A Medieval Jewish Medical Student’s Letter Home

Amid the many treasures of the Cairo Genizah—a repository for discarded manuscripts in the Ben Ezra synagogue—is a letter from a young Jewish student who came to the Egyptian capital to study medicine. Like many of the documents in the Genizah, it is written in Judeo-Arabic, that is, Arabic in Hebrew letters. In the letter, addressed to the writer’s mother, he tells her that “the whole world is covered in blackness because of my absence from you.” He then recounts fulfilling his dream of meeting with the great sage Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), who referred him to study with “the elder al-Muwaffaq.” The Princeton Geniza Lab summarizes the rest of the document, and provides pictures of the original: