Full bibliography

The author publishes an Arabic document from the Cairo Geniza, now at Cambridge. It is the letter of a Jewish spice-dealer whose affairs had taken him as far as India, and who sent his goods from Aden in Southern Arabia to his brothers whose business was taking them to Egypt. In the letter he mentions inter alia that he had heard a rumour of the Riots in North Africa. The date of the letter is roughly 1149, and the writer presumably refers to the massacres and forced conversions of the Jews in North Africa following the conquests of ʿAbd el-Muʾamân in 1147. The cities to which he refers include a number known to us from other sources, and also Karkana and Sfax.