The Cairo Geniza is the largest and richest store of documentary evidence for the medieval Islamic world. This book seeks to revolutionize the way scholars use that treasure trove. Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman draws on legal documents from the Geniza to reconceive of life in the medieval Islamic marketplace. In place of the shared practices broadly understood by scholars to have transcended confessional boundaries, he reveals how Jewish merchants in Egypt employed distinctive trading practices. Highly influenced by Jewish law, these commercial practices served to manifest their Jewish identity in the medieval Islamic context. In light of this distinctiveness, Ackerman-Lieberman proposes an alternative model for using the Geniza documents as a tool for understanding daily life in the medieval Islamic world as a whole.
The Cairo Geniza is the largest and richest store of documentary evidence for the medieval Islamic world. This book seeks to revolutionize the way scholars use that treasure trove. Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman draws on legal documents from the Geniza to reconceive of life in the medieval Islamic marketplace. In place of the shared practices broadly understood by scholars to have transcended confessional boundaries, he reveals how Jewish merchants in Egypt employed distinctive trading practices. Highly influenced by Jewish law, these commercial practices served to manifest their Jewish identity in the medieval Islamic context. In light of this distinctiveness, Ackerman-Lieberman proposes an alternative model for using the Geniza documents as a tool for understanding daily life in the medieval Islamic world as a whole.
The Business of Identity: Jews, Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt
464
The Business of Identity: Jews, Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt
464eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The Cairo Geniza is the largest and richest store of documentary evidence for the medieval Islamic world. This book seeks to revolutionize the way scholars use that treasure trove. Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman draws on legal documents from the Geniza to reconceive of life in the medieval Islamic marketplace. In place of the shared practices broadly understood by scholars to have transcended confessional boundaries, he reveals how Jewish merchants in Egypt employed distinctive trading practices. Highly influenced by Jewish law, these commercial practices served to manifest their Jewish identity in the medieval Islamic context. In light of this distinctiveness, Ackerman-Lieberman proposes an alternative model for using the Geniza documents as a tool for understanding daily life in the medieval Islamic world as a whole.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804787161 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/15/2014 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 30 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Business of Identity
Jews, Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt
By Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8547-1
CHAPTER 1
Jewish, Islamic, or Mediterranean?
Historiography and the Cairo Geniza
The Cairo Geniza is, certainly, one of the most important resources for the study of the world of the Islamic Mediterranean. This treasure trove, discovered in the dedicated chamber at the back of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), contained documents dating as far back as the ninth century and as recently as the nineteenth, when Western scholars began to plumb its depths in order to study medieval Jewish life. S. D. Goitein's estimate (1967) of a quarter-million leaves of paper and papyrus in the Geniza dwarfs that of only fifty thousand sheets from the rest of the Islamic world, offered by Adolf Grohmann in 1952. Although the vast majority of the Geniza leaves represent literary texts, the fragments of the so-called documentary Geniza are believed to number around fifteen thousand, "which appear in a trickle during the second part of the tenth century and become a flood for the subsequent two and a half centuries."
It should be obvious that the greatest contribution made by the Geniza documents is in providing insight into the daily lives of the individuals who composed them. This is because otherwise "documentation for Fatimid rule and for the societies that lived under it is certainly poorer than for a dynasty like that of the Mamluks." In general, whereas edited literary sources "yield tantalizing bits of data, though seldom enough to permit a fully satisfactory resolution of any major problem," the edited nature of literary sources leaves them vulnerable to the challenge that any such source "evolved over time ... and naturally shows the impact of political, theological, social and other issues that were not important at the time of the event the accounts are supposedly describing." Furthermore, while classical literary and rabbinic works may overrepresent the rabbinic and social elite and may or may not even be intended to depict the quotidian reality of their writers in medieval Egypt, scholars generally understand the data found within the "documentary Geniza" to depict accurately the daily life of its writers since the Geniza is simply a repository of documentary fragments rather than an archive or an edited literary collection. A. L. Udovitch, one of the most important Geniza scholars of the late twentieth century, asserts this when he writes that "there is no Heisenberg effect here, that is, the data in the documents are 'unobserved' and require no adjustment for distortion as a result of observation." It is the "unobserved" or "unedited" quality of the documents, as well as their great breadth of substance (Udovitch also points out that they "derive from ... a fairly wide range of the social spectrum") that has established the importance of the Geniza documents for the study of the broader world from which the documents emerged. Further, although their writers—and indeed, the vast majority of the dramatis personae with which the Geniza documents are concerned—are overwhelmingly Jewish, the question arises of whether and to what extent this rich collection of materials can be used as a source of Islamic as well as Jewish social history. This question is of particular importance for a period in which other sources of documentary evidence are few.
In this chapter, I briefly outline some of the various strands of Geniza study, with an eye toward describing how the documents have been used by scholars as a source of Jewish and Islamic social and economic history. Contemporary Geniza studies may be said to have begun with the visit of Jacob Saphir to the Geniza chamber in 1864 and his subsequent publication of a work describing its contents. Yet one of the most prominent strands of Geniza scholars (and perhaps the most prolific strand) is the "Princeton School," which looks to Geniza documents as an important source (perhaps the most important) describing the Islamic environment as a whole, communicating much "about the rhythms of daily life in the Islamic environment from the data on material culture from the Geniza." I focus my energies in this chapter on the Princeton School. One fundamental element found among its members is a willingness to assume a cosmopolitanism among Jews and Muslims in medieval Egypt that manifested itself in a commonality of practice across "confessional" barriers in one domain or another. Here, the idea of Jewish "embeddedness"—defined by these scholars as "assimilation" or "conformity"—sits in tension with the idea of Jewish "exceptionalism." That is to say, these scholars understand Jewish embeddedness to imply behavioral conformity with the norms of their broader environment, rather than exceptional behavior through which Jews might have distinguished themselves. Examining the social conditions and the intellectual environments from which these scholars emerged, I show that this dichotomy between embeddedness and exceptionalism emerges not from the documents themselves but rather from the Bildung or "character education" of the scholars who studied the documents and their assumptions about Jewish life in the medieval Islamic context.
Challenging the dichotomy between embeddedness and exceptionalism, I propose an alternative to the humanism or cosmopolitanism of scholars such as S. D. Goitein, the twentieth-century doyen of Geniza studies, which allows the Geniza documents to be viewed as the distinctive cultural production of a Jewish community that was embedded in medieval Egyptian culture and economy and yet maintained the possibility of distinctiveness in quotidian life. Focusing on documents concerned with mercantile cooperation, I entertain the possibility that commerce and trade provided the Jewish community with a vehicle for expressing its own cultural distinctiveness. And over the course of this book (particularly in the third chapter), I explore in detail the process through which Jewish economic actors were made aware of traditional rabbinic legal norms concerning matters of commerce. With this in mind, the choice of these Jews to interact with one another in accordance with Jewish law can be seen as deliberate, reflecting a tendency on the part of merchants and traders to adhere to traditional Jewish norms when their colleagues in the broader "Islamic" marketplace may have acted otherwise.
The possibility of Jewish distinctiveness in daily life, particularly in the domain of commercial cooperation, would problematize the use of the Geniza documents as sources for Islamic social history. The joining of embeddedness and assimilation or conformity conveniently allows the historian to use the Geniza documents as a proxy for the largely obliterated documentary record of the Islamic community; conversely, the possibility of Jewish exceptionalism could lead the researcher in Islamic history to the despairing conclusion that the Geniza is useless for shedding light on the object of his or her study, except where the Geniza documents describe Muslims or Islamic institutions. This book as a whole offers a possible solution to this problem, sketching out how scholars can actually use the distinctiveness of Jewish merchants in the economic domain as a tool for understanding the Islamic environment in which those Jewish merchants functioned. But the history of the humanistic association between embeddedness and assimilation must first be addressed; and such a history must begin with the work of Goitein, whose masterful and extensive scientific study of the documents laid the foundation for the present-day field of "Geniza studies."
S. D. Goitein: Humanist and the Doyen of Geniza Studies
The study of the "documentary Geniza" did not start with S. D. Goitein, but he is the undisputed doyen of Geniza studies. Born the scion of a rabbinic family in the town of Burgkunstadt, Bavaria, in 1900, Goitein pursued Islamic studies in Frankfurt and Berlin, though he also pursued in parallel the study of Jewish texts and tradition under the tutelage of Rabbi Nehemias Nobel. Immigrating to Palestine in 1923, Goitein initially taught Bible and history at the Haifa Reali School, moving to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1928, shortly after its establishment. Gideon Libson's appreciation of Goitein's scholarship explains that "Goitein's scholarly work centered not on a variety of different subjects, but on one broad topic, with different branches being nourished by a single root: the Jewish-Arab encounter on all levels and its varying impact." Surveys of Goitein's research trajectory—including Libson's—generally describe a more or less definitive move from one branch of the "Jewish-Arab encounter" throughout his early days and his years in Palestine and Israel to another branch during his years in Philadelphia (which could be said to have begun with his migration to the University of Pennsylvania in 1957, though this followed shortly after Goitein's year as a visiting professor at Dropsie College in 1953–54) and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where Goitein served from 1971 until his death in 1985. This shift is reflected in a move from his early works on the foundations of Islam—such as his doctoral dissertation, "Das Gebet im Qoran" (approved under the supervision of Josef Horovitz, a well-known orientalist who would go on to establish the Hebrew University's Institute of Oriental Studies) and his translation of the fifth volume of al-Baladhuri's prosopographical Ansab al-Ashraf (published in 1936 by the Hebrew University)—to the study of the Cairo Geniza.
Thus, although it was not published until 1966, well after Goitein had become established in Philadelphia, his Studies in Islamic History and Institutions can be seen as a watershed representing this shift in his research; as Libson writes, "while the first part is based on Muslim sources, the second turns to genizah documents." This was more than a shift in the sources on which Goitein relied; it also betokened a shift in the object of his analysis from "Islamics" to what he himself would come to call "a Mediterranean People." It is abundantly clear that he did not intend by this designation "Jews in Islamic Lands," or even the broader "Jews living in the Mediterranean Littoral." Rather, he seems to have understood the term to describe (and inscribe) Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike in the region whose inhabitants produced the Geniza documents. Goitein's recognition, from the beginnings of his Geniza studies, of the importance of these documents for deepening his understanding of Islamic history and culture, the object of his early research, is immediately apparent from his publication of a number of articles with titles such as "What Would Jewish and General History Benefit by a Systematic Publication of the Documentary Geniza Papers?" and "The Documents of the Cairo Geniza as a Source for Islamic Social History." At the core of this recognition was his understanding of a "Jewish-Arab symbiosis" in which the Jews of the Arab world "drank in everything Arab because they were sure of their autonomous culture and comfortable in a religious environment that was simply an 'enlargement' of Judaism."
Appreciations of Goitein's life—particularly those of Steven Wasserstrom and Gideon Libson—explore the master's vision of a "creative symbiosis" between Judaism and Islam. The term these accounts use to describe Goitein's approach to medieval Jewish society and its symbiosis with medieval Islam is "humanism," which bears discussion here. In his posthumously published article "The Humanistic Aspects of Oriental Studies," Goitein explains:
What then is humanism? I use the word humanism in its traditional sense, as it was applied to the great humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In a very general way, a spirit of humanism has been manifest in world history in many places and times, namely, when people were searching for useful knowledge, goodness, and beauty not only among themselves, but wherever they could find them, even among strangers and enemies.
Thus Goitein saw the search for "self-perfection" as transcending space, time, and the boundaries of nationality and creed, and subsequent readers of his work have often pointed out his efforts to push aside these boundaries. Further on, I discuss in greater depth his tendency to overlook the passage of nearly a millennium from the period of the Geniza documents until his own, seen most fully in his efforts to thrust insights from his own life experience and time period onto the medieval period. Yet he did not believe that there were no boundaries at all between communities. He reserved for participants in a "humanistic" culture the right to rejoice in their own identity: "There is nothing wrong with a man's conviction that his religion is the best (at least for himself), as long as this belief does not make him blind to the virtues of others and as long as the supreme values of morality and mercy are not sacrificed to confessional fanaticism."
Thus, in describing the "genizah man," Goitein explains that "this person had firm ethical views; his religiosity was simple and healthy, he was sober, pretty much free of superstition, and generally loyal to his own people." By "superstition," Goitein clearly meant obscurantism, a fealty to unenlightened practices and ideas. Understanding the "genizah man" to be "pretty much free" of such ideas and practices, Goitein would have had little truck for magic or fancy among the Geniza people. Indeed, Cohen even explains that Goitein
found little expression of magical superstition in the business letters he so painstakingly transcribed and translated. The merchant had to be rational in his pursuit of profit. He was a thinking and calculating man, carefully planning his every move, his every purchase and sale. He relied on his carefully orchestrated partnerships, not on magical powers. If the merchant relied on supernatural intervention, it was on God, alone.
Likewise, Goitein focused on the "rational" even within the creative domain of the literary: he describes the sage Abraham Maimonides (1186–1237 Ce), in his view the very apogee of Jewish culture in medieval Egypt, as having been so persuasive in his biblical commentary "as to make even its midrash (homiletics) seem like peshat (the simple meaning of the text)." That is to say, Goitein even saw Abraham's biblical exegesis—an area in which one might be expected to exercise a great deal of literary freedom and creativity—as "free from superstition," since it could be understood as nothing more than unpacking the simple meaning of the text.
Further, although Goitein's "genizah man" might be reasonably expected to maintain loyalty to his own people, this loyalty did not eclipse the perpetual search for ultimate human perfection: Goitein particularly praises Abraham Maimonides' adoption of Muslim Sufi traditions for his "efforts to shore up these views with ancient Jewish sources and prove their continuity with early tradition." Goitein understood that commonality in language, religion, and culture led the Jewish community to look to their Muslim neighbors for leadership in many areas.
The permeability of interconfessional boundaries implied by this communal search for perfection allowed Goitein not only to discover "nuggets of evidence about Islamic society buried in the Geniza records" but also to muse about the possibility that the Geniza could provide more than simply nuggets, and perhaps even descriptions of entire cultural institutions and practices not detailed in the medieval Islamic literary or documentary sources available to him. Although the Geniza documents did not, by and large, emerge from Islamic hands, nor was their vast majority concerned with individuals who were identifiably Muslim, Goitein understood much of the detail those documents provided to be no less descriptive of Muslims than of the Jews who wrote them. For example, noting a "usual condition" in Jewish marriage documents from the Geniza that the husband agrees not to marry a second wife, Goitein writes: "In the Arabic papyri, the wife sometimes receives the right to 'dismiss' the second wife, if she does not please her. I wonder, however, whether the still unpublished Muslim marriage contracts, which are contemporary with the Geniza papers, do not contain the same 'usual condition'."
Importantly, perhaps, Goitein presents this conjecture despite his own admission that this clause was absent from the five published Muslim marriage documents from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that he knew. He maintained this conjecture despite the silence of these documents by explaining that the prevalence of monogamy "was more characteristic of a progressive middle class than of a specific religious community. It is not excluded that the same practice prevailed at that time in the corresponding layers of Muslim society." In this case, it would seem that he understood behavioral norms to be described by economic strata (these are the "corresponding layers") rather than religious affiliation. Such an outlook follows what he himself described as "the towering figure of Michael I. Rostovtzeff," under whose influence Goitein fell, both in relying heavily on epigraphy and in understanding social divisions to be defined principally by economic class rather than by confessional boundaries. Goitein composed his magnum opus A Mediterranean Society in a manner that presented detail he deemed "sociographic ... not sociological"—by which he meant that his work aimed to arrange and present detail from the Geniza documents in order to bring to light his "Mediterranean Society" rather than to draw the lines of cultural border and identity established by distinctive mentalités of specifically Jewish or Muslim communities. Indeed, it could be said that Goitein's humanistic impulse led him to perceive one overarching "Mediterranean" mentalité whose contours were generally smooth, at least across confessional lines. Goitein seems even to have originally intended to title the fifth volume of A Mediterranean Society "The Mediterranean Mind," though he was later dissuaded from doing so.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Business of Identity by Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
1 Jewish, Islamic, or Mediterranean? Historiography and the Cairo Geniza 1
2 Partnership as Culture: Jewish Law and Jewish Life 49
3 Commercial Forms and Legal Norms in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt 156
4 The Geniza, Jewish Identity, and Medieval Islamic Social and Economic History 194
Appendix: Fifteen Legal Documents Concerning Partnership 229
Notes 325
Bibliography 415
Index of Geniza Documents 431
Index 435