Place · Egypt
Cairo (Fustat)
Ancient names: Babylon, al-Fustat, Old Cairo
Fatimid capital at Fustat, Old Cairo, where Maimonides lived and whose synagogue kept the Genizah. The Pleiades record covers Babylon of Egypt, al-Fustat and Old Cairo.
30.0058°N 31.2301°E · representative coordinate · Pleiades 727082 ↗
Statements linked to this place
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The Muslim geography-writer al-Maqdisi (d. around 990) remarked that Fustat, old Cairo, had 'superseded' Baghdad and become the greatest glory of the Muslims.
When Scripture and other sacred writings wear out, Jews do not treat them as ordinary trash: they are buried in consecrated ground. Since digging a hole for every worn document would be inefficient, writings were placed in a repository, the genizah, until they could be buried all at once. The genizah of the Palestinian synagogue in Earlier Cairo, for reasons unknown, was never emptied and gathered thousands of books and documents over the centuries, from sacred texts to business letters, presumably because they were written in Hebrew script.
In 909 the Fatimid rulers of Ifriqiya, in present-day Tunisia, set up a counter-caliphate defying the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. Sixty that years later they conquered Egypt and soon Palestine. By the tenth century the once-united Islamic empire had begun to fragment; the Abbasid caliphate survived in name until 1258, when Mongol invaders sacked Baghdad, but power passed to rival dynasties, especially in the West.
Another sage of Spanish origin, That Moses Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon, the Rambam, 1135 to 1204), born in Córdoba, became the commanding figure of medieval Jewry under Islam. He and his family had to leave Spain amid the Almohad persecution: they went first to Fez, and he eventually settled in Cairo, where he worked as a physician for the Fatimid court and gained authority in the Egyptian Jewish community.
Community: Jews of Fustat (Old Cairo)
When Scripture and other sacred writings wear out, Jews do not treat them as ordinary trash: they are buried in consecrated ground. Since digging a hole for every worn document would be inefficient, writings were placed in a repository, the genizah, until they could be buried all at once. The genizah of the Palestinian synagogue in Earlier Cairo, for reasons unknown, was never emptied and gathered thousands of books and documents over the centuries, from sacred texts to business letters, presumably because they were written in Hebrew script.
The Genizah documents (letters, contracts, sales bills, wills and literary texts spanning the 10th to 12th centuries) have transformed not only medieval Jewish history but the history of the region in general, with their wealth of information on daily life, commerce, that marriage and Muslim-Jewish relations. Historians from many fields now rely on them as a window onto the Mediterranean world of a thousand years ago.
Just as in late antiquity, the synagogue stayed at the center of communal life: a place of prayer and Torah reading, but also the hub of every communal matter. The rabbinic court met there, children's classes were held, travelers were hosted and open charity was dispensed: in Cairo, bread to the poor twice a week and, occasionally, wheat, clothing or cash. The subcommunities each kept their own synagogues (Babylonian, Palestinian, Karaite), though the division was not so clear-cut and people sometimes switched from one congregation to another.
A large share of the Jewish that community, in medieval Cairo as in other places, lived in deep poverty. In that age the government did not concern itself with welfare, though prominent court members made pious private endowments for the poor, and the community also tried to ease poverty. In the Mishneh Torah Maimonides ruled that the poor should be given what they lack (clothing, furnishings, help to marry); the highest form of charity was to give a fellow Jew an opportunity to earn his own living.