The Courts, the Qadi, and the ‘People’: Resolving Mercantile Disputes in the Medieval Islamic Mediterranean

Goldberg The Cairo Geniza contains very few records of lawsuits between Jewish merchants in the eleventh twelfth centuries. And by very few, I mean there is only solid evidence of five such full-blown mercantile lawsuits coming before the Jewish court in the period 990–1150. Such a small number of cases is perhaps surprising – letters, the source of information have from represented in disputes because that and smaller towns Fatimid Ayyubid Egypt and maintained communal ratified, recorded not handle cross-confessional disputes, and