Sunbat (Ar. Sunbāṭ; Sambūṭ or Sambūṭiya in Cairo Geniza documents) was a town in Lower Egypt which had a Jewish population from at least the tenth to the seventeenth century. Although small, the community maintained a rabbinical court and a synagogue, the foundational elements of a middle-sized Jewish settlement. The town also sustained a scholarly elite: scholars from Palestine and Syria lived in Sunbat, and an eleventh-century head of the Babylonian community in Fustat, Sahlān ben Abraham, traced his lineage back seven generations to the town. According to Joseph Sambari, a Torah …