ABSTRACT
Prior to the systematic study of the Geniza documents, the picture of the organization of the Jewish community of medieval Egypt, as of the Jewish community of the Islamic world in general, was rather sketchy. Much had been known about the gaonate and exilarchate in Babylonia, thanks to the responsa literature (including Sherira Gaon’s so-called “Epistle”), several Muslim sources mentioning these institutions, and Nathan the Babylonian’s vignette of the Babylonian gaonate and exilarchate in the tenth century. But these sources tell us very little about Jewish public life in other eastern regions of the Islamic world, and nothing at all about local communal organization in Egypt. Moreover, they give the impression that Jewish communal life was organized centrally and autocratically, much like the centralistic and despotic caliphate in Islam, and that local communal life was virtually effaced by the domineering institutions of Jewish central self-government in the capital of the caliphate in Baghdad.
