The Lost Archive Rustow, Marina
2020, 2020-01-14, Volume:
63
eBook
A compelling look at the Fatimid caliphate's robust culture of documentation
The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a ...synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of this extraordinary find, inviting us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer.
Beginning with government documents before the Fatimids and paper’s westward spread across Asia, Rustow reveals a millennial tradition of state record keeping whose very continuities suggest the strength of Middle Eastern institutions, not their weakness. Tracing the complex routes by which Arabic documents made their way from Fatimid palace officials to Jewish scribes, the book provides a rare window onto a robust culture of documentation and archiving not only comparable to that of medieval Europe, but, in many cases, surpassing it. Above all, Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to understand preindustrial documentary ecology.
Illustrated with stunning examples from the Cairo Geniza, this compelling book advances our understanding of documents as physical artifacts, showing how the records of the Fatimid caliphate, once recovered, deciphered, and studied, can help change our thinking about the medieval Islamicate world and about premodern polities more broadly.
In a book with a bold new view of medieval Jewish history, written in a style accessible to nonspecialists and students as well as to scholars in the field, Marina Rustow changes our understanding of ...the origins and nature of heresy itself. Scholars have long believed that the Rabbanites and Qaraites, the two major Jewish groups under Islamic rule, split decisively in the tenth century and from that time forward the minority Qaraites were deemed a heretical sect. Qaraites affirmed a right to decide matters of Jewish law free from centuries of rabbinic interpretation; the Rabbanites, in turn, claimed an unbroken chain of scholarly tradition.
Rustow draws heavily on the Cairo Geniza, a repository of papers found in a Rabbanite synagogue, to show that despite the often fierce arguments between the groups, they depended on each other for political and financial support and cooperated in both public and private life. This evidence of remarkable interchange leads Rustow to the conclusion that the accusation of heresy appeared sporadically, in specific contexts, and that the history of permanent schism was the invention of polemicists on both sides. Power shifted back and forth fluidly across what later commentators, particularly those invested in the rabbinic claim to exclusive authority, deemed to have been sharply drawn boundaries.
Heresy and the Politics of Communitypaints a portrait of a more flexible medieval Eastern Mediterranean world than has previously been imagined and demonstrates a new understanding of the historical meanings of charges of heresy against communities of faith. Historians of premodern societies will find that, in her fresh approach to medieval Jewish and Islamic culture, Rustow illuminates a major issue in the history of religions.
A compelling look at the Fatimid caliphate's robust culture of documentation
The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909-1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a ...synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of this extraordinary find, inviting us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer.
Beginning with government documents before the Fatimids and paper's westward spread across Asia, Rustow reveals a millennial tradition of state record keeping whose very continuities suggest the strength of Middle Eastern institutions, not their weakness. Tracing the complex routes by which Arabic documents made their way from Fatimid palace officials to Jewish scribes, the book provides a rare window onto a robust culture of documentation and archiving not only comparable to that of medieval Europe, but, in many cases, surpassing it. Above all, Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region's administrative culture, but with our failure to understand preindustrial documentary ecology.
Illustrated with stunning examples from the Cairo Geniza, this compelling book advances our understanding of documents as physical artifacts, showing how the records of the Fatimid caliphate, once recovered, deciphered, and studied, can help change our thinking about the medieval Islamicate world and about premodern polities more broadly.
Over the past several decades, the field of Jewish studies has expanded to encompass an unprecedented range of research topics, historical periods, geographic regions, and analytical approaches. Yet ...there have been few systematic efforts to trace these developments, to consider their implications, and to generate new concepts appropriate to a more inclusive view of Jewish culture and society.Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and Historybrings together scholars in anthropology, history, religious studies, comparative literature, and other fields to chart new directions in Jewish studies across the disciplines. This groundbreaking volume explores forms of Jewish experience that span the period from antiquity to the present and encompass a wide range of textual, ritual, spatial, and visual materials. The essays give full consideration to non-written expressions of ritual performance, artistic production, spoken narrative, and social experience through which Jewish life emerges. More than simply contributing to an appreciation of Jewish diversity, the contributors devote their attention to three key concepts-authority, diaspora, and tradition-that have long been central to the study of Jews and Judaism. Moving beyond inherited approaches and conventional academic boundaries, the volume reconsiders these core concepts, reorienting our understanding of the dynamic relationships between text and practice, and continuity and change in Jewish contexts. More broadly, this volume furthers conversation across the disciplines by using Judaic studies to provoke inquiry into theoretical problems in a range of other areas.
Why did medieval Islamic polities permit non-Muslims to develop their own institutions of communal governance, and even actively encourage those institutions' autonomy from the state? The ...historiography on Jewish communal autonomy is particularly well-developed, so it can help advance inquiries into other religious communities. But that scholarship also tends to take Jewish communal autonomy - as well as Jewish officials' influence over other Jews - for granted rather than explaining it. Documents from the Cairo Geniza offer a fine-grained view of both sides of the question of why the state permitted communal autonomy and what communities did in order to safeguard it. The documents this article considers include state decrees, petitions and other official records in Arabic script, as well as legal deeds and private letters in Hebrew script.
The Cairo Geniza preserved thousands of Arabic-script texts, among them documents from the Fatimid and Ayyubid government administration. This essay offers a brief overview of the state document ...corpus from the Geniza. It also surveys previous scholarship on the documents, attempting to push the material further in two ways: by reading it as evidence of Fatimid and Ayyubid strategies of rule, and by paying attention to its material clues and what they tell us about the production, storage, retrieval, and discard of state documents. The article concludes by suggesting areas for further research and offering an edition and translation of an official memorandum intended for palace officials.
The Cairo Geniza preserved hundreds of Arabic-script petitions to officials at the Fatimid palace. These petitions are more elaborate than those written during the rule of earlier Islamic dynasties. ...This essay asks three questions about Fatimid petitions and their development: Who were the scribes who wrote them? When (and why) did Arabic petitions assume the elaborate form and format characteristic of the Fatimid period? And why did Fatimid high officials hold the petition-and-response procedure to be so central to governance? The essay includes an edition and translation of an unedited petition to Sitt al-Mulk, the sister of the caliph al-Ḥākim (386–411/996–1021), who ruled the state for more than two years after her brother’s death. A comparison between this petition and another I edited in 2010 sheds light on all three questions.
The Genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat preserved dozens of petitions addressed to the Fatimid and Ayyubid chanceries in Cairo and decrees that they issued in response. This article provides ...an edition, translation, and discussion of a petition housed among the Genizah documents of the Bodleian Library directed to Sitt al-Mulk, half-sister of the caliph al-Ḥākim (386–411/996–1021) and head of the Fatimid state between his death and her own in 414/1023. Geoffrey Khan had previously identified two petitions to a Fatimid princess housed in Cambridge and New York; it is likely that they, too, were addressed to Sitt al-Mulk. Such documents elucidate Sitt al-Mulk's role in government after her brother's death and provide evidence for the chronicler al-Musabbiḥī's claim that she received and responded to petitions from subjects. The article offers possible explanations as to why petitions such as this one, which concerns an Ismaili mosque, should have found their way to the Jewish community of Fustat whose members reused and preserved them. It also suggests some broader conclusions about the dispersal, survival, or disappearance of pre-Ottoman Middle Eastern archives and documents.
In his work on Iberian Jews—openly practicing ones and conversos, on and off the peninsula, before 1492 and 1497 and after—Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi made few explicit methodological statements. But from ...his earliest work, he made his historiosophical commitments clear and rarely wavered from them. Those commitments included basic trust in inquisitorial sources, the investigation of both marginal and normative Jewish practices, interest in the history of mentalities, and, above all, a focus on the relationship between "immanent" and external causes in Jewish history. This article traces the influence of several mid-twentieth-century historians on Yerushalmi's work and examines his place in twentieth-century debates on conversos and the Inquisition; it also discusses his relationship to microhistory and the problem of historical distance and perspective. The article concludes by considering the apparent contradiction between Yerushalmi's emphasis on the agency and subjectivity of Jews and his trust in the records of an institution that some have characterized as pervasively anti-Jewish.
