The medieval Middle East, where the vast majority of medieval Jews lived, is widely presumed to have produced few documentary texts and preserved next to none. But tens of thousands of documents have survived—for the period before 1100, more than survived from Europe. The find spots range from Cairo to China. This illustrated lecture will take account of a flood of new information these caches offer about the Jewish communities of the Middle Ages, their surprisingly broad geographic remit and the impact of mobility and distance on communal life.
Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, where she runs the Princeton Geniza Lab and holds a joint appointment in the departments of Near Eastern Studies and History. Her second book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue, has just been published by Princeton University Press. In 2015, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
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My name is Ali Behdad and I'm
the Director of the
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Center for Near Eastern Studies,
and on behalf of my colleagues,
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I would like to welcome you to
this talk, to this second Averroes
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lecture of this series which we
have been doing for several years now.
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Before I turn the podium to my colleague
Aomar Boum, who will introduce our
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today's speaker professor Marina Rustow,
I would like to take just this opportunity
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to thank several colleagues, first
and foremost Sarah Stein and the Leve
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Center for Jewish Studies for the
co-sponsorship of these series.
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As well I would like to thank my
colleagues at CNES, especially Aomar,
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I think Susan, Susan Slyomovics, who have
really taken on sort of the intellectual
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leadership with Sarah, Sarah Stein, to help
us organize these series. I also should
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give a shout out to our stellar staff
especially Christian Rodriguez who is
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here tonight to help us out. For those of
you are not familiar with the Center for
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Near Eastern Studies, I think many of you
are, CNES is it is a Research Center.
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We're over a hundred faculty from
humanities, social sciences, arts, and law
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school collaborate in a variety of
research and pedagogical projects. The
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center that was founded in 1957 and is
one of the oldest centers for
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interdisciplinary research on
the broader Middle East. We provide a
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forum for exchange of ideas and
dissemination of information within and
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beyond campus and you know our
colleagues do really cutting edge
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research and offer our faculty and the
broader community fresh perspectives on
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the challenges and cultural richness
of the region. We also support
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graduate and undergraduate fellowships
and awards of various sorts.
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To students who work on the Middle East as
you know we get support from the
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Department of Education and the
Mellon Foundation recently. Today's talk
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is part of the Averroes lecture series
that has been underwritten by a generous
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donor, an anonymous donor and which focuses
on the Jewish communities living in the
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Muslim world prior to the 20th century. We have named series Averroes, the
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Latin name for Ibn Rushd, as those of you
who are familiar with the history of
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medieval Islam in the 12th century and the
Lucien polymath whose
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philosophical work really integrated
Islamic traditions with ancient Greek
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thought. To point out we've––
to point out the history of Córdoba's
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Jewish Muslim relations as a model of
coexistence and the connections between
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Averroes as an intellectual and the
Jewish philosopher Maimonides, both of
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whom were committed to intellectual
exchange and communal life across
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religious boundaries. I would like to
very briefly introduce our wonderful
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colleague Aomar who is a sociocultural
anthropologist here at UCLA and now the
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also the program director for our Mellon
Grant on minorities in the Middle East
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which we hope to do more of this kind of
a program but also other minorities as
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well almost. Aomar's stellar ethnographic work
addresses the place of religious and
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ethnic minorities in MENA region. He has
published widely on this topic. His
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publication includes an important book
Memories of Absence: How Muslims
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Remember Jews in Morocco, which was
published by Stanford University Press, a
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very important book that I highly
recommend and recently co-edited with
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Sarah Stein, The Holocaust and North
Africa which was published by again by
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Stanford University Press.
So Aomar, please introduce
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our speaker and welcome to the podium.
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Welcome everyone. It takes a special and
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unique scholar to revisit the
Cairo Geniza after a generation of
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scholars such as great time
Mark Cohen, and others have done so
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and still see what they couldn't. It
takes a scholar with special linguistic
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gifts, knowledge of materiality and paper,
scholarly investigative expertise, an
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ability to reconstruct puzzles out of
paper fragments. Above all, it takes a
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scholar with a sense of humility to
collaborate with others to put together
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a story out of paper dispersed in
different archives and institutions. Dr.
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Marina Rustow has proven without doubt
to be up to the challenge and emerge as
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a leading 21st century expert of the
Geniza, of the Cairo Geniza.
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The historian of Judeo-Arabic
documents of the Cairo Geniza and the
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history of Jews during the Fatimid
period, Dr. Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha
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professor of Jewish civilization in the
Near East at Princeton University. In 2014,
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she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship,
followed by a MacArthur Fellow in 2015.
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Professor Marina Rustow received a BA
from Yale University and two masters and
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a PhD from Columbia University under the
mentorship of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. She
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taught at Emory University of 2003 to 2010 and
John Hopkins University from 2010 to
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2015, prior to joining
the faculty at Princeton
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University where she is currently
professor in the Department of Near
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Eastern Studies and History and Director
of the Princeton Geniza Lab.
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Professor Rustow has changed our understanding
of the Fatimid Caliphate, a Shia state
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which ruled in North Africa between
10th and 12th centuries.
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As a historian whose research is largely
based on the Geniza,
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Dr. Rustow has managed and succeeded to
shed new light on eternal Jewish life
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and on board a Fatimid Society of the
medieval period Dr. Rustow's approach to
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this archive goes beyond decoding
documents–in itself a phenomenal task–
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to questioning the relationship between
subject and medieval states and asking
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what that relationship tells us about
power and the negotiation of religious
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boundaries. In heresy, talking about her first
work, in heresy a politics of community
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the Jews of the Fatimid period, the
Jews of the Fatimid caliphate, Dr. Rustow
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focuses on the period from 909
to 1171 c.e. and
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upends long accepted ideas about the
relationship between two rival Jewish
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communities under the Fatimid rule.
Analyzing archival documents and material
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from the point of view of both
Islamic and Jewish communities
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Professor Rustow has built an academic
career through mining these documents
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or what they can tell us about how the
Caliphate state grew and how Jewish,
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Christian, and Muslim subjects related to
it. Her second book, which is going to be
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on solo
after the talk, The Last Archive:T races
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of a Caliphate in a Cairo
Synagogue is a new book published by
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Princeton University Press in 2020–– in
2020 and analyzes the Fatimid history
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of documentation through material
found in the Fustat synagogue
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Reminiscent of work about Islamic
writing and manuscripts in sub-saharan
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Africa, Rustow challenges that arguing
about Islamic dynasties produce little
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documents and manuscripts. With patience,
rigor, and excellent analysis, Dr. Rustow
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takes her readers from Geniza twelve
to communal spaces and outside
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geographic borders of Egypt following
the complex trials by which Arabic
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documents made their way from Fatimid
palace officials to Jewish scribes. Just
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like what she did in her first book on
heresy and the politics of community, Dr.
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Rustow invites us again to rethink
Fatimid archives through the lens of–
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what she calls– the investor-owned
ecology of documentation. Deploy her
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considering her prowess in languages, social
history, and paper
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Dr. Rustow is rewriting our
understanding of medieval Jewish life
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and transforming the historical study of
the Fatimid Empire. Please join me in
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welcoming our winter Averroes lecture
speaker Dr. Marina Rustow.
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Aomar, thank you so much
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for that really generous introduction.
That was really nice of you and thank
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you to Ali and to the Center for Near
Eastern Studies and especially to
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Christian Rodriguez for making this
visit possible and as well as colleagues
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and administrators in the Center
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
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especially Jessica Goldberg and Luke
Yarborough who organized a conference
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that's happening this weekend that was
the initial impetus for my trip
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to LA. I'm going to move a little bit
closer in the hope that proximity will
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make up for the lack of a microphone and
also the fact that I'm going to lose my
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voice over the course of this lecture
because I'm getting over a cold, and
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thank you all very much for being
here. I live in New York and I came to LA
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via Chicago and with weather like this I
wouldn't be sitting in a room indoors so
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I appreciate it.
So pre-modern historians all face a
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similar problem which is lack of
information and the consequences of this
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lack of information have slightly...
they're slightly different when you look
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at it from the perspective of Jewish
history and the perspective of Middle
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Eastern history. So from the Jewish side
first, when the Muslims conquered the
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region that we now know as the Middle
East in the seventh and eighth centuries,
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most Jews were living in areas that came
under Muslim rule within the first
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decades of conquest. We know actually
very little about what happened next. We
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do know that Talmudic law– so basically
what formed the the basis of Jewish law–
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is largely agrarian, meaning if you read
the Babylonian and the Palestinian
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Talmud's the the version of Jewish law
that you're going to see represented
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presumes that most
Jews are living in rural communities.
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Yet we also know that if you flash-forward
500 years later, the Judaism that emerged
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is 100% urban. So what happened in
between? A subsidiary question to that
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is how did the rabbinic construction of
Judaism win out over all the other
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possible constructions? Judaism never
developed a papacy or Church councils or a
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Grand Mufti or other centralized
structures of governance and instead it
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relied on a kaleidoscopically shifting
network and nodes of rabbis whose
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opinions Jews were actually under no
obligation to follow. So given that the
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rabbis were relying entirely on
persuasion and had very little coercive
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power, how did they convince anyone to
actually listen to them? So that's like
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just a glimpse of the kinds of questions
that hover over the first 500 years of
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Islamic rule from the Jewish history
side. On the middle east side, the
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questions are broader but I think no
less perplexing. There's a widespread
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perception, to which Aomar just
referred, that the Middle East used
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documents less than Europe did in the
Middle Ages, so the kind of most
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succinct and strongest statement of this thesis...
I'm just going to bring you, you know
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there are many places from which I
could bring this but I'm going to bring
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it from a book that was published in the
90s, an otherwise excellent book on
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medieval Damascus by Michael Chamberlain
where he argues that in the Middle East
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rulers maintained patrimonial if not
absolutist claims, considered most of the
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wealth of their subjects their own, and
permitted other social bodies none of
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the formal autonomies they had in Europe.
Individuals, households, religious bodies,
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and groups did not brandish documents as
proofs of hereditary status, privilege, or
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property to the extent that they did in
the Latin West, nor were there strategies
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of social reproduction recorded,
sanctified, or fought out through
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documents to the extent they were in
Europe. So you can see that the
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comparison between the medieval Middle
East and medieval Europe is right there
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in the minds even of specialists in
medieval Middle East history, the idea is
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that the grass is much greener on their
side of the Mediterranean and they have
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better archives to work with. In fact
this is a total myth actually on both
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sides. If you look at the period before
1200, in fact the Middle East has
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preserved far more original
documents than medieval Europe has
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largely because the medieval European
documents were at a certain point
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jettisoned, especially over the course of
the course of the 9th and 10th century
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and copied into what are known as cartularies, which are kind of summaries and
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registers of documents. So we have lots
of kind of documentary content, but we
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don't actually have a lot of original
documents from Europe before 1200,
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whereas we have, you know nobody's
actually counted, but certainly hundreds
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of thousands of documents from the
Middle East. So this myth has had
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consequences for the field... Some of the
the other assumptions that you see
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embedded in the Chamberlain quotation is
the idea that together with documents
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goes a certain presumption about rights
and privileges. So you can't defend––
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defend rights and privileges unless you
have access to documentation and
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document production. And so what
Chamberlain is saying here is there were
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no documents and effectively what you
had was rulers making arbitrary
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decisions. So all of this has had
unfortunate consequences for the field
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of medieval Middle Eastern history
because people tend not to look for the
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documents that exist. Documents are
important to historians especially
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because they give us access to
information that was not intended for
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long posterity, but even more than long
posterity, one of the many things that
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interests me about documents is how
they're used in kind of the immediate––
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the immediate play of social power. In
fact, we have vast caches of documents,
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many of them from Egypt, but it's not
just Egypt. The proximity–– in general the
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proximity of the desert and the zone is
conducive to the preservation of human
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artifacts, so the clearest example of
this actually is a cache of mostly
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ancient papyri from a town that in the
Roman period in Egypt was called
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Oxyrhynchus, now known as El-Bahnasa,
where as the town contracted over the
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course of the late Roman period, the
houses kind of hewed to the banks of the
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Nile, leaving a gigantic trash heap out
in the desert where five hundred
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thousand documents were preserved, most
of them in Greek although there are some
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Arabic documents from Oxyrhynchus as
well which have not been published. So if
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you tally up all of the papyrus paper
and parchment documents from the Middle
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East before 1200, there are far more than
there are from medieval Europe, let alone
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from Byzantium. So in what follows, I'm
going to try to give you a kind of Janus-
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faced view of what all of this
documentation has a potential to do to
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our image of both Jews in the Islamic
world and of the Middle East more
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broadly. At the time of the Islamic
conquests, the two largest Jewish
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communities in the world were to be
found in Mesopotamia and Syria, with
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other important communities in Asia
Minor and Egypt. So the most significant
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thing that this map demonstrates for my
purposes, you can see that in the
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darker green you have the conquests,
Muslim conquests up until 632. In the
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middle shade of green, 632 to 661, and
then finally in the lightest shade of
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green, the conquest that happened between
6061 and 750 so there's a kind of
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concentric circle geographically
going on here. So the the biggest Jewish
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communities were in Mesopotamia and
Syria with other communities in Asia
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Minor and in Egypt, and what that means
is that most Jews in the world lived in
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regions that the invading Muslim armies
would conquer in their very first decade
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of campaigning outside the Arabian
Peninsula.
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So Palestine fell between 636 and 640,
Egypt in 640, Iraq in 642, which means
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that before the last sasanian Shah was
killed, before the Byzantine Emperor
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Heraclius knew that he permanently lost
the eastern Mediterranean, most of the
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world's Jews were living under a single
polity and they would continue to do so
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for half a millennium or more. So
basically they started out here and then
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the Jewish populations spread from there
but I'll get to that in a minute.
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The notion that the Islamic conquests
proceeded in an Islam or the sword
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fashion has been debunked already for a
long time, although the consequences of
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that still have yet to be fully spelled
out. In a fascinating example of a book
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whose methods have been basically
completely–
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I mean, questioned to the point of like,
you know, being nobody really accepts the
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00:17:52,584 --> 00:17:55,554
methodology anymore and yet at the same
time everyone accepts the general
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conclusions– I'm talking about Richard
Bulliet's book Conversion to Islam in the
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Medieval Period, which was a fascinating
attempt in 1979 to apply the methods of
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quantitative history to the medieval
Islamic period... and methods aside, what
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Bulliet tried to do was to shed light on
the gradualness of conversion to
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Islam, and some of the consequences that
that might actually have and some of
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also the causes and how that linked up
with some of the events that we knew
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best from Islamic history, like the
consolidation of Empire and then the
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fragmentation of Empire.
So what Bulliet concludes is that the
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proportion of Muslims in the Middle East
didn't reach an absolute majority until
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the 9th or 10th century, depending on the
region. So that means that Muslims were
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ruling over a vast majority of
non-Muslims for the first 300, 400 years
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of their rule. Linguistic Arabization was
also a gradual process and a separate,
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but not completely unrelated one. And
even the language of empire and its
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administrative practices were slow to
change. You can see this in some of the
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documents that have survived. So these
are two bilingual Greek Arabic papyri,
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one from Egypt and the other from Syria,
and the Arabic text is on the top
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and the Greek text is on the bottom. Fascinatingly, both of them concerned
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taxation and in neither case does the
Greek and the Arabic text say precisely
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the same thing. So this is kind of an
example of, if you're conquering a big
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swath of the planet and you still want
to collect taxes, you should keep the tax
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structure in place and have the people
who are collecting taxes under the
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Romans continue to collect taxes under your role, but at the same
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time your view of all of this from the
upper echelons of the administration, i.e.,
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the people writing in Arabic is going to
be slightly different from the view of
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the people on the ground. So nothing
necessarily–– I'm not claiming that
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nothing changed at the first conquests.
At the same time, it would be, I think, a
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stretch to argue that everything changed
at the first conquest for Jews or for
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anyone else.
So despite these papyri and other
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smaller but equally mind-blowing cache
of early Islamic documents which are
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00:20:13,834 --> 00:20:17,464
still in the process of being published
and interpreted, what follows the Islamic
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00:20:17,464 --> 00:20:21,504
conquest in Jewish history is a vast
blackout of substantive information
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00:20:21,504 --> 00:20:27,214
nearly everywhere except for Iraq and
Syria... and even there all we know are the
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00:20:27,214 --> 00:20:30,514
works of a thin crust of illiterate
elite in and around the rabbinic
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academies at Tiberias and Palestine and
Sora and Pumbaa dita on the lower
249
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Euphrates in Iraq. So basically there's a
vast silence until about 900. That
250
00:20:46,234 --> 00:20:50,974
silence lifts and when it lifts not only
were there dense and well-organized
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Jewish communities all over the vast
expanse of the Islamic world, but those
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communities were already urban and
prosperous to an astonishing degree. The
253
00:20:59,644 --> 00:21:02,974
scatter bits of information that we do
have suggest that the Jews adopted
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Arabic earlier than Christians likely
because they were faster to move to
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cities. So cities are really the big kind
of story here. A conservative estimate
256
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puts 9th century Baghdad at half a
million inhabitants.
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For comparison's sake, remember that
after Imperial Rome, no city in Europe
258
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would reach half a million inhabitants
until 17th century Paris and London. So
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half a million is very, very impressive
for a pre-modern city. A less
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00:21:28,564 --> 00:21:32,554
conservative figure estimates Baghdad at
closer to a million inhabitants, which
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would make its mean its only medieval
rival eighth century Chang'an, which was
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about to be destroyed anyway. So even
rabbinic scholasticism was forced in the
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end to become urbane, urban, and
sophisticated. So the the yeshiva is the
264
00:21:49,294 --> 00:21:52,384
rabbinic academies in Iraq, which had
always existed in these kind of rural
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communities themselves, move to Baghdad
by 900. The Geonim who ran these
266
00:21:59,014 --> 00:22:04,203
academies in the 10th and 11th century
were cosmopolitan, educated broadly in
267
00:22:04,203 --> 00:22:09,123
the sciences and not just in rabbinic
law, educated in canonical Jewish texts
268
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and methods, but also in Islamic
jurisprudence and philosophy. And an
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example that I like to bring of this for
a couple of reasons is a letter of Hai
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Gaon who's like... even if the Ganiza had
never been discovered in the late 19th
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century, this is still somebody we would
have known about. This is like a very, you
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know, famous, for those who know the
inside baseball. It's always funny when
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people say like famous, but to whom? A
famous Gaon of the 11th century who
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all we had to go on were his legal
opinions, his responsa, and they Ganiza
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00:22:47,733 --> 00:22:54,934
yielded some letters of his. And in
this case–– I like this letter because
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I had read it so many times before I
realized what was going on. So if you're
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a medieval letter-writer, the first thing
you have to know is that you cannot
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mention anyone without putting a
blessing after their name. Now if you
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really, really hate their guts, you still
put a blessing after their name but it's
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a kind of underhanded one or like a
curse or something like that, but you have to
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say something. So if you look carefully
at the blessings in this letter, he's
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writing to thank a benefactor.
I have had a teacher at the Jewish
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Theological Seminary when I was in
graduate school named Neil Danzig who
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00:23:30,424 --> 00:23:34,083
used to describe the letters of the Geonim
as shnorebriven which is Yiddish for
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begging letters, so you expect these kind
of glorious, you know, legal
286
00:23:37,894 --> 00:23:41,823
pronouncements and in fact what you get
are fundraising letters and this is one,
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00:23:41,823 --> 00:23:47,073
where he says "please thank on my behalf
David Ibn Bapshad, probably a Karaite by
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the way, may God support him since he has
extended towards me every kindness
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00:23:50,493 --> 00:23:54,274
benefited me and been loyal to me. Let
him know of the esteem in which I hold
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00:23:54,274 --> 00:23:57,503
his loyalty." So translation: tell him
to send me more money.
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00:23:57,503 --> 00:24:02,583
But when he puts in the blessing after
his name, he puts it in an Arabic script.
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00:24:02,583 --> 00:24:06,353
And it's something that,
again I'd read the letter
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so many times before I realized this was
happening and before I realized how kind
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00:24:09,323 --> 00:24:14,323
of momentous it was... There are a couple
of different ways to read this. One is
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00:24:14,323 --> 00:24:17,843
that the Geonim were educated
outside of the confines of the yeshiva
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and if you were writing a good letter in
Arabic you would simply habitually write
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00:24:21,894 --> 00:24:28,313
aya de allah, may god preserve him,
and that was how it came out. But another
298
00:24:28,313 --> 00:24:32,573
way to read it which was pointed out to
me by an undergraduate is maybe this is
299
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actually how people were learning to
write letters inside the yeshiva too, and
300
00:24:35,753 --> 00:24:41,514
we simply don't know the answer but
either way that's what was happening. So
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that's just to give you a glimpse of
kind of the curtain lift and this is
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00:24:44,363 --> 00:24:49,733
what's going on... Yeah sorry, the letter is in
in Judeo-Arabic and for those who
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00:24:49,733 --> 00:24:56,813
haven't had the pleasure, Judeo-Arabic is
Arabic written in Hebrew characters. So
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00:24:56,813 --> 00:25:01,223
the kind of geographic mobility that
Jews started to enjoy in the centuries
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00:25:01,223 --> 00:25:04,644
following the Islamic conquests simply
couldn't have been fathomable before. It was
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unfathomable in a number of ways.
First of all the proportion of Jews,
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especially male Jews who now traveled,
the number of wages that a Jew was
308
00:25:13,073 --> 00:25:16,673
likely to undertake over a single life
span– so in other words, if you traveled
309
00:25:16,673 --> 00:25:20,363
once you were probably gonna travel more
than once– the distance is that a single
310
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person could traverse on a regular basis
and also the techniques that Jews use to
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remain networked even as they traveled,
especially letters. So one thing that my
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research over the years has convinced me
of is that this map of medieval Jews is
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as good as far as it goes, but it
actually doesn't go far enough. In fact,
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if you want to get a kind of–– if
you take a snapshot of the
315
00:25:48,353 --> 00:25:51,473
geographic region that the documents
actually cover, we're looking at a much
316
00:25:51,473 --> 00:25:57,833
much broader expanse. By the 9th century,
Jews had reached China. In the late 11th
317
00:25:57,833 --> 00:26:01,253
and 12th century, traders were making
money hand over fist in the Indian Ocean
318
00:26:01,253 --> 00:26:05,904
trade and Jews were among them. In the
9th and 13th century, we have evidence
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00:26:05,904 --> 00:26:09,384
that they were Jews in the Eastern
Indian Ocean, including sumatra, I'll get
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to that in a minute. And we know about
this primarily because of the Geniza, but
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00:26:15,144 --> 00:26:19,253
there are other caches of
documents that contribute to our
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00:26:19,253 --> 00:26:23,933
knowledge that I'll come to towards the
end of the lecture. So first, let me just
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00:26:23,933 --> 00:26:27,713
talk a little bit about the Cairo
Geniza. It's a rapidly changing field,
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which I'm really happy to be able to say,
part of this is the advent of digital
325
00:26:31,553 --> 00:26:36,253
technology and part of it is that
there's now a critical mass of
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00:26:36,253 --> 00:26:40,553
specialists in the field, so things are
really moving and they have been moving
327
00:26:40,553 --> 00:26:46,253
for 10-15 years. So even this is a field
you–– you tend to follow. I
328
00:26:46,253 --> 00:26:49,603
might say some things that you haven't
heard before.
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00:26:49,603 --> 00:26:55,283
So the Cairo Geniza, the the name
comes from a Hebrew phrase bet genizah,
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00:26:55,283 --> 00:26:58,493
which is a burial chamber or
a storage chamber,
331
00:26:58,493 --> 00:27:03,803
generally for worn out texts, although
that's covering over a much, much more
332
00:27:03,803 --> 00:27:10,853
complicated history to do with old
Iranian languages and Biblical
333
00:27:10,853 --> 00:27:16,223
Hebrew and in fact, again because of this
big sort of gap in coverage, we don't
334
00:27:16,223 --> 00:27:22,163
exactly understand how this particular
practice developed, but by the time the
335
00:27:22,163 --> 00:27:28,793
the Cairo Geniza starts developing, Jews
are depositing their worn documents
336
00:27:28,793 --> 00:27:35,813
into a special, dedicated chamber in
their synagogues. So the way this
337
00:27:35,813 --> 00:27:42,654
happened in Cairo– Cairo is special for a
number of reasons but most of all
338
00:27:42,654 --> 00:27:48,593
because it's the largest and oldest
Geniza to have survived. So when I
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00:27:48,593 --> 00:27:53,453
say Cairo first of all, this is a bit of
a misnomer because in fact the place
340
00:27:53,453 --> 00:27:59,183
where people actually lived in the 11th
and 12th century was Fustat, which
341
00:27:59,183 --> 00:28:03,983
was the older residential core, whereas
Cairo proper was a Palatine city that
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00:28:03,983 --> 00:28:07,793
was walled off and so you didn't get to
hang out there unless you were part of
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00:28:07,793 --> 00:28:17,533
government circles. The Fatimid dynasty
arose in North Africa and 909 and they
344
00:28:17,533 --> 00:28:21,894
entered Egypt in 969, they had
made several attempts to conquer Egypt
345
00:28:21,894 --> 00:28:26,933
but they were finally successful in 969
and it was bloodless because Egypt was
346
00:28:26,933 --> 00:28:32,034
in administrative disarray
when they came in and they immediately
347
00:28:32,034 --> 00:28:36,894
set about building a number of
buildings that still stand today, so if
348
00:28:36,894 --> 00:28:41,544
you go to Cairo today and you want to
see some Fatimid buildings, you should
349
00:28:41,544 --> 00:28:46,254
ask to see Islamic Cairo, whereas if you
want to see Fustat, don't ask for
350
00:28:46,254 --> 00:28:52,464
Fustat because people will laugh at
you, ask for Coptic Cairo, called thus
351
00:28:52,464 --> 00:28:56,724
because there are lots of medieval
Coptic churches that survive there. So
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00:28:56,724 --> 00:29:02,304
the Fatimids arose in central North
Africa in 909 and if you watch
353
00:29:02,304 --> 00:29:07,434
the map carefully, it's about to turn
more green than lavender as the Fatimids
354
00:29:07,434 --> 00:29:12,804
conquer Egypt, Syria, and part of
the Arabian Peninsula, which essentially
355
00:29:12,804 --> 00:29:20,484
means that they're taking the biggest
tax yielding regions outside of Iraq for
356
00:29:20,484 --> 00:29:25,494
themselves and depriving the Abbasid
Empire of lots and lots of revenue. The
357
00:29:25,494 --> 00:29:32,784
change was palpable at the time. There's
a geographer from Palestine from the
358
00:29:32,784 --> 00:29:38,394
10th century, he's writing about 985 and
he himself actually says Baghdad has
359
00:29:38,394 --> 00:29:41,754
been superseded until the day of
judgment, Egypt's Metropole has now
360
00:29:41,754 --> 00:29:45,294
become the greatest glory of the Muslims.
So there's an idea that Baghdad is great
361
00:29:45,294 --> 00:29:53,424
but that was then, this is now, now Cairo
is the important city. So this is the
362
00:29:53,424 --> 00:29:57,584
city of Fustat and the yellow
buildings here are Christian churches,
363
00:29:57,584 --> 00:30:02,994
the ones that survived. In the blue you
see the Ben Ezra Synagogue, and that's
364
00:30:02,994 --> 00:30:06,804
where the Cairo Geniza was kept. The way
this looks on the ground is if you go
365
00:30:06,804 --> 00:30:10,614
down this alley and hang a left at the
gentleman with the cane, if you hit the
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00:30:10,614 --> 00:30:14,484
Coptic museum you've gone too far.
What you're looking for is this. This is
367
00:30:14,484 --> 00:30:18,424
the Ben Ezra Synagogue as it was
refurbished after 1991.
368
00:30:18,424 --> 00:30:23,124
It actually looks from this photo much
larger than it is. If you go inside, it's
369
00:30:23,124 --> 00:30:28,044
a little jewel box of a synagogue, small
enough, I would say probably just about
370
00:30:28,044 --> 00:30:33,174
the size and volume of this room, that
when I first went there, I had to totally
371
00:30:33,174 --> 00:30:38,214
revise my notions either of the Jewish
population of medieval Cairo or of how
372
00:30:38,214 --> 00:30:41,484
many people actually made it to
synagogue on a regular basis
373
00:30:41,484 --> 00:30:44,694
or possibly and how many synagogues
there were, because it's a very, very
374
00:30:44,694 --> 00:30:49,704
small space. At the same time the space
that you'll see is a simulacrum, it's not
375
00:30:49,704 --> 00:30:53,123
actually the medieval synagogue, it was
built on the site of the medieval
376
00:30:53,123 --> 00:30:56,634
synagogue supposedly on the footprints, I
mean there are people who in the 19th
377
00:30:56,634 --> 00:30:59,424
century had seen the old building and
then they saw the new building that was
378
00:30:59,424 --> 00:31:03,654
built in the 1890s and they were like
yes, yes it's just the same but do we
379
00:31:03,654 --> 00:31:10,674
really know? No. If you go–– if you look at
this photo there's a mezzanine level and
380
00:31:10,674 --> 00:31:15,854
on the left-hand side of the mezzanine,
the mezzanine is the women's gallery, and
381
00:31:15,854 --> 00:31:19,524
if you go on the left hand side of
the mezzanine all the way to the
382
00:31:19,524 --> 00:31:23,274
front wall of the synagogue, you'll see a
little hole in the wall and again that
383
00:31:23,274 --> 00:31:27,623
hole in the wall is not actually
historically accurate because for much
384
00:31:27,623 --> 00:31:32,003
of the 19th century, the Geniza was
accessible only via a hole in the roof,
385
00:31:32,003 --> 00:31:36,984
so it was a totally walled off chamber
that people were not accessing on a
386
00:31:36,984 --> 00:31:40,854
regular basis. What was going on in the
Middle Ages, we don't actually know.
387
00:31:40,854 --> 00:31:45,174
Whether it was accessible via a hole in
the wall or via a hole in the roof is
388
00:31:45,174 --> 00:31:53,243
not entirely clear. One of the advantages
of being in Cairo–– people think that
389
00:31:53,243 --> 00:31:56,363
Geniza survived the way it did
because of the dryness of Cairo. Cairo is
390
00:31:56,363 --> 00:32:03,384
actually not that dry. Cairo... what Cairo
has to its advantage or to the advantage
391
00:32:03,384 --> 00:32:09,294
of manuscripts is even humidity. So you
know the humidity level will be
392
00:32:09,294 --> 00:32:14,604
about 45 degrees in the winter. It'll go
up to about 60 in the early summer and
393
00:32:14,604 --> 00:32:19,373
then it kind of falls gently back down
to 45 degrees humidity, which turns out
394
00:32:19,373 --> 00:32:24,474
to be the perfect humidity level for
preserving paper, parchment, and
395
00:32:24,474 --> 00:32:30,264
papyrus. But there's another factor as
well, it's not just the climate. If
396
00:32:30,264 --> 00:32:34,704
anyone's ever been to Cairo, you know
about the dust. So the dust of Cairo is a
397
00:32:34,704 --> 00:32:38,334
very particular kind of dust. I'm not
talking now about what happens when
398
00:32:38,334 --> 00:32:42,144
there's a sandstorm, that's different. I'm
talking about just the average everyday
399
00:32:42,144 --> 00:32:47,363
dust of Cairo which– it's like a thing.
Like if you live in Cairo you have to
400
00:32:47,363 --> 00:32:50,873
dust your bookshelves every day even if
you're keeping your windows closed. It
401
00:32:50,873 --> 00:32:56,243
sort of fills your, you know, sinuses
and, you know, with this kind of wonderful
402
00:32:56,243 --> 00:33:00,204
heady cocktail of diesel fuel. If you've
been there you know just what I'm
403
00:33:00,204 --> 00:33:04,464
talking about– I find it completely
addictive. But I didn't understand until
404
00:33:04,464 --> 00:33:08,274
I talked to a friend of mine there who's
a historic preservationist, Noel Hassan,
405
00:33:08,274 --> 00:33:12,534
who explained to me that the source of
the dust is not the desert. The source of
406
00:33:12,534 --> 00:33:17,843
the dust is actually the Mokattam massif
which is a limestone cliff that
407
00:33:17,843 --> 00:33:24,084
overlooks Cairo and it's friable, so the
dust is actually coming from there and
408
00:33:24,084 --> 00:33:30,084
that means that it's limestone dust, and
limestone by definition is 50% calcium
409
00:33:30,084 --> 00:33:34,493
carbonate, which is chalk, which turns out
to be a fantastic substance for
410
00:33:34,493 --> 00:33:39,233
preserving paper, parchment, and ink. Again,
something I didn't realize until I
411
00:33:39,233 --> 00:33:42,444
talked to a papermaker friend of mine
who's like "you know, if you really want
412
00:33:42,444 --> 00:33:45,654
to preserve this stuff you should put
chalk in it." I was like "oh, light bulb." So
413
00:33:45,654 --> 00:33:50,514
the dust turns out to have been very,
very fortunate for the Geniza. The
414
00:33:50,514 --> 00:33:53,363
story of the Geniza's discovery I'm
not gonna get into now, but I do just
415
00:33:53,363 --> 00:33:58,404
want to flag the fact that it's a
complex story, much more complex than
416
00:33:58,404 --> 00:34:04,613
anyone realized for most of the 20th
century. So the ice started to break
417
00:34:04,613 --> 00:34:08,573
with this book, Sacred Trash by Adina
Hoffman and Peter Cole, who pointed out
418
00:34:08,573 --> 00:34:13,194
that there's a whole prehistory to the
famous moment when Solomon Schechter
419
00:34:13,194 --> 00:34:18,414
from Cambridge emptied the chamber in
1897, and that prehistory is a very, very
420
00:34:18,414 --> 00:34:21,774
interesting and complicated one and
explains why the Geniza today is
421
00:34:21,774 --> 00:34:28,313
dispersed over more than 60 collections. But even that book didn't actually get
422
00:34:28,313 --> 00:34:31,674
to the bottom of it. Rebecca Jefferson,
who used to work in the Geniza
423
00:34:31,674 --> 00:34:35,864
Research Unit at Cambridge University
and is now at the University of Florida,
424
00:34:35,864 --> 00:34:40,644
is digging into the archives of people
from the 19th century who were involved
425
00:34:40,644 --> 00:34:43,604
in collecting these manuscripts, and
there are still many mysteries but she's
426
00:34:43,604 --> 00:34:52,553
she solved many of them, so watch this
space for her book. This is an iconic
427
00:34:52,553 --> 00:34:55,464
picture of Solomon Schechter when he got
home from Cambridge with about
428
00:34:55,464 --> 00:34:59,724
200,000 Geniza fragments.
And this is what they looked like before
429
00:34:59,724 --> 00:35:03,714
conservation. So the point being here:
this is still happening today. This is a
430
00:35:03,714 --> 00:35:06,444
photograph that I was sent by a paper
conservator from the Jewish Theological
431
00:35:06,444 --> 00:35:12,394
Seminary in 2015 after they
had begun conserving
432
00:35:12,394 --> 00:35:17,104
and encapsulating some of the fragments
that had literally never been sorted or
433
00:35:17,104 --> 00:35:23,404
taken out of boxes. So no researcher had
ever seen these and as soon as she sent
434
00:35:23,404 --> 00:35:27,484
this to me, I got really excited because
I was in the process of studying my, like,
435
00:35:27,484 --> 00:35:31,594
favorite kind of document– this is gonna sound
so boring– which is the Fatimid
436
00:35:31,594 --> 00:35:34,924
tax receipt. I love tax receipts.
And it turns out
437
00:35:34,924 --> 00:35:39,154
that is a Fatimid tax receipt right
there and I was like please, conserve
438
00:35:39,154 --> 00:35:41,884
these so then she sent me the pictures
of them conserved and I realized how great
439
00:35:41,884 --> 00:35:45,394
it was that she had sent me the one– the
picture– of the unconserved documents.
440
00:35:45,394 --> 00:35:48,334
So this is still going on every once in a
while like a shoe box will pop out of
441
00:35:48,334 --> 00:35:53,194
the closet of the grandson of an early
20th century Geniza researcher– this
442
00:35:53,194 --> 00:35:57,964
happened a few years ago, to a friend of
mine in London. So not everything is
443
00:35:57,964 --> 00:36:02,284
accounted for. But even the things that
are accounted for, less than half of it
444
00:36:02,284 --> 00:36:06,094
has been identified, let alone deciphered.
So what I'm going to tell you now are
445
00:36:06,094 --> 00:36:09,244
some provisional statistics, but this
could all change depending on what
446
00:36:09,244 --> 00:36:13,804
happens with research in the next decade
or two. So the vast majority of what we
447
00:36:13,804 --> 00:36:19,804
have from the Geniza dates from this
period between 950 and 1250, about which
448
00:36:19,804 --> 00:36:24,814
we knew very, very little before the
Ganesa came to light, although there are
449
00:36:24,814 --> 00:36:29,014
significant pockets of information from
the 16th and the 19th centuries which
450
00:36:29,014 --> 00:36:31,954
are finally beginning to get their due,
by which I mean there are like two
451
00:36:31,954 --> 00:36:35,074
researchers now as opposed to zero
who are interested in the later
452
00:36:35,074 --> 00:36:40,294
Geniza material. The grand total is
about 400,000 pages or
453
00:36:40,294 --> 00:36:44,824
fragments of pages which is considerably
more than you may have heard. This is
454
00:36:44,824 --> 00:36:48,064
only in part because of those shoeboxes
that are like coming out of the woodwork.
455
00:36:48,064 --> 00:36:51,964
This is also because there are
computerized methods of counting what
456
00:36:51,964 --> 00:36:55,564
are called multi-fragments, which is tiny
fragments that are bound, like a hundred
457
00:36:55,564 --> 00:36:59,184
to the page, so those used to be counted
as one and now they're actually counted
458
00:36:59,184 --> 00:37:07,534
singly. But 90% are "books." I put this in
quotation marks because a book in the
459
00:37:07,534 --> 00:37:12,724
Middle Ages as many things. So a book is
a text meant for posterity, written as it
460
00:37:12,724 --> 00:37:15,574
were on speakerphone in the sense that
you don't know quite who's gonna read it
461
00:37:15,574 --> 00:37:20,854
in the future, even if you've dedicated it
to an individual. But physically, a book
462
00:37:20,854 --> 00:37:23,714
can take forms. There's the
codex, which is the
463
00:37:23,714 --> 00:37:28,334
book as we know it and there are very few
whole codices that survived in the
464
00:37:28,334 --> 00:37:32,464
Geniza because generally speaking, what
you were putting in there was old books.
465
00:37:32,464 --> 00:37:38,983
This is a fascinating codex because it's
a copy of a biblical book that didn't
466
00:37:38,983 --> 00:37:42,553
make it into the Jewish canon, so it
demonstrates that Jews were reading non-
467
00:37:42,553 --> 00:37:47,293
canonical literature in the Middle Ages,
which nobody suspected. Nobody even knew
468
00:37:47,293 --> 00:37:50,864
that the Hebrew original of this
particular text had survived because
469
00:37:50,864 --> 00:37:53,533
only the Christians had preserved the
book, so we knew the Greek but we didn't
470
00:37:53,533 --> 00:37:59,983
know the Hebrew. And in the end,
dozens of fragments of the book of
471
00:37:59,983 --> 00:38:04,513
Ecclesiasticus have come to light from
the Geniza, but only in 2018 did an
472
00:38:04,513 --> 00:38:09,704
article emerge trying to put together
the actual codices from which these
473
00:38:09,704 --> 00:38:20,204
pages came. So that's the codex. Then, the
codex consists of smaller units which
474
00:38:20,204 --> 00:38:26,114
codacologists– specialists in books–
call choirs, and a choir is a number of
475
00:38:26,114 --> 00:38:31,473
bifolio pages nested together. This is
from a collection in Saint Petersburg.
476
00:38:31,473 --> 00:38:36,344
It's a manuscript that Luke Yarbrough,
who's here, is working on together with a
477
00:38:36,344 --> 00:38:40,574
team of researchers and it's a totally
fascinating one-off text. It seems to be
478
00:38:40,574 --> 00:38:45,283
an administrative manual, like government
administrative manual from late 11th
479
00:38:45,283 --> 00:38:51,553
century Palestine. So it's in the form of
a choir, so 10 pages essentially. Here's
480
00:38:51,553 --> 00:38:56,894
another example of a choir. This is a
liturgical text in Hebrew, the
481
00:38:56,894 --> 00:39:00,733
author of which we actually know, which is
not so common. So that's the second form
482
00:39:00,733 --> 00:39:04,124
of the book. The third form of the
book is the horizontal scroll, which is a
483
00:39:04,124 --> 00:39:08,384
much older form. That had been kind of
the major form of the book in antiquity
484
00:39:08,384 --> 00:39:13,513
until the codex started to make inroads,
especially among Christian books and the
485
00:39:13,513 --> 00:39:17,263
story of how the codex finally made
inroads among Jews is a fascinating one,
486
00:39:17,263 --> 00:39:22,124
because for most of antiquity, Jews
avoided writing anything in codex form
487
00:39:22,124 --> 00:39:28,033
and stuck to the scroll, probably because
the codex was kind of, you know, smacked
488
00:39:28,033 --> 00:39:31,454
of Christianity, and Jews wanted to make
their books look different from
489
00:39:31,454 --> 00:39:34,754
Christian books. But then what happened
is that when the Muslims
490
00:39:34,754 --> 00:39:39,944
came along, they as a minority living
among, you know, a huge sea of Christians,
491
00:39:39,944 --> 00:39:43,544
they wanted to make their holy book look
like a serious holy book, so what are you
492
00:39:43,544 --> 00:39:46,484
gonna do? You're gonna make it look like
a Christian book. So the earliest Quran
493
00:39:46,484 --> 00:39:50,804
manuscripts that we have are in codex
form, and at that point the Jews look at
494
00:39:50,804 --> 00:39:55,634
the codex and they say okay, now it's
kosher for us too. So the scroll, the
495
00:39:55,634 --> 00:39:59,204
horizontal scroll, became a kind of
antiquated form for the Jews already by
496
00:39:59,204 --> 00:40:02,714
this period, and was used mainly only for
liturgical purposes, like reading Torah
497
00:40:02,714 --> 00:40:10,094
scrolls. Then there's the vertical scroll.
So this is a very strange form of the
498
00:40:10,094 --> 00:40:14,234
book. It doesn't look like a book to us,
it looks more like a document, but in
499
00:40:14,234 --> 00:40:21,284
fact Jews routinely wrote literary texts
in this long form — the one I'm showing
500
00:40:21,284 --> 00:40:25,184
you right now is about three meters long —
and they particularly seem to have
501
00:40:25,184 --> 00:40:30,624
written text for performances in the
long rotulis form.
502
00:40:32,104 --> 00:40:34,364
That's what it looks like up close.
503
00:40:35,104 --> 00:40:40,154
Okay, so those are quote-unquote books.
Complicated issue, right? Summed up by one
504
00:40:40,154 --> 00:40:45,464
word: books. The other 10% of what's in the Geniza are documents and again the
505
00:40:45,464 --> 00:40:51,194
figure of 40,000 is quite a bit higher–
certainly than what I was taught– so S.D.
506
00:40:51,194 --> 00:40:54,554
Goitein, who founded the field of
Documentary Geniza Studies, used to
507
00:40:54,554 --> 00:40:58,784
estimate that there were between 10 and 15,000 documents and that's
508
00:40:58,784 --> 00:41:01,754
what the second generation of
Documentary Geniza scholars, his
509
00:41:01,754 --> 00:41:05,474
students, including my teacher Mark Cohen,
also used to go with, by way of an
510
00:41:05,474 --> 00:41:12,284
estimate. But now that we have digital
methods, by which I mean that people have
511
00:41:12,284 --> 00:41:15,944
actually made an attempt to photograph
every single Geniza document, we have a
512
00:41:15,944 --> 00:41:20,354
much better sense of numbers, and so the
current figure that I'm citing is 40,000
513
00:41:20,354 --> 00:41:24,914
which sounds, like, insanely high if– like
me– you were educated thinking about 10
514
00:41:24,914 --> 00:41:30,974
to 15,000 documents. But in
fact, the Princeton Geniza Project, which I
515
00:41:30,974 --> 00:41:35,864
took over when I came to Princeton in
2015, now has nearly 30,000
516
00:41:35,864 --> 00:41:40,684
records, so I think 40,000 is
probably not an unreasonable estimate.
517
00:41:41,484 --> 00:41:47,024
I just want to point out here: the great
fat eunuch. This is real, like you
518
00:41:47,024 --> 00:41:51,104
can't make this stuff up, but what
we do is we make an effort to have that
519
00:41:51,104 --> 00:41:53,984
document always be the first one in the
database so it's the first thing you see
520
00:41:53,984 --> 00:41:57,524
when you go to the Princeton Geniza
Project website. This is catalogued by
521
00:41:57,524 --> 00:42:02,894
my friend Oded Zinger, who has a knack
for finding the most hilarious Geniza
522
00:42:02,894 --> 00:42:08,354
documents. Okay, so those are
the documents. The linguistic situation
523
00:42:08,354 --> 00:42:13,874
is relatively simple. The documents tend
to be in Judeo-Arabic– again, Arabic and
524
00:42:13,874 --> 00:42:20,864
Hebrew characters in Hebrew, occasionally
in Aramaic, which is like fancy, if you
525
00:42:20,864 --> 00:42:25,904
want to use old legal terminology, as
well as Arabic script. So that's kind of
526
00:42:25,904 --> 00:42:29,324
what you can expect to find: lots of
Hebrew script, lots of Arabic script. But
527
00:42:29,324 --> 00:42:34,334
then– and here's an example of both
together. So here's a Hebrew script
528
00:42:34,334 --> 00:42:37,964
document. This is a marriage contract.
Even if you knew absolutely nothing
529
00:42:37,964 --> 00:42:42,284
about either Hebrew or about medieval
documents, you could probably guess at
530
00:42:42,284 --> 00:42:46,184
what this was, because you see at the
bottom a bunch of handwriting that
531
00:42:46,184 --> 00:42:49,814
doesn't look like it's written in the
same hand as the rest of the document. It
532
00:42:49,814 --> 00:42:53,584
turns out that those are signatures, and
this is a legal document with 11
533
00:42:53,584 --> 00:42:57,764
signatories. These guys are actually a
pretty calligraphic bunch, but one of the
534
00:42:57,764 --> 00:43:01,484
great things about signatures as
historical evidence is that you can see,
535
00:43:01,484 --> 00:43:05,264
kind of, the varying states of semi-
illiteracy that people had. Sometimes
536
00:43:05,264 --> 00:43:08,174
they could only write their names, they
could only write them in something
537
00:43:08,174 --> 00:43:13,934
approximating square script, but they had
never learned to write beyond that. This
538
00:43:13,934 --> 00:43:17,444
is an Arabic script document that was
discovered by a graduate student in a
539
00:43:17,444 --> 00:43:23,114
seminar that I was teaching two years
ago. It's a business letter in Arabic
540
00:43:23,114 --> 00:43:28,394
that mentions various red sea ports, as
well as India. So this is basically an
541
00:43:28,394 --> 00:43:34,514
Indian Ocean trade letter that had not
yet been identified or noticed or
542
00:43:34,514 --> 00:43:37,634
discovered by any of the people who were
actually working on Indian Ocean
543
00:43:37,634 --> 00:43:42,734
documents, and that's just to give you a
sense. I had six graduate students in
544
00:43:42,734 --> 00:43:48,074
that seminar, and over the course of the
semester, this came to light. Another
545
00:43:48,074 --> 00:43:51,524
couple of interesting things came to
light, but the best one was when, you know,
546
00:43:51,524 --> 00:43:55,244
I had the students just go through, like,
piles and piles of Arabic script
547
00:43:55,244 --> 00:43:59,264
documents to try to identify whatever
they could and then they would email
548
00:43:59,264 --> 00:44:01,273
me the night before the seminar and
kind of give me the rundown,
549
00:44:01,273 --> 00:44:05,654
and then we'd come to class and we'd try
to read one or two of them. And so
550
00:44:05,654 --> 00:44:09,824
one of them emails me the night before
class, and he says, "Nothing that exciting
551
00:44:09,824 --> 00:44:14,924
this week, I found a petition to Saladin,"
who's the first Ayyubid Sultan, and
552
00:44:14,924 --> 00:44:18,703
it was so great because when
you make these discoveries, you don't
553
00:44:18,703 --> 00:44:22,273
often know that you're even making a
discovery, right? So he thought, "Oh, this is
554
00:44:22,273 --> 00:44:25,364
totally normal, a petition to Saladin." I
said to him, "There's only one other
555
00:44:25,364 --> 00:44:28,934
petition to Saladin that has survived on
the planet Earth, and you've just
556
00:44:28,934 --> 00:44:33,703
discovered number two."
So the discoveries are still coming.
557
00:44:33,703 --> 00:44:40,184
And then there are curiosities. So this
was discovered by Gideon Bohak at
558
00:44:40,184 --> 00:44:47,313
Tel Aviv University in 2008 and
despite the best efforts of Indyk
559
00:44:47,313 --> 00:44:50,384
linguists and philologists, nobody
actually knows what language it's written
560
00:44:50,384 --> 00:44:55,664
in. I've given it to a couple of
specialists who said, "You know, Indyk
561
00:44:55,664 --> 00:44:59,324
dialectology is really, really difficult.
This seems to be something resembling
562
00:44:59,324 --> 00:45:03,944
southern Gujarati." So basically we don't
know what language it's written in, but one
563
00:45:03,944 --> 00:45:09,644
thing that we do know is that there are
peppercorns in this text, which makes me
564
00:45:09,644 --> 00:45:12,973
really happy because if it had been like
a copy of some literary text that we
565
00:45:12,973 --> 00:45:17,594
have kind of, you know, a dime-a-dozen,
I would have been a sad panda, but it
566
00:45:17,594 --> 00:45:24,134
seems to be some kind of commodity
bearing document in a Sanskri-derived
567
00:45:24,134 --> 00:45:29,624
script, which stands to reason because of
all of the Jews in the Indian Ocean
568
00:45:29,624 --> 00:45:34,453
trade, so this must have made it back to
Cairo somehow in a trader's personal
569
00:45:34,453 --> 00:45:40,934
archive. Okay, so I want to say a little
bit about the Indian Ocean trade because
570
00:45:40,934 --> 00:45:46,513
this is really where, for me, the penny
dropped, when I started to try to think
571
00:45:46,513 --> 00:45:50,164
in a kind of summary way about, okay, well,
what actually has the Geniza taught us?
572
00:45:50,164 --> 00:45:55,453
We've known that there were something
like 600-700 documents that have
573
00:45:55,453 --> 00:46:00,194
survived documenting trade in the
western Indian Ocean, trade by Jews, but
574
00:46:00,194 --> 00:46:05,444
Jews had trading partners who weren't
Jews as well. But it's not really until
575
00:46:05,444 --> 00:46:09,434
you kind of look into the documents that
to understand the momentousness of this.
576
00:46:09,434 --> 00:46:15,944
So the trade routes, first of all,
the Indian Ocean trade and the
577
00:46:15,944 --> 00:46:20,023
Mediterranean trade are connected. What's
being traded in the Mediterranean, much
578
00:46:20,023 --> 00:46:24,434
of it actually comes from the Indian
Ocean, which I hadn't realized when I ––
579
00:46:24,434 --> 00:46:30,553
until I really started looking at the
stuff. And there you see Egypt at the
580
00:46:30,553 --> 00:46:37,394
kind of hinge between these two trades.
Now, how you actually get to India– so
581
00:46:37,394 --> 00:46:40,574
it's kind of incredible that anybody
managed to do this at all–
582
00:46:40,574 --> 00:46:44,493
the one thing that you needed to do was
to studiously avoid the Northern Red Sea,
583
00:46:44,493 --> 00:46:51,973
because the Northern Red Sea has coral
reefs and bad winds, and it was the most
584
00:46:51,973 --> 00:46:55,783
dangerous passage you could imagine, so
instead you would go up the Nile, and
585
00:46:55,784 --> 00:47:00,424
then you would go overland at Kush,
and then you would set out sailing on the
586
00:47:00,424 --> 00:47:05,764
Red Sea at Quseir. You would sail
south. Aden became a very, very important
587
00:47:05,764 --> 00:47:10,094
port along this trade, although it's not
actually a very well endowed natural
588
00:47:10,094 --> 00:47:15,584
harbor, but what the Adenese did was to
provide services to boats that other
589
00:47:15,584 --> 00:47:19,303
harbors didn't provide. They kind of, you
know, they tried harder, like, I don't know,
590
00:47:19,303 --> 00:47:25,334
the HBSC of their day or something.
And then eventually, you'd go over
591
00:47:25,334 --> 00:47:34,033
by the Persian Gulf and to the western
coast of India. But what it actually felt
592
00:47:34,033 --> 00:47:40,334
like to do that is another question. So
this is a letter from a trader who is
593
00:47:40,334 --> 00:47:44,414
originally from Libya, from Tripoli in
Libya, and he's writing to his brother
594
00:47:44,414 --> 00:47:49,243
back home in 1103, and he's describing
what for him was an absolutely
595
00:47:49,243 --> 00:47:53,563
terrifying journey, and it was terrifying
for him not because of storms, not
596
00:47:53,563 --> 00:47:58,813
because the ship found or anything like
that, but because the methods of boat
597
00:47:58,813 --> 00:48:02,503
building in the Mediterranean and the
Indian Ocean were different. So in the
598
00:48:02,503 --> 00:48:06,313
Mediterranean, you have boats that were
made with nails, and in the Indian Ocean
599
00:48:06,313 --> 00:48:10,753
you had boats that were tied together
with coconut coir ropes, which he found
600
00:48:10,753 --> 00:48:15,674
to be uniquely terrifying, so he says,
"Then we left the machlein, which I still
601
00:48:15,674 --> 00:48:19,334
don't know where it is, and set sail on a
ship that had in it not a single nail of
602
00:48:19,334 --> 00:48:22,634
iron, but rather was tied together with
ropes, may God protect us with his
603
00:48:22,634 --> 00:48:27,404
shield." So he's just getting going. So now
he describes the journey
604
00:48:27,404 --> 00:48:33,824
on the Red Sea and he describes it in
a rhyme. "I arrived in Aybeb, which is truly
605
00:48:33,824 --> 00:48:38,324
a city of tribulations of ebb. We arrived
at a city called Sowacken, which is
606
00:48:38,324 --> 00:48:42,434
really a most frightening place, a halde macken.
Then we arrived at a city called
607
00:48:42,434 --> 00:48:45,884
Badia, the jjone that cuts, for it is just
as the name says, the most bitter,
608
00:48:45,884 --> 00:48:50,264
frightening, miserable of places. Then we
arrived at a city called Dahlak, the
609
00:48:50,264 --> 00:48:54,704
following adage is said about it, but you
surpass them all, it is a ruinous land,
610
00:48:54,704 --> 00:49:01,874
ballad mohalek." So he's clearly enjoying
the, you know, the storytelling here, but
611
00:49:01,874 --> 00:49:06,464
nonetheless it gives you a sense of how,
kind of, terrifyingly different this must
612
00:49:06,464 --> 00:49:11,264
have been for those who were used to the
Mediterranean trade. These are the
613
00:49:11,264 --> 00:49:14,594
scholars who've done the lion's share of
the work on the Indian Ocean trade. They
614
00:49:14,594 --> 00:49:18,074
largely focused on the philology, just
trying to understand what the documents
615
00:49:18,074 --> 00:49:22,844
say, which itself is not for the faint of
heart, but there's much, much more to be
616
00:49:22,844 --> 00:49:28,934
done in terms of historical
contextualization. Goitein–– So, Goitein
617
00:49:28,934 --> 00:49:32,894
died in 1985. His student Mordechai
Akiva Friedman took over the India
618
00:49:32,894 --> 00:49:37,543
documents project from him. It took him
25 years to publish volumes 1 through 4.
619
00:49:37,543 --> 00:49:41,974
Volumes 5 through 7 are sitting in a
filing cabinet in Princeton, New Jersey.
620
00:49:41,974 --> 00:49:46,724
Okay, so one of the things that I'm trying
to do is, like, you know, bring in the
621
00:49:46,724 --> 00:49:49,214
scholars who will actually get this
stuff out into the public.
622
00:49:49,214 --> 00:49:53,924
It's much likelier that they'll go
online before they go between covers
623
00:49:53,924 --> 00:49:59,474
because I simply want them to be out
there and available. So this is where we
624
00:49:59,474 --> 00:50:03,974
get the Eastern Indian Ocean. This was
super surprising to me when I found it,
625
00:50:03,974 --> 00:50:06,644
and then I realized that it actually
read these texts several times before––
626
00:50:06,644 --> 00:50:10,934
before I, you know, was able to locate
them on a map and realize what was going
627
00:50:10,934 --> 00:50:17,264
on. This is a draft of a court record in
the hand of Maimonides' son, Abraham
628
00:50:17,264 --> 00:50:21,524
Maimonides, is from 1226 and the record
says, "We the undersigned members of the
629
00:50:21,524 --> 00:50:25,424
court, assembled in a court session in
Fustat on Tuesday" – the dating systems
630
00:50:25,424 --> 00:50:30,553
are crazy – "1226 CE. Abu Sa'id Aleve, son of the
631
00:50:30,553 --> 00:50:35,024
elder Abu Maran Aleve, the
merchant known as Dejanji, testified to us
632
00:50:35,024 --> 00:50:39,524
that Abu Fudul al-Moughard al-Schyendendy
known as Ibn Something,
633
00:50:39,524 --> 00:50:43,554
died in Kala in the lands of
of something-or-other."
634
00:50:43,554 --> 00:50:49,014
So we know that that's actually Malaysia.
"He checked and certified this one, he
635
00:50:49,014 --> 00:50:52,974
went to el Malabar, which is the
Malabar Coast in India, and when he
636
00:50:52,974 --> 00:50:56,544
deposited his testimony in our presence.
We wrote it down for it to be a title of
637
00:50:56,544 --> 00:51:02,514
right and proof." Okay, so basically a Jew
dies in the Eastern Indian Ocean in 1226.
638
00:51:02,514 --> 00:51:08,994
Is this significant? So it turns out he's
not the only one. So this is the port of
639
00:51:08,994 --> 00:51:15,674
Funsour, which is where a lot of
camphor came out of in this period
640
00:51:15,674 --> 00:51:21,474
and this is also a document to do with
Abraham Maimonides from a few
641
00:51:21,474 --> 00:51:26,364
years earlier. So the question here has
to do with what happened to the wives of
642
00:51:26,364 --> 00:51:30,594
these India traders who were left behind,
if they disappeared, right? There's a
643
00:51:30,594 --> 00:51:33,834
problem in Jewish law: if you don't have
a proper divorce document, you can't
644
00:51:33,834 --> 00:51:37,284
remarry, meaning if your
husband disappears, you––
645
00:51:37,284 --> 00:51:43,844
and there's no proof of his death and he
hasn't left you conditional divorce
646
00:51:43,844 --> 00:51:49,674
documents, then you can never remarry. So
a man traveled to the lands of India and
647
00:51:49,674 --> 00:51:52,794
he spent 15 years there. Not a single
letter has arrived from him. His wife
648
00:51:52,794 --> 00:51:55,314
works, eats, and provides
for two children. He has a
649
00:51:55,314 --> 00:51:59,484
mother and when he went to India, we
think he also left her behind. "A Jewish
650
00:51:59,484 --> 00:52:03,924
man was sent from Aden to close a deal. I
met him and asked him to tell me the
651
00:52:03,924 --> 00:52:08,754
news regarding the man who was missing"–
presumably. "He told me, we heard in Aden
652
00:52:08,754 --> 00:52:12,144
from those docked in the bay that he
died in Funsour, at which point the
653
00:52:12,144 --> 00:52:16,254
government there took his possessions.
Instruct us, our teacher, is this
654
00:52:16,254 --> 00:52:20,934
testimony sufficient to permit the
wife's remarriage?" And alas the answer is
655
00:52:20,934 --> 00:52:25,974
no, in fact, that this counts as hearsay,
it doesn't count as a properly witnessed
656
00:52:25,974 --> 00:52:32,094
fact and therefore she can't remarry. So
this is a text that Goitein discovered
657
00:52:32,094 --> 00:52:34,944
half of it. He discovered
the right half and he
658
00:52:34,944 --> 00:52:38,454
published it with a speculative
reconstruction of what the left half
659
00:52:38,454 --> 00:52:42,714
might have said, which when the left half
was later located, turned out to be like
660
00:52:42,714 --> 00:52:46,644
80 percent correct which was kind of
mind-blowing.
661
00:52:46,644 --> 00:52:51,534
I had an undergraduate student who
worked on on these two documents last
662
00:52:51,534 --> 00:52:54,084
year who pointed out
to me that actually, when
663
00:52:54,084 --> 00:52:58,944
you look at the way Jewish law was
shaped, you have to remember that it's
664
00:52:58,944 --> 00:53:04,044
not just the rabbis who are shaping it.
It's also the wives of the husbands who
665
00:53:04,044 --> 00:53:08,934
are missing like thousands and thousands
of kilometers away. You have to have a
666
00:53:08,934 --> 00:53:13,884
much, much, kind of, bigger vision of what
the Jewish community is, than just the
667
00:53:13,884 --> 00:53:17,364
organized Jewish community that you can
actually see through the documents that
668
00:53:17,364 --> 00:53:21,294
we know best. So this was kind of like, I
was listening to him give a presentation
669
00:53:21,294 --> 00:53:29,904
on class and I said, "I gotta totally
revise my my vision here." Okay, so that's
670
00:53:29,904 --> 00:53:36,894
just to give you a sense of how this has
all changed, and to give you a sense, as
671
00:53:36,894 --> 00:53:41,004
well as of the geographic breadth, but
there's also quite a bit of depth. There
672
00:53:41,004 --> 00:53:45,564
is depth on the daily lives of
congregations and congregants. We know
673
00:53:45,564 --> 00:53:49,734
from Eve Krakowski's book– I understand she
spoke here a couple of years ago– there
674
00:53:49,734 --> 00:53:56,784
was more divorce, more extramarital sex,
more quasi-independent women, less
675
00:53:56,784 --> 00:54:01,914
literacy, less piety, more internecine
strife, which– of course– I love. I love to
676
00:54:01,914 --> 00:54:07,944
write about, you know, Jews who fight with
other Jews. Krakowski also points out
677
00:54:07,944 --> 00:54:11,754
that there's only a minority of
children who are likely to live with a
678
00:54:11,754 --> 00:54:15,474
single set of adults in a single
household over their lifetimes. So very
679
00:54:15,474 --> 00:54:18,984
flexible living arrangements, and if you
look at archaeological excavations from
680
00:54:18,984 --> 00:54:23,484
medieval Cairo, you can actually see how
this works because there's not a lot of
681
00:54:23,484 --> 00:54:29,354
mobile furniture. The seating
arrangements are built into the walls.
682
00:54:29,354 --> 00:54:36,774
People didn't have a lot of stuff, and
people had extended families to whom
683
00:54:36,774 --> 00:54:42,684
they passed back and forth on a regular
basis. The implications of that for the
684
00:54:42,684 --> 00:54:47,274
transmission of Jewish tradition in an
age when Judaism was learned not from
685
00:54:47,274 --> 00:54:51,884
books, but mimetically, from imitating
the grown-ups around you, are also
686
00:54:51,884 --> 00:54:58,524
momentous. Krakowski explores the idea of
lived customs versus technical, legal
687
00:54:58,524 --> 00:55:02,844
norms. What she means by that is that on
the one hand, when you look at how Jews
688
00:55:02,844 --> 00:55:05,664
were actually living, it's very
similar to how
689
00:55:05,664 --> 00:55:09,563
Muslims were practicing marriage and
divorce arrangements. At the same time,
690
00:55:09,563 --> 00:55:13,404
the rabbinic technical norms were very
different from Islamic law, so how are
691
00:55:13,404 --> 00:55:18,023
they squaring these two? And that's what
her book is about. So that's just one
692
00:55:18,023 --> 00:55:23,783
area of depth that's opened up recently
is gender and the family. There's quite a
693
00:55:23,783 --> 00:55:28,734
bit more Arabic script than we realized,
including Jews who are having their
694
00:55:28,734 --> 00:55:34,704
cases against other Jews tried in
ecology courts, and there's a lot more
695
00:55:34,704 --> 00:55:39,293
takeout food than I would have
anticipated. So just as Cairo today is,
696
00:55:39,293 --> 00:55:43,254
like, the global center of take-out food,
so too in the Middle Ages. It was much, much
697
00:55:43,254 --> 00:55:45,114
more likely that you were
getting your food
698
00:55:45,114 --> 00:55:49,763
hot from the market in a food carrier
than cooking it at home, because the last
699
00:55:49,763 --> 00:55:56,244
place you wanted a fire was in your
house. This is a strange little text. It
700
00:55:56,244 --> 00:56:01,194
seems to be some kind of a shopping list
with a number of foods including, at the
701
00:56:01,194 --> 00:56:06,114
end, a fat hen– again, you
can't make this stuff up– and what's
702
00:56:06,114 --> 00:56:11,154
written on the other side is a section
from the Babylonian Talmud to do with
703
00:56:11,154 --> 00:56:16,013
the kosher slaughtering of animals. So
you can try to reconstruct for yourself
704
00:56:16,013 --> 00:56:19,584
where this little slip of paper might
have come from, you know, somebody's
705
00:56:19,584 --> 00:56:24,384
basket in the marketplace or perhaps a
meat stall or something like that. This
706
00:56:24,384 --> 00:56:30,624
was, you know, I don't know, the guy who was
overseeing the butchery dropped
707
00:56:30,624 --> 00:56:35,184
it or something like that.
And finally, there's quite a bit more
708
00:56:35,184 --> 00:56:41,214
magic than we realized.
So this is a set of amulets against
709
00:56:41,214 --> 00:56:45,834
scorpions, hence the drawings
of scorpions that the
710
00:56:45,834 --> 00:56:49,854
amulet writer wrote in multiple, and
apparently he only managed to sell just
711
00:56:49,854 --> 00:56:54,684
a few of his amulets, and the rest of
them survived together. But these would
712
00:56:54,684 --> 00:57:00,293
have been cut apart into pieces and kept
rolled up in an amulet holder
713
00:57:00,293 --> 00:57:06,834
around the neck. So all of this has kind
of emerged in the last two or three
714
00:57:06,834 --> 00:57:10,793
years, and this is typical of the way
research goes in this field. It proceeds
715
00:57:10,793 --> 00:57:14,604
slowly and pointillistically. You get a
kind of pinprick of light here, a
716
00:57:14,604 --> 00:57:17,604
pinprick of light there, and until you
can actually make a connection between
717
00:57:17,604 --> 00:57:21,664
them, sometimes it takes
a long time. On top of that, the
718
00:57:21,664 --> 00:57:25,023
manuscripts are fragmentary. They're
housed in 60 collections on four
719
00:57:25,023 --> 00:57:29,914
continents, and the skills needed to make
sense of them are specialized. But that
720
00:57:29,914 --> 00:57:34,384
said, digital technology has changed
everything. So we had this kind of
721
00:57:34,384 --> 00:57:38,253
illusion in the humanities that we're,
like, in our monks cells working in
722
00:57:38,253 --> 00:57:45,213
solitude, but the possibilities of
collaboration that digital technologies
723
00:57:45,213 --> 00:57:48,213
have opened up, I think, have forced us to
admit that in fact what we do is much
724
00:57:48,213 --> 00:57:53,684
more similar to what the scientists do
when they work in labs together.
725
00:57:53,684 --> 00:57:58,464
It's also enabled us to go back to images
constantly, and to be looking at the
726
00:57:58,473 --> 00:58:04,053
texts. I wrote my entire dissertation
based on printed texts, based on Geniza
727
00:58:04,053 --> 00:58:07,834
text that had been edited by somebody
else, meaning printed text without
728
00:58:07,834 --> 00:58:12,453
looking at the originals. That's
unthinkable today. You learn so much just
729
00:58:12,453 --> 00:58:16,384
by looking at the text. And what that
means, the corollary of that, is that our
730
00:58:16,384 --> 00:58:20,763
eyes have improved. We actually see more
on these texts than we were seeing a
731
00:58:20,763 --> 00:58:23,914
generation ago. I don't think that's
entirely because we're looking at
732
00:58:23,914 --> 00:58:27,664
more Geniza fragments, I think that might
also be because of Instagram, but if it's
733
00:58:27,664 --> 00:58:34,263
a good thing, that's fine. Okay, so
that's the, kind of, the Jewish history
734
00:58:34,263 --> 00:58:39,154
side. More briefly, I want to give you a
glimpse of what's changed in Middle
735
00:58:39,154 --> 00:58:44,104
Eastern history, and then I'll bring it
all home. So for the medieval Middle
736
00:58:44,104 --> 00:58:48,604
East, if all we had to go on were the
Hebrew texts of the Cairo Geniza, we
737
00:58:48,604 --> 00:58:51,483
would actually have a surprising amount
of information about Christians and
738
00:58:51,483 --> 00:58:56,614
Muslims. But that information would be
skewed in one significant respect. It
739
00:58:56,614 --> 00:59:00,844
would be about Christians and Jews– sorry,
Christians and Muslims as seen by Jews,
740
00:59:00,844 --> 00:59:05,003
by their trade partners, by their
neighbors, by their patrons and clients.
741
00:59:05,003 --> 00:59:10,174
Fortunately, there are Arabic scripts aplenty,
Arabic script texts aplenty, but
742
00:59:10,174 --> 00:59:13,503
these have received much, much less
attention than the Hebrew script texts
743
00:59:13,503 --> 00:59:20,584
have. Their legal deeds, and not just
scattered legal deeds, but hundreds of
744
00:59:20,584 --> 00:59:25,023
them. They're not easy to read, but
luckily, being legal deeds, in many cases
745
00:59:25,023 --> 00:59:28,773
they're formulaic so you can get the
hang of it pretty quickly. There are
746
00:59:28,773 --> 00:59:31,664
trade letters, in which case we have no
way of knowing whether their
747
00:59:31,664 --> 00:59:35,503
authors are Jews, Christians, or Muslims because
Jews also wrote trade letters in Arabic
748
00:59:35,503 --> 00:59:41,533
script, and there are literary works
aplenty in which case, as well, we have no
749
00:59:41,533 --> 00:59:45,404
idea what the religion of the scribe
would have been, not even if the text is
750
00:59:45,404 --> 00:59:48,793
the Quran because we have lots of
evidence that Jews and Christians copied
751
00:59:48,793 --> 00:59:53,624
the Quran on a regular basis. The
material text can also teach us
752
00:59:53,624 --> 00:59:58,033
something. So this is a fragment of the
Epistle of the so-called Brethren of
753
00:59:58,033 --> 01:00:04,154
Purity, the Ikhwan Al-Ṣafa, which is a work
written in southern Iraq in the 10th
754
01:00:04,154 --> 01:00:12,224
century in many, many volumes. It's a
fascinating, kind of, almnapedia by a
755
01:00:12,224 --> 01:00:17,004
group of thinkers who were absolutely
committed to classical ideals,
756
01:00:17,004 --> 01:00:23,884
Pythagorean ideals in geometry, in
music, and in calligraphy. And they were
757
01:00:23,894 --> 01:00:27,043
responsible for revolution in Arabic
script, I have like a whole chapter on
758
01:00:27,043 --> 01:00:33,344
this in my book because I found this so
fascinating. And this is a copy of their
759
01:00:33,344 --> 01:00:38,824
epistle on music written in precisely
the script that they actually prescribed
760
01:00:38,824 --> 01:00:43,454
writing in. So this is like a typical,
second half of the 10th century southern
761
01:00:43,454 --> 01:00:45,914
Iraqi script and it survived in the
Geniza.
762
01:00:45,914 --> 01:00:51,184
So was this very fragment the vehicle
for the transmission of the Ikhwan Al-Ṣafa
763
01:00:51,184 --> 01:00:56,444
from Iraq to Egypt? We don't know,
but it's only by actually understanding
764
01:00:56,444 --> 01:01:07,934
the material text that we can begin to
piece bigger stories together. Then we
765
01:01:07,934 --> 01:01:17,144
have texts that were reused by Jews. So
let me just back up one step. If the Geniza
766
01:01:17,144 --> 01:01:21,283
was a repository for war in Hebrew
script text, why did non-Hebrew script
767
01:01:21,283 --> 01:01:25,513
text survive in the Geniza? So I'm not
going to give you every possible answer
768
01:01:25,513 --> 01:01:30,914
to that question, because that would take
me 643 pages, but I will say that in some
769
01:01:30,914 --> 01:01:35,594
cases, these texts survived in the Geniza
simply because they were reused by Jews.
770
01:01:35,594 --> 01:01:42,104
In other cases, Jews would have read them
or used them as literary models. So why is
771
01:01:42,104 --> 01:01:45,084
this so fascinating to me? Because here
we get into the territory of
772
01:01:45,084 --> 01:01:49,374
Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things,
the most influential introduction ever
773
01:01:49,374 --> 01:01:53,424
written to an edited volume. The argument
of which is that we can learn a lot
774
01:01:53,424 --> 01:01:57,054
about an object by tracing not just its
production, but also its circulation and
775
01:01:57,054 --> 01:02:01,284
exchange. And on that level, there was one
class of document that really intrigued
776
01:02:01,284 --> 01:02:04,764
me, which was documents that were
produced by state officials, because
777
01:02:04,764 --> 01:02:08,814
these were documents that changed hands.
And I thought that if I tried to trace
778
01:02:08,814 --> 01:02:13,434
all the hands through which these documents
passed, I could learn not only about the
779
01:02:13,434 --> 01:02:18,684
Fatimid state, but also about how people
related to the Fatimid state. So there
780
01:02:18,684 --> 01:02:23,784
are decrees. These are Ottoman state
decrees that have been reused for Hebrew
781
01:02:23,784 --> 01:02:32,334
script texts, all of these come from the
1130s. There are many, many, many decree
782
01:02:32,334 --> 01:02:36,594
fragments. Most of the tree fragments
that I found were actually sliced in
783
01:02:36,594 --> 01:02:42,474
half vertically before they were then
sent out, presumably onto the used paper
784
01:02:42,474 --> 01:02:46,524
market, which is how Jews got their hands
on them. But there were many other
785
01:02:46,524 --> 01:02:52,044
pathways by which Jews could get their
hands on government documents. These are
786
01:02:52,044 --> 01:02:54,924
simply the most recognizable because
they had these gigantic calligraphic
787
01:02:54,924 --> 01:02:59,064
lines with enormous line spacing. My
colleague Tamara Lafy refers to this as
788
01:02:59,064 --> 01:03:03,624
"the sovereign privilege of waste," like
we're the caliphs, we can write as large
789
01:03:03,624 --> 01:03:11,664
as we want to. There are petitions. Again,
so many that it would be possible to
790
01:03:11,664 --> 01:03:15,854
write a whole book just about the
petition and response procedure based on
791
01:03:15,854 --> 01:03:21,624
Geniza documents. Their fiscal
receipt, these are my beloved tax
792
01:03:21,624 --> 01:03:28,404
receipts. They're really, really hard to
read. If you are fluent in Arabic and you
793
01:03:28,404 --> 01:03:32,154
want, like, a real challenge,
try your hand at one of these. Again,
794
01:03:32,154 --> 01:03:35,064
luckily, they mostly say the same thing,
so if it can read one, you can read
795
01:03:35,064 --> 01:03:40,734
mostly all of them. And then there are
state memoranda. So in this case, we have
796
01:03:40,734 --> 01:03:47,694
a memorandum in five different hands. The
bottom section had been published by S. M.
797
01:03:47,694 --> 01:03:51,294
Stern and Geoffrey Khan before me. They
didn't realize that there were another
798
01:03:51,294 --> 01:03:55,254
two, actually now three, fragments that
connected with these, so they didn't––
799
01:03:55,254 --> 01:03:59,134
they weren't able to see that
these were multiple hands. But
800
01:03:59,134 --> 01:04:01,684
if you think about the fact that there
were five state officials writing on a
801
01:04:01,684 --> 01:04:06,784
single piece of paper, you immediately
get a sense of the complex procedures
802
01:04:06,784 --> 01:04:14,914
that the government was developing as a
kind of administrative habit. So the
803
01:04:14,914 --> 01:04:18,364
quotation that I brought to you
from Michael Chamberlain about how there
804
01:04:18,364 --> 01:04:22,204
were no documents and these were
autocratic decisions, you look at the
805
01:04:22,204 --> 01:04:24,994
documents themselves and you understand
no, there was a bureaucracy, there were
806
01:04:24,994 --> 01:04:31,894
procedures, and there were, kind of,
predictable habits of documentation. It
807
01:04:31,894 --> 01:04:35,314
wasn't just the Middle East historians
that I had to contend with when I wanted
808
01:04:35,314 --> 01:04:39,424
to talk about the state documents, it was
also the Geniza historians themselves. So
809
01:04:39,424 --> 01:04:44,254
Goitein had kind of left the state out of
his purview. One of the things he said
810
01:04:44,254 --> 01:04:48,304
about the Fatimids is that they
excelled in laissez-faire. And he went on
811
01:04:48,304 --> 01:04:52,414
to say, "out of indolence, it seems, rather
than conviction." So I've just shown you a
812
01:04:52,414 --> 01:04:56,494
lot of documentation that, to my mind,
does not really smack of indolence. The
813
01:04:56,494 --> 01:04:59,314
far-reaching degree of autonomy enjoyed
by the Jews and, of course, the Christians
814
01:04:59,314 --> 01:05:02,584
during their rule has a very simple
explanation. Their Muslim subjects, too,
815
01:05:02,584 --> 01:05:06,124
were left mostly to their own devices. So
this was kind of the image of the state
816
01:05:06,124 --> 01:05:09,184
in Geniza studies, because basically
nobody had actually looked at the
817
01:05:09,184 --> 01:05:13,414
documentation that the state had
produced. Now, Goitein thought that ––
818
01:05:13,414 --> 01:05:18,064
hat the Fatimid state was weak,
and he wasn't wrong about that.
819
01:05:18,064 --> 01:05:22,084
The Fatimind state was weak compared to
modern states, but all pre-industrial
820
01:05:22,084 --> 01:05:26,254
states were weak compared to modern
states. If you'd like to be disabused
821
01:05:26,254 --> 01:05:29,494
about what states were and weren't in
the pre-modern period, this is the book
822
01:05:29,494 --> 01:05:32,914
to read: Patricia Crone's
Pre-Industrial Societies,
823
01:05:32,914 --> 01:05:36,544
and if you don't feel like reading a
whole book, just look at this chart.
824
01:05:36,544 --> 01:05:41,554
Consider the demographics. This is global
population. So the population of the
825
01:05:41,554 --> 01:05:44,824
world in the period that I study was
roughly the population of the U.S. today,
826
01:05:44,824 --> 01:05:49,954
possibly the US and Canada, or to put it
another way, it was equivalent to the
827
01:05:49,954 --> 01:05:53,434
current population of Egypt and Brazil
combined, right? That's the whole planet
828
01:05:53,434 --> 01:05:57,424
Earth. So manpower is thin on the ground,
and that's going to yield a very
829
01:05:57,424 --> 01:06:00,814
different kind of state
administration than what we might
830
01:06:00,814 --> 01:06:06,274
unconsciously have in our minds based on
20th and 21st century states. But just
831
01:06:06,274 --> 01:06:09,544
because states were weak doesn't mean
that they were non-existent or that they
832
01:06:09,544 --> 01:06:13,354
didn't rely on documentation,
let alone in a region that had invented,
833
01:06:13,354 --> 01:06:18,664
pretty much simultaneously, both
statecraft and writing. There was one
834
01:06:18,664 --> 01:06:22,233
other reason why all of the state
documentation had been ignored, and that
835
01:06:22,233 --> 01:06:26,914
was that it's not very easy to read. So
in the 1906 Bodleian Catalogue of the
836
01:06:26,914 --> 01:06:31,414
Geniza manuscripts, every time there
was a Fatimid state document, it was
837
01:06:31,414 --> 01:06:36,483
catalogued the same way: scribbling in
Arabic characters. Okay, so you might say
838
01:06:36,483 --> 01:06:40,444
well this is 1906, we know better now. It
turns out we don't know better now, the
839
01:06:40,444 --> 01:06:45,334
Bodleian online catalogue still has
this catalogued as illegible, when in
840
01:06:45,334 --> 01:06:49,233
fact it's a Fatimid fiscal document
with some pretty fancy titles from about
841
01:06:49,233 --> 01:06:56,733
1034. The UPenn Geniza Collection
catalogues this as scribbling
842
01:06:56,733 --> 01:07:00,694
in Arabic characters. It's just hilarious
to me how the word scribbling keeps
843
01:07:00,694 --> 01:07:03,634
coming back. It's true that these scribes
didn't like to lift the pen, but they
844
01:07:03,634 --> 01:07:09,364
were writing for each other, not for us.
Okay, so there's a state with complex——
845
01:07:09,364 --> 01:07:16,473
a complex system of documentation. Little
did I know when I set out to understand
846
01:07:16,473 --> 01:07:19,563
the state documentation, the Geniza, that
there was enough material to try to
847
01:07:19,563 --> 01:07:23,793
reconstruct the state on its own terms,
both as the Jews might have seen it and
848
01:07:23,793 --> 01:07:32,344
as they never could have seen it. So to
kind of, like, put that into a nutshell, I
849
01:07:32,344 --> 01:07:37,684
have a colleague who finished her PhD at
Princeton three years ago who is now in
850
01:07:37,684 --> 01:07:45,213
Vienna, who wrote on the Roman archiving
system in Egypt based on papyri, and she——
851
01:07:45,213 --> 01:07:48,963
the Romans were like these totally
ambitious archivists, where they wanted
852
01:07:48,963 --> 01:07:53,463
everything in triplicate, and she has
this fantastic papyrus that she quotes
853
01:07:53,463 --> 01:07:57,094
where the archivist comes into the Arsinoite nome in the year one-something-
854
01:07:57,094 --> 01:08:01,294
or-other and sees this huge heap of
papyri with like mice nibbling away at
855
01:08:01,294 --> 01:08:04,444
it and says, "Oh my God,
what am I gonna do with this? Like, I just
856
01:08:04,444 --> 01:08:09,303
inherited a total mess," and writes to his
superiors and says, you know, "This is the
857
01:08:09,303 --> 01:08:15,094
current state of the archive, what would
you like us to do?" The Fatimid seem to
858
01:08:15,094 --> 01:08:18,723
have taken a different approach. They did
not want everything in triplicate. They
859
01:08:18,723 --> 01:08:22,273
wanted everything in one copy in the
central archives in Cairo,
860
01:08:22,273 --> 01:08:26,953
and the rest they simply jettisoned. So
there was a constant pruning going on,
861
01:08:26,953 --> 01:08:31,033
which any archivist will tell you is
necessary to archiving. If archives are
862
01:08:31,033 --> 01:08:36,074
there not just to store, but also to
allow you to retrieve what you're
863
01:08:36,074 --> 01:08:39,614
looking for, they need to be organized,
and to be organized, they need to be
864
01:08:39,614 --> 01:08:44,203
pruned, and it's to the pruning that we
owe this kind of inverted mirror of the
865
01:08:44,203 --> 01:08:50,143
Fatimid archive that I have been digging
up from the Geniza. Okay, last point, so
866
01:08:50,143 --> 01:08:56,743
how exceptional is all this? Is the
Geniza simply a one-off and we'll never
867
01:08:56,743 --> 01:09:00,853
be able to do anything like this again?
It turns out that it's not. There are
868
01:09:00,853 --> 01:09:05,053
actually other Genizas from the medieval
Middle East, even if they're not called
869
01:09:05,053 --> 01:09:11,464
that. In Damascus, in the Umayyad Mosque,
a structure in the courtyard called
870
01:09:11,464 --> 01:09:15,043
various things, but called among other
things the Qubbat al-Khazna, the "Dome of
871
01:09:15,043 --> 01:09:21,433
the Treasury," preserved about 200,000
fragments of texts in an array
872
01:09:21,433 --> 01:09:27,973
of languages that are suspiciously
parallel to what you find in the Geniza.
873
01:09:27,973 --> 01:09:33,284
So Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, Hebrew, as well
as Greek, Latin, Coptic, and old French
874
01:09:33,284 --> 01:09:37,724
because after all, there was a crusade
going on. So these are 200,000
875
01:09:37,724 --> 01:09:41,704
medieval texts, almost all of
which are in Istanbul now, and hardly any
876
01:09:41,704 --> 01:09:47,164
of which have been published. Another
Umayyad Mosque, the Great Mosque of Sanaa,
877
01:09:47,174 --> 01:09:55,123
Yemen preserved, kind of, immured between
the ceiling and the roof of the building.
878
01:09:55,123 --> 01:09:59,744
The oldest Quran manuscripts that we
have, and they were simply sitting there,
879
01:09:59,744 --> 01:10:04,094
and it wasn't until the building was
reconstructed in the 1970s that these
880
01:10:04,094 --> 01:10:10,023
were discovered. So this is the
manuscript called known as Sanaa one.
881
01:10:10,023 --> 01:10:16,873
Benham Sadeghi, who was here at UCLA,
worked on this because the palimpsest, so
882
01:10:16,873 --> 01:10:22,603
the upper text is Quran and the lower
text is also Quran, and the lower text
883
01:10:22,603 --> 01:10:28,183
dates to before 669 C.E., so it's the
earliest evidence of the Quran that we
884
01:10:28,183 --> 01:10:34,534
have in physical form.
So both the Damascus and the Sanaa
885
01:10:34,534 --> 01:10:39,123
caches raise the possibility that
Muslims accorded similar treatment to
886
01:10:39,123 --> 01:10:44,254
warn sacred texts as Jews did, i.e., don't
destroy it, but also protect it from
887
01:10:44,254 --> 01:10:48,994
future destruction, so there's a kind
of sacred limbo, and their current theme
888
01:10:48,994 --> 01:10:53,404
of having this in immured, whether
it's between the ceiling and the roof or
889
01:10:53,404 --> 01:11:00,094
between walls is a fascinating one. So as
Mark Cohen argued in an article about 15
890
01:11:00,094 --> 01:11:04,444
years ago, the custom of Geniza was not
exclusively a Jewish one, and I agree
891
01:11:04,444 --> 01:11:09,364
with him that it was a kind of
region-wide custom that wasn't
892
01:11:09,364 --> 01:11:15,364
necessarily due to any Jewish taboo or
prohibition on destroying Hebrew script.
893
01:11:15,364 --> 01:11:19,804
I think there was a much wider
prohibition on destroying text. But not
894
01:11:19,804 --> 01:11:25,714
only that, it's a custom that actually
reaches well beyond the Middle East. This
895
01:11:25,714 --> 01:11:32,313
is a map of the Taklamakan desert and
the so-called silk routes, and I don't if
896
01:11:32,313 --> 01:11:35,103
you can see from where you're sitting,
but there are these tiny yellow boxes.
897
01:11:35,103 --> 01:11:40,504
Each of those yellow boxes is a Geniza.
So, like, we have our lovely Cairo Geniza,
898
01:11:40,504 --> 01:11:47,373
they have for 40 Genizas, and
there, too, the practices are suspiciously
899
01:11:47,373 --> 01:11:54,304
parallel. So here at the eastern end of
the silk routes in Dunhuang, there's a
900
01:11:54,304 --> 01:11:58,024
story that, just like the story of the
Geniza, begins around 1900, when a
901
01:11:58,024 --> 01:12:03,454
Daoist monk named Wang Yuan Liu fled
violence in his home region, and came to
902
01:12:03,454 --> 01:12:09,813
the isolated town of Dunhuang, and I just
want to give a shout out to my colleague
903
01:12:09,813 --> 01:12:13,954
Shen Wen, who— this is a story that's been
told many times in Chinese and not many
904
01:12:13,954 --> 01:12:18,484
times in English, and Shen Wen tells it
particularly well in his—— in his book in
905
01:12:18,484 --> 01:12:22,594
progress, so I'm indebted to him for some
of this information. So Wang appointed
906
01:12:22,594 --> 01:12:26,194
himself the caretaker of a series of
caves known as the "Grottoes of
907
01:12:26,194 --> 01:12:32,643
Unparalleled Height," Mogao ku, which has
Buddhist statues and murals dating from
908
01:12:32,643 --> 01:12:36,304
the 4th to the 14th century, so exactly a
parallel time period to what we're
909
01:12:36,304 --> 01:12:42,304
talking about. So one night in 900—— in
1900, sorry, the story goes, this Daoist
910
01:12:42,304 --> 01:12:45,754
monk saw a flickering of light in one of
the cave walls, so he started just kind
911
01:12:45,754 --> 01:12:48,364
of digging at it, and eventually
he tunneled through, and
912
01:12:48,364 --> 01:12:53,344
what he found was a small hidden chamber,
about three meters by five meters, that had
913
01:12:53,344 --> 01:12:58,174
been sealed in the early 11th century
and lay undisturbed for nearly 900 years.
914
01:12:58,174 --> 01:13:03,274
It contains 60,000 manuscripts, most of
them were Buddhist texts, plus around
915
01:13:03,274 --> 01:13:08,844
3000 documentary sources, about 5% of the
total. The languages that he found there—
916
01:13:08,844 --> 01:13:12,484
there was a staggering array of
languages, some of which have not yet
917
01:13:12,484 --> 01:13:18,484
been deciphered, Indo-European languages
galore, Turkic, Mongolian, and Sino-Tibetan
918
01:13:18,484 --> 01:13:24,274
languages, as well as some Syriac and
Hebrew. What ensues should sound familiar
919
01:13:24,274 --> 01:13:27,214
to those of us who know about the Geniza.
Manuscript hunters made piecemeal
920
01:13:27,214 --> 01:13:30,904
acquisitions, eventually the collection
was dispersed. It's now housed at the
921
01:13:30,904 --> 01:13:34,564
British Library, the Bibliothèque
Nationale in Paris, and the National
922
01:13:34,564 --> 01:13:38,034
Library of China in Beijing, with smaller
collections in Saint Petersburg, Osaka,
923
01:13:38,034 --> 01:13:44,244
Taipei, and Princeton. So this is a kind
of sacred limbo that's remarkably
924
01:13:44,244 --> 01:13:49,654
parallel to the other caches that I
showed you. Not only that, you have
925
01:13:49,654 --> 01:13:54,364
evidence for the reuse of state
documents for religious text. So this is
926
01:13:54,364 --> 01:13:58,204
a decree from the ruler of Dunhuang,
giving permission for the ten-year-old
927
01:13:58,204 --> 01:14:01,684
daughter of an official to enter a
monastery. The date seems to be in the
928
01:14:01,684 --> 01:14:07,444
early 10th century, and you can see the
imprints from the ruler's seal in red
929
01:14:07,444 --> 01:14:12,064
there, and the back contains a Buddhist
text, a dharani, which is like the essence of
930
01:14:12,064 --> 01:14:16,114
a Sutra that's generally used for
meditative or prayer purposes. Likewise,
931
01:14:16,114 --> 01:14:19,294
the state documents that I saw, almost
all of them are reused for Jewish
932
01:14:19,294 --> 01:14:25,534
liturgical texts. Okay, so what does it all
mean? What can this wider array of
933
01:14:25,534 --> 01:14:30,124
sacrosanct waste bins, a phrase I've stolen
from Amitav Ghosh, tell us that we
934
01:14:30,124 --> 01:14:33,364
didn't know before?
First of all, written objects and
935
01:14:33,364 --> 01:14:37,354
cultures of the handmaid. Was it the
sanctity of the texts that led to their
936
01:14:37,354 --> 01:14:41,734
preservation and limbo, or a more
generalized, pre-modern reluctance to
937
01:14:41,734 --> 01:14:47,044
discard anything? Why are we surprised in
the face of medieval people's habitual
938
01:14:47,044 --> 01:14:51,544
repurposing, so that we feel that we have
to explain it as an act of piety? This was
939
01:14:51,544 --> 01:14:55,144
a culture of the handmaid, in which
everything was reused, in which things
940
01:14:55,144 --> 01:14:59,584
fashioned by human hands, including texts,
were never casually destroyed, but
941
01:14:59,584 --> 01:15:04,294
from hand to hand and from use to use. An
average person owned very few garments
942
01:15:04,294 --> 01:15:08,644
over a lifetime, and when the cloth could
no longer be repaired, it was transformed
943
01:15:08,644 --> 01:15:12,544
into paper. And when that was
written on—— when what was written on the
944
01:15:12,544 --> 01:15:15,754
paper no longer mattered, you wrote
something else on it. And when you could no
945
01:15:15,754 --> 01:15:20,434
longer write anything else on, it went
into the limbo of a Geniza. So what
946
01:15:20,434 --> 01:15:24,034
happens when we consider Asia as a
continent not of static disconnected and
947
01:15:24,034 --> 01:15:28,114
mostly defunct civilizations, but of
medieval documents, travelers, and traders,
948
01:15:28,114 --> 01:15:33,874
of the circulation of written artifacts?
Their survival at the seams between the
949
01:15:33,874 --> 01:15:37,924
desert and the sown, and of the view that
those documents can give us of
950
01:15:37,924 --> 01:15:41,704
extraordinary human mobility in pursuit
of knowledge, of stable employment, a
951
01:15:41,704 --> 01:15:46,414
profit, and of prestige. Of the capacity
of human beings to solve logistical
952
01:15:46,414 --> 01:15:49,984
problems before the Industrial Age, we
should take all these lessons seriously,
953
01:15:49,984 --> 01:15:53,164
because if there's one thing the Cairo
Geniza has taught us, it's that medieval
954
01:15:53,164 --> 01:15:56,974
Jews were not so very different from the
Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians,
955
01:15:56,974 --> 01:16:01,654
Buddhists, and Hindus, among whom they
lived and worked. A Jewish householder
956
01:16:01,654 --> 01:16:04,684
from Jerusalem thought nothing of
travelling to Baghdad to study with a
957
01:16:04,684 --> 01:16:09,334
revered scholar. A trader from Tripoli in
Libya undertook journeys to Aden despite
958
01:16:09,334 --> 01:16:14,074
the terror of nailless boats. A Hebrew
poet from Cordoba received commissions
959
01:16:14,074 --> 01:16:18,244
from patrons in Cairo and Caida Wan, and
a Jew's disappearance in Sumatra or
960
01:16:18,244 --> 01:16:22,894
Malaysia, and his wife's need for clarity
occasioned the testimony of traders in
961
01:16:22,894 --> 01:16:27,184
Aden and the writing of rabbinic
responsa in Cairo. It's not so different
962
01:16:27,184 --> 01:16:30,844
from the world we see in the Tarim Basin
finds, but they haven't yet been
963
01:16:30,844 --> 01:16:35,864
connected with the Geniza finds mostly
because the linguistic complexities——
964
01:16:35,864 --> 01:16:40,524
the linguistic complexities of the medieval
imperial world, which make outsized
965
01:16:40,534 --> 01:16:46,254
demands on our modern, nationalist brains,
impoverished by a lack of polyglotism.
966
01:16:46,254 --> 01:16:50,614
Connecting these disparate worlds can
shed light not just on Jewish history,
967
01:16:50,614 --> 01:16:56,074
but on global history more broadly— it's
just a question of digging through the
968
01:16:56,074 --> 01:16:59,394
documents. Thank you.