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From the early Islamic period until modernity, Jews living under Muslim rule used both Jewish and Islamic legal instruments to transmit property, including cash, movable assets, and real estate (rural and urban), to their relatives, to charitable clients, and to Jewish communal institutions. Patterns of Jewish inheritance can be uncovered from Jewish and Muslim court and state documents, responsa, and communal edicts, which have been unevenly studied and remain mostly unpublished.Until the Ottoman era, most Islamic rulers permitted Jews to transmit property withou…

Wills are legal documents that dictate how a person’s assets will be distributed after his or her death. Although rabbinic law prescribes a strict order of kin succession derived primarily from the Bible (Numbers 27:8-11), the earliest rabbinic legal texts also permit individuals to use two basic types of will to transmit their property to both relatives and non-relatives in other ways. The first is a deathbed will that can be changed or voided if the testator recovers (alternately termed deyatiqi, from the Greek diathēkē; and, in Hebrew, mattenat shekhiv me-raʿ); the other is an irr…

Nathan ben Isaac ha-Kohen ha-Bavli is the otherwise unknown author of a brief but very important historical text concerning the Babylonian academies and the exilarchate. The work, entitled Akhbār Baghdād (A Chronicle of Baghdad), was apparently written in Judeo-Arabic in North Africa in the mid-tenth century, but the sobriquet ha-Bavli indicates that Nathan came from Babylonia (Iraq). His account has been preserved in an undated Hebrew translation published by A. Neubauer. Fragments of the Judeo-Arabic original found in the Cairo Geniza were subsequently published by I. Friedlan…