic and also for the social history of the Jews of the Ottoman period. The project will result in the publication of a book and a variety of articles.
The project is being carried out in collaboration with Dr. Esther-Miriam Wagner (Woolf Institute).