LEGAL TEXTS ARE increasingly proving to be valuable sources for the study of the material culture of the medieval Middle East and the Islamicate world more broadly. Innovative monographs (such as Leor Halevi's Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society) and articles (such as Tziona Grossmark's study of glass within Jewish law and Ruba Kana’an's use of Islamic legal sources in the interpretation of medieval metalwork production) exemplify the new perspectives that emerge from the dialogue between legal texts and material things. As Don Davis proposes in this issue, we can see the “story of law” as “the formation of endless practical legal arrangements, the creation of rules and categories to tame them, and the subsequent mutual development of (and tension between) both as an ongoing encounter.” Hence, the objects of material culture offer us a new opportunity to explore the encounter between the theory and the praxis of law. Nevertheless, the slow pace at which legal corpora are being integrated into the study of material culture is a symptom of the complexity of these sources and the fundamentally interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of such an enterprise.

This article focuses on a set of legal questions about ṣīnī vessels (literally, “Chi-nese” vessels) sent from the Jewish community in Aden to Fustat (Old Cairo) in the mid-1130s CE. These questions survive in a memorandum subsequently deposited in the so-called Cairo Geniza, a document which eventually made its way to Cambridge University Library (see Figure 5).

While ṣīnī vessels are listed in various Geniza inventories and wills, this is the only known discussion of the materiality of ṣīnī to occur in any Geniza document, and also the earliest dated and localized query about these vessels’ status with respect to Jewish law of vessels used for food consumption. Although opaque at first reading, our analysis of these queries will suggest that their phrasing and tim-ing can be linked to the contemporaneous appearance, in the Yemen, of a new type of Chinese ceramic material: in effect, an early true “porcelain.” Although various types of Chinese ceramic had been entering the Middle East since the first half of the ninth century, sometimes in huge quantities, this particular ceramic fabric presented Jewish scholars and householders at the port of Aden with a perplexing problem, since its properties confounded their expectations of how a ceramic fabric should look, feel, and behave.