2. Documents from Ottoman Alexandria

Chapter 2 focuses on Alexandria, Egypt’s other great Mediterranean port, located on the Nile’s western arm. Four of the five Genizah documents presented here are composed in Ottoman Turkish and feature Salmūn al-Iskandarānī, the powerful Jewish merchant who directed Alexandria’s customs in the early 17th century. In the first two (T-S Ar. 38.111 and T-S Ar. 39.425), two of Salmūn’s agents—a member of the imperial palace soldiery and another high-ranking military officer—report to him, requesting guidance on a sale of wood and asking Salmūn to aid a fellow Alexandrian travelling to Mecca. The third document (T-S AS 178.88) is a petition from Salmūn himself, who complains to an unnamed official that the subprovincial administrators known as kāshifs prevent him from assembling the tribute to be shipped to the Ottoman palace. Document 4 (Mosseri Xa.3.10) is a petition from Salmūn’s replacement as tax farmer of a village near Alexandria, requesting that Salmūn be investigated for subleasing revenue sources to his associate Saʿadia Cohen; notable here is that all those involved in this case are Jewish merchants. The final document (ENA 3941.4), written in Arabic, is a brief salary receipt, dated 1824, from one of the textile-weaving factories that Egypt’s autonomous governor Meḥmed ʿAlī Pasha (r. 1805–48) opened in an attempt at import-substitution industrialisation.