‘Goat Beautiful of Voice’: A Piyyut of Abraham ibn Ezra from Medinet el-Fayyūm, Egypt

This zuta provides an edition of a new copy of a known piyyut by Abraham ibn Ezra, ‘Goat beautiful of voice’ (יַעְלָה יְפַת קוֹל), with translation, full collation, and commentary. This copy, now in the collection of the University of Michigan (P.Mich. inv. 531), offers some valuable new readings as well as evidence for the readership of Ibn Ezra in a provincial setting in medieval Egypt, as its provenance can be traced to the city of Medinet el-Fayyūm; the text can be added to evidence for a Jewish presence there, of which an overview is also given.

The ‘oldest dated document of the Cairo Genizah’ (Halper 331): The Seleucid era and sectarian Jewish calendars

Halper 331 is the fragment of a codex that has been styled the ‘oldest dated document of the Cairo Genizah’. It preserves the opening of a Jewish legal document dated to the year 1182 (Seleucid era), which appears to have been copied into this codex, probably as a formulary, not long after this date, in the late 9th century. In this article, the text of this fragment, in Aramaic and Hebrew, is edited, and its identification as the beginning of a marriage contract (ketubbah) is evaluated. Its Egyptian provenance is questioned, partly because the earliest evidence for the introduction of the Seleucid era by Jews in Egypt dates from the mid-10th century. The article surveys the history of Jewish dating methods in early medieval Egypt and the Near East, in an attempt to clarify this question. The specific date of the document deviates from the rabbinic calendar, but agrees with that of the contemporary Jewish Near Eastern sectarian groups of Abū ʿImrān al-Tiflīsī and Ismāʿīl al-ʿUkbarī; this document could thus uniquely attest one of these sectarian Jewish calendars.