Divorce in 1204
- Cairo, 1204. A woman received a letter from the merchant husband who was working abroad, in response to his wife’s earlier divorce petition. The letter is one of more than 300,000 documents found in the Fustat synagogue Ben Ezra in Cairo. For historians, these writings have been fundamental to knowing the lives of Middle Eastern Jews in the Middle Ages.
The author of the letter was a Jewish merchant who in the Middle Ages was not able to reconcile his tender profession with his family relations. The name of the trader and his wife is unknown, but her husband was long away from home to do business in the city of Aden (India) and its surroundings, which worsened the relationship between husband and wife, until finally her wife asked for divorce.
“If that’s what you want, I don’t reproach you. The waiting time has been long. And I do not know if the Creator will help me right away and if I will be able to go home, or if it will take a long time, because I cannot go home with my bare hands. For all these reasons, I have decided to send you the certificate of liberty which has been given to you. Now the decision is in your hands. If you want to separate yourself from me, please accept the document of contempt and you will be free. But if it’s not your decision and your will, let’s not waste all these years that you’ve been waiting for: maybe the payment is close and, if not, maybe you’ll regret at a time when repentance doesn’t make sense.”
“And please don’t blame me, I’ve never neglected you, and I’ve always tried to protect you from rumors that hurt my honor. You denied me, not the other way around. I don't know if the decision is yours or someone else, but after all this, I beg you not to say it, neither you nor anyone: this is the reward we will receive from it. All day, my solitary heart hurts because we're separated. I feel that pain when I write these lines. But the decision is yours. If you want to separate yourself, go ahead; if you want to leave things as they are, just like that. But don't follow the first premonition. Ask honest people for advice and think about what's best for you. May God help you make the right decision.”
We don't know what the rumours were saying or whether they had a firm foundation and, above all, we don't know what their wife eventually decided. This and many other letters were compiled and translated by ethnographer and historian Shelomo Dov Goitien (1900-1985) in the book Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders. In his view, the Jewish merchant had returned to Egypt and, if his wife had accepted the contempt sentence, her husband would probably have stayed in Aden. Thus, according to Goitien, “those long hard years were not useless. In the end he met with the traveler.”
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