Narrating Masculine Failure: The Marital Woes of a Twelfth-Century Jewish Physician in Egypt

This article analyzes a rare autobiographical Judeo-Arabic letter from the Cairo Geniza, written by a 12th-century Jewish physician in rural Egypt. Addressed to his uncle, the letter links the writer's his repeated bankruptcies to his troubled married life. After the death of a virtuous first wife, he remarried into the Ibn Sabra family. This second marriage soon deteriorated, eventually drawing in legal intervention by Moses Maimonides. Drawing on Miriam Frenkel's approach to Geniza documents as literary products, the article argues that the letter is an act of self-fashioning rather than a straightforward account. By contrasting a good first wife with a bad second wife and seeking validation from male relatives, the physician reconstructs a damaged masculine identity. The article situates this narrative of failure within broader medieval Jewish conceptions of masculinity, dependency, and social belonging, showing how storytelling provided a framework for coping with personal, professional, and marital crises.