Several years ago, a cache of some 1,000 manuscripts—most of which are from 12th and 13th centuries—was discovered in Afghanistan’s Samangan province. Aram Yardumian reports on the archive’s contents and the results of recent research into these documents:
The documents are written in six languages: early Judeo-Persian, Early New Persian [the precursor of modern Farsi spoken in the 8th and 9th centuries], Judeo-Arabic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic; they range in genre from Islamic legal instruments to personal correspondence, civil contracts to biblical commentary, debt lists to poetry. The most celebrated manuscript so far is a page of the 10th-century [talmudist and theologian] Saadiah Gaon’s commentary on Isaiah 34, otherwise absent from the rabbi’s corpus. . . .
[Among the other items are a number of letters and documents] written by or in relation to the family of Abu Nasr Yehuda ben Daniel. Abu Nasr, who was the family’s patriarch, and his son Abu al-Hasan Siman Tub appear to have been prominent figures in the local Jewish community. . . . Both were landowners and goods traders. A third man, Ibrahim ben Daniel, most likely Abu Nasr’s brother, is also mentioned in the documents, but infrequently. . . .
Owing to a scarcity of written sources, very little is known about the lives and origins of the Jews of [this area]. . . . There are very few clues as to the origins of the Abu Nasr Yehuda ben Daniel family, but the most important come from the five languages represented in the corpus. The cross-genre presence of Judeo-Arabic and Arabic and very little Hebrew suggest an origin in the Arab world. So far there are not enough legal-formulary or [linguistic] clues pointing to a specific region, but Iraq seems most likely. Some of the Hebrew-script correspondence uses Babylonian-style nikkud, an orthographic system for distinguishing alternative pronunciations of letters. Moreover, although the Arabic and Judeo-Arabic texts are few, and the family members clearly use the Persian language to communicate, the use of the Hebrew [alphabet] would suggest they are not local converts to Judaism.
Read more on Science Trends: https://sciencetrends.com/the-afghan-genizah-and-eastern-persian-jewry/