Jewish History - Jews and the Islamic Empire (10a of 20 sessions)

hello everyone thanks very much for coming uh this evening we're going to be talking about the rise of islam and its impact on jewish civilization and one of our challenges with this period as well as with other periods of history is to try to appreciate the historical experience lived forward and not understood backwards we tend to look back from our own perspective and project back our values and experiences and the experience of jews under islam is no different and in fact is particularly challenging given ongoing tensions between israel and its arab muslim neighbors in the early part of the 20th century uh a giant of jewish history whose name was salo baron he was the first endowed chair of jewish history at columbia university or anywhere in the world for that matter um and he wrote a masterful 13 volume history of jewish communities long and short-lived but he made fun of a view that he called the lacrimos view of jewish history la crimosa if you think of that section of a requiem mass is the very tearful part of the mass the lack of most view of jewish history i had one professor call it the oyvay view of jewish history where oy vey the jews suffered in this place and then they had to move somewhere else and oh they they suffered even more there and you know just suffering from suffering to suffering and and baron pointed out that jewish communities often live for many centuries in the same place and yes there was a sometimes persecution or other reasons they had to leave there but you can't only look at the end you have to look at the lived experience during that period in fact in some cases historians of the 19th and early 20th century writing jewish history from of earlier centuries imagine that jewish life in christendom was in fact this lacrimos view of suffering suffering and punishment but the jewish life under islam was much more enlightened and happy and tolerant and successful will enter the tensions of hamas and islamic terrorism and the war on terror starting in 2001 and a revised version of the history of the jews under islam begins to be articulated that's sometimes called the neo-lacrimos view which is saying you thought it was bad in europe just take a look at what it was like under islam and they would highlight episodes of persecution and suffering and disability and second class citizenship and all kinds of other challenges that jews under islam had to deal with of course the answer is that real history is not simple it's complicated it's different in different times and places so jews living under morocco for example could have had it much better than jews living in iran or living in other parts of the arab world so yemen is another example where jews tended to suffer quite a bit in north africa they tended to be a little bit more well rooted syria and lebanon generally uh fine but there were episodes of religious persecution and so on so the reality is that it's neither the lack or most view which says christianity uh christendom is terrible and islam is wonderful or the neo-lacrimus lacrimos youth that says everybody was terrible and you suffered all the time everywhere we need to try to experience it the way that people lived it and experienced it going forward which was often long periods of stability and ability to be successful and well rooted where they were so the story of jews in islam really begins with the story of muhammad himself who is the founding prophet of this new religion he is born in mecca which is a holy pilgrimage city even before he exists but it's a polytheistic pilgrimage city because the arabian peninsula is full of polytheists and i'm giving you only the um the abstract of the reader's digest version of the muhammad story there's plenty more out there he winds up receiving a revelation not from any particular god but from allah the god if you think in hebrew l it's a word for god it's the same root as allah in arabic because there's both semitic languages and it tells them there's in fact only one god and he does not want you to worship idols and so muhammad s opens his mouth and this is bad news for the tourism business in a pilgrimage city and so the city fathers begin to persecute him in the end he flees in the year 622 of the common era to medina which is a major trading city up further north along the um the arabian coast and in fact this date of 622 of the common era is the year 0 for the muslim calendar so if you notice muslim dates sometimes appear on 14 1500 in our time period it's because their calendar started at year zero around the year 622 of the common era when he moves to medina which is as i mentioned a trading city he meets a lot of different people um he ultimately becomes very successful as a prophet and ultimately uh as a political authority because he's able to adjudicate between warring and battling tribes and trading clans and he in fact meets a number of jewish tribes and clans in this city of medina and he learns quite a bit from them he is able to refine his concept of monotheism even more clearly there are a number of quranic versions of biblical stories that become part of the revelation that he's gradually creating as an oral literature that ultimately gets written down by the end of his life but there are slight changes so for example the story of the almost sacrifice of the sun is shifted where in the quran it is isma'il who is almost sacrificed by ibrahim as opposed to isaac and the biblical version is almost sacrificed by abraham another example is initially muhammad has a direction of prayer but his direction of prayer is not toward mecca the initial qibla the initial direction of prayer was toward jerusalem in fact there's a famous story about muhammad having a midnight journey to jerusalem on his horse al-burak and then launching from a special rock in jerusalem up into the sky that's the origin of the dome of the rock in jerusalem to this day and why it's seen as a holy site for muslims jerusalem understood to be the third holiest city in islam after medina where muhammad got his power and mecca which maintained its preeminent place but because the jews did not convert to islam convert to following muhammad he ultimately got mad at them this by the way repeats itself later in history when martin luther thinks he's going back to the bible he cuts out all the books that the catholics added he claims to the old testament scriptures and then the jews don't convert and he gets mad at them too and says some pretty terrible things about them which you can look up so muhammad does get mad at the jews as well for not following his lead and joining his new community the uma of islam the community of islam and ultimately there are three results that apply to three different jewish clans that are in medina the first group the banu kanuka and banu is just another one for the sons of the clan of the banu kainuka are sent into exile because they refuse to accept muhammad's authority a second group the banu nadir are taxed specially because again they won't accept his full authority and religion but they're willing to abide by the rules of the community and then the third group the banu kuriza actually participate in a rebellion against muhammad and then flee to an oasis where they are chased by the armies of medina unified under muhammad's leadership and ultimately they are wiped out at least all the men are wiped out the women and children taken into slavery and the reason why these stories are important is because there becomes the idea of the founding period of the religion as the template for how things should proceed going forward you know those little bracelets that some people wear that say wwjd what would jesus do muslims actually have a whole body of literature called the hadith the legends and stories about muhammad that are versions of what would muhammad do and there are stories passed down by word of mouth describing what he did in certain circumstances we saw this as well with rabbinic literature and the deeds of the rabbis as a model for what you should do or shouldn't do and so when later generations of islam are looking back on the founding narratives to say what should we do with all these jews and for that matter all these christians that are now living in our empire and who are refusing to convert to islam well what do we do with them well one option is exile that was model one one option is have them pay a special tax and have some disabilities and option three is convert or die at one point a fanatical muslim invader of spain would put their quran on the point of their sword the message being pick one either convert or die but by and large over the course of muslim conquest and the expansion of the muslim empire the model was the second one that of having some disabilities and some special taxes but also having a kind of tolerated minority status and so what i'm going to do now is show you an exam a map of these muslim conquests you can get a sense of how rapid and how large this empire became so under muhammad ultimately arabia is unified there's a famous march on mecca with his unified armies from medina muhammad actually manages to conquer mecca and the settled parts of uh the the arabian coast along the red sea um obviously the middle of the desert nobody's really in charge of but the parts along the coast are valuable for trading purposes so from that setting after his death the caliphs or the sort of regions who are ruling after him managed to expand the emperor quite a bit you can see in that first wave the lighter pink color they make it all the way to tripoli in what is today libya and all the way east into the borders of afghanistan and sweeping of course for jewish purposes most importantly through mesopotamia where the baghdad slash babylonian talmud is being developed and through the land of israel where there are still jews living but who have been under the byzantine christian empire for quite a long time now you'll notice the muslims don't manage to get further north than more or less armenia and uh where cyprus is if you drew a line across the north in syria there they don't manage to conquer the byzantine empire but they do manage to sweep through north africa all the way across what's called the maghrib you see there what's now morocco algeria and into spain itself they in fact get all the way up to the city of tul in france where they are beaten by charles martell in a famous battle in 730 whatever um again this is not the core focus of what we're doing um but what we find in this period is that jews who have been living under the visigoth kingdom in spain for example or under the byzantine empire in syria in jerusalem and egypt and so on were not so sad to see the byzantines go because the byzantines had persecuted them and there were a lot of affinities between jewish culture and religion and lifestyle and muslim culture religion and lifestyle for one thing arabic was a semitic language so if they were learning hebrew or they had been speaking aramaic to learn arabic was a relatively easy shift or certainly something that you could be functional in a government service kind of way muslim law also functions similar to jewish life under a religious law in islam it's called sharia in hebrew it's called they actually both mean the path the way of walking and they encompass everything from torts and damages to contract law to marriages to prayer practice to dietary laws and so on i mean even the concept of having dietary laws remember jesus famously said it doesn't defile you what goes into your mouth what defiles you is what comes out of your mouth and he abandoned the dietary laws where jews maintain those kosher laws and islam also had rules of dietary practice they could not eat pork for example meat had to be slaughtered in a certain way what's called halal interesting quirk kosher meat is acceptable by halal standards but it doesn't go both ways jews would need halal meat as kosher but muslims would eat kosher meat as halal but they had additional dietary rules most famously not allowing alcohol or wine where jews did maintain that but muslims and jews both had multiple prayers a day for muslims it was five times a day for jews it was three times a day and these were not individual prayers these were collective prayers in the community they came from a middle eastern culture with those particular standards for you know nudity modesty culture and so on and most importantly they had a common enemy neither of them were particularly fond of christians because of the influence of christian empires on jewish life and of course the ongoing military conflict between jews and christians so jewish affinity for muslim culture didn't only apply to the broader concept of cultural dialogue it was also impactful on internal jewish developments so muslims for example because they were told they were not allowed to translate the quran from arabic became very focused on the exact words in the text and they began the tradition of writing commentaries to the scriptural text which jews began to imitate they focused on grammar in fact it was arab grammarians that realized that semitic languages have a three-letter root system so if you have the word it all is related to writing or written or document a ketubah for example is the written contract in modern hebrew mikhtav is a letter kotev is to write etc so the the reality is that we learned more about hebrew by learning arabic right learning what arabs learned about their own language than jews knew themselves in fact there are a couple examples where rashi who's a famous medieval commentator will learn more about in a couple of lessons who is living in christian europe actually got a couple of etymologies of words wrong because he wasn't living in the muslim empire and hadn't learned the grammar that the muslims had helped jews discover but he was operating in a different setting and didn't have access to that knowledge but you'll also notice the approach to architecture shows a very strong muslim influence jews by the way historically did do some human figures but by later periods were moving away from doing human figures they might do animals muslims were even more strict when it came to what you could represent in artwork other than in persia they were more flexible in shiite islam but in mainstream sunni islam the only decorations you could have on a building were geometric patterns plants because nobody worship plants and calligraphy and so if you go into one of these ancient mosques the hagia sophia for example in istanbul or or other famous of the blue mosque in istanbul as well or other famous mosques or the dome of the rock for example you will see beautiful calligraphy wonderful geometric patterns wonderful floral and vine motifs and no animals and no people that's part of the aesthetic and the longer jews lived under islamic rule and influenced by islamic culture the more they got influenced in that direction even to the level of language jews began speaking a kind of judeo-arabic where they would write it in hebrew letters if they were writing it but the content was in fact arabic my family for example my father's family came from syria and their daily language was arabic they didn't have ladino or any other kind of imported language they had adopted arabic as their home language it was a particular jewish accent some hebrew words mixed in here or there and if they wrote it again they'd write it in hebrew letters but their daily language was arabic their food was arabic um and so you know it's funny uh when you talk about jewish food people often assume it's ashkenazi food but for my father growing up in a syrian jewish family kugel and you know bagels and that was all what those people ate that wasn't what he ate at home that wasn't his home food his was kibben idja and in fact when they read hebrew in the synagogue it sounded more like arabic than the standard ashkenazi pronunciation because it was inflected with that cultural context in fact jews under islam even maintained polygamy much longer than jews under christendom such that even into the early modern period you have examples of jews taking more than one wife or taking child brides in as young as 10 11 12 i have to say because that was the culture of the surrounding community and under islam you could have up to four wives so follow again following muhammad's example so jews in those countries sometimes also took more than one wife following both biblical and uh and muslim examples so what was life like for jews living under this large expanded muslim empire well for one thing the larger the empire you live under the greater your economic opportunity because living under a large empire means you have very few borders to cross where you have to pay tariffs or bribes or risk pirates taking your stuff you know the more you have the security of a larger empire the more mobile you're able to be and thus the more successful you can be if you take the risk of traveling and notice they're controlling large parts of the mediterranean you could go uh shore hopping uh all the way from spain and then take land routes all the way into asia over the silk road and other major routes you so you had this great expansive empire for economic opportunities but you had to live with certain restrictions as well you can think about it in terms of what freedoms to jews have and what limits did they have so in terms of freedom they could move anywhere within this empire they were not confined in many cities they were not confined but to an area of residence some did have a jewish neighborhood they were expected to live in but that was often by mutual consent they wanted to live with other jews that was their personal choice but they could live in other places they could pursue just about any profession jews became viziers like prime ministers they became court translators court physicians in fact often jews were attractive as court physicians both because they were literate and well read and because they weren't a rival for power you know if you had a muslim who was the court physician he might want to maybe become khalif someday or have a friend who would and he might poison you um but the jew knew he could only go so high he couldn't become a caliph and so he wouldn't uh wouldn't push his luck uh too far um and so you had all these freedoms to to live their life including the freedom to live their own private religious behaviors they didn't have to go to an imam to get married they had rabbis able to do that but there were only certain people who were tolerated under the muslim empires they had to be monotheists and they had to have a written revelation that was jewish jews or christian basically qualified but polytheists zoroastrians were much much less tolerated in fact it's muslims who come up with a phrase that jews think uniquely apply to them the arabic is which means the people of the book you notice that word kitab katav as book writing the people of the book were people with a written revelation and so that counted both jews and christians who were thought to have been superseded by muslims so if you are the super sessionist movement you don't want the ones that have been superseded to get too high and mighty too uppity to use the language of a later generation and so ultimately the practice was codified in a document known as the pact of umar so this is a text from the 9th century but the thought is that the original pact of umar was written in the 630s when umar who was one of these caliphs conquered jerusalem and had to deal with all these christians and jews who were living there who were clearly monotheists which was the essence of islam but didn't want to follow islamic practice and so this is framed as a letter that the christians wrote to omar but this becomes an agreement that is imposed on these communities with certain rules and regulations and ultimately the communities become referred to as the dhimmi d-h-i-m-m-i which means a tolerated monotheistic community sometimes they were the majority by the way in the area but the muslims were the ones in charge so here are some of the rules involved we will not erect in our city or the suburbs any new monastery church cell or hermitage so you can't build a new church but you can keep the existing ones we will not repair any of such buildings that may fall into ruins or renew those that may be situated in the muslim quarters of town so if you had to leave the muslim route quarters they're gone and if they happen to fall into ruins too bad so you can't fix them you only can keep what's there we will not refuse the muslims entering to our churches by day or night so they have free access at any time they can open the gates wide to travelers and passengers especially muslim travelers who get food and lodging for three nights you get a feel for this that this is what it's like being the subordinate minority is you have to do these things for the group for the larger more powerful group we will not harbor any spy in our churches or houses or conceal any enemy of the muslims so that fear of the third column the enemy of christendom in christian europe uh later on the crusades i mean you feel that tension here too we will not teach our children the quran why wouldn't they want them to know the quran well if a rabbi is going to teach you the quran he's going to teach it to you wrong or he's going to teach it to you how not to believe it or what's wrong with it he's not going to teach it to you to believe it and so if you want people to learn the quran you only want muslim teachers to be the ones allowed to teach the quran just like we said multiple times it doesn't matter what the scripture says it matter what people tell you what people tell you it means that's what matters we will not make a show of the christian religion nor invite anyone to embrace it so you're not allowed to convert anyone into christianity or judaism for that matter and the next one we will not prevent any of our kinsmen from embracing islam if they so desire people who are christian or jews can convert out into islam so you can stay jewish you can stay christian but you're not allowed to convert someone into it and you're not allowed to prevent someone who wants to convert out into islam to do so if they're tired of paying the taxes if they're tired of the disabilities you can't stop them we honor the muslims and rise up in our assemblies when they wish to take their seats think about buses in the jim crow south right we will not imitate them in our dress either in the cap turbine sandals or parting of the hair we will not make use of their expressions of speech or adopt their surnames again don't blend in don't hide who you are maintain a distinct community so we know who everybody is do not ride on saddles or gird on swords or take to ourselves arms or wear them or engrave arabic inscriptions on our rings so you can't do anything that would give you a too high and mighty position and we will not sell wine which would of course undermine islamic practice we do not display the cross upon our churches or our crosses or sacred books in the streets of muslims or in their marketplaces now you might notice if you go to some of these communities in fact synagogues and churches for that matter look very nondescript from the outside and then when you walk inside it's beautifully ornate it's amazing but that's part of this ethos of you should be quiet you should be subordinate you should be not seen or heard as you see the next ones do not strike the clappers in our churches uh too loudly do not recite our services in a loud voice do not carry palm branches on palm sunday or images and processions in the street at the burial of our dead do not chant too loudly or carry lighted candles in the streets of muslim so be quiet be seen but not heard and don't even be seen that much when you're doing your religious stuff and again you cannot take slaves that have been in the possession of muslims and certainly we may not strike any muslims that is definitely being too uppity now within the bounds of this of course there is room for persecution and also for tolerance so for example you notice it says we will not repair any buildings that may fall into ruins well what if there was a like a pogrom kind of riot and they burned down the synagogue or they burned down the church well sorry can't repair them so you can see how this can be leveraged into persecution or you decide you're imitating us too much in your dress your camp or your turban you're using too many of our expressions of speech what are you doing on a saddle so different periods in different times these same basic provisions were applied more leniently and more strictly depending on the ebbs and flows of jewish status in the community sometimes jews would be thought to be getting too uppity and there'd be a sort of persecution wave against them other times they were able to be successful as i mentioned uh they could become court physicians maimonides for example the preeminent jew of the 1200s was the court physician for the khalif in cairo and was very successful in that position and very respected by the surrounding community so you could become very successful and most importantly jewish communities living under islam were stable for centuries you know we were talking before class started about the length of time and how americans think 300 years is a really old house when the reality is many centuries have gone by in other countries where people have lived in the same place for uh for generations and generations unusual to the american experience or for that matter to the american jewish experience jews living in north africa in egypt and syria in iraq and babylonia baghdad they had been there for centuries they were part of the landscape even the muslims knew they were part of the landscape they were not seen as a foreign element where sometimes in parts of christian europe the jews were seen as a foreign element that could be expelled in most of the muslim world they were simply seen as part of the landscape you had you had your farmers you had your shepherds you had your jews you had your wood workers your goldsmith i mean they were simply part of who was there they weren't seen as a foreign element at all now part of what also gave jewish culture their stability this time was not only the arab empires being in place and being somewhat centralized but the fact that the center of jewish authority was also the center of muslim authority after this huge empire is established and while at last because it ultimately breaks up into sub-empires again a saga beyond our scope a new capital is founded in between the tigris and euphrates river near the old site of babylon this new city called baghdad is founded early in the caliphates and this becomes the center of this muslim empire in particular the points east and up to about egypt ultimately the egypt part breaks away but the the caliphate based in baghdad is very very important and as i mentioned last time that's where the babylonian talmud is getting codified well if your center of religious authority is where the center of political authority is for the surrounding empire that means you have the ability to impose your authority more broadly and ultimately what evolves is a kind of three-headed ruling committee for the jewish community living in the east that is under islam there is a political head who's known as the resh galuta which means the head of the exile he's thought to have been descended from king david it's a kind of political head and then there are what are called the geo-nim a gaon in hebrew means a genius but it also became the head of rabbinical academies there were two major rabbinic academies surah and pumbadita which ultimately shifts into another town called nehadaya but these two major rabbinical academies are using the talmud to train new rabbis and then shipping those rabbis all over the arab empire with them as the high court and the heads of those academies are known as the geonin the geniuses who are the top religious thinkers of the day and so the two geonim plus the reiskaluta make this kind of ruling triumvirate and one of the most famous of these geoneem is a man named sadia gaon who actually writes a very interesting philosophical text he lives from around 880 to 940 so around the turn of the 10th century he writes interesting philosophical attacks he begins to codify a prayer book with prayers in a certain order remember the word for order in hebrew is seder like passover so a siddur is a prayer book with the prayers in a fixed order that begins under sadia gaon in this period he also begins to codify jewish thought and philosophy in part in response to arab philosophers who have translated greek philosophy from greek into arabic and so jews are beginning to read hellenistic philosophy in arabic translation and realize they have to respond to it in fact there's a famous character whose book we don't have but we wish we did he's known as kiwi alba and you'll notice that arrow south of the word persia here on the map that goes to what looks like baluchistan that's the homeland of baal that's balk or where al balti is from now balti evidently wrote a book with a hundred plus refutations of the truth of the bible again inflicted with this hellenistic skeptical philosophy we don't have kiwi's book but we have sadia's rebuttal the kiwi's book where he mentions a lot of the objections that he we made so i mean whether he is a construct that saudia made up to write these rebuttals of philosophical arguments or was a real person it's still fascinating to know that the preeminent government of the day felt the need to answer these kind of theological questions to a jewish audience and not just looking uh at the provocation of outside philosophy but ultimately this is the basis for the establishment of rabbinic duties and the fact that they are based in babylon they have this core corpus a curriculum to train rabbis how to think and how to do halacha and a structure now with the rabbis in the provinces sending their questions back to the uh the academy they studied at going all the way up the chain to the head of the academy as sort of the supreme court making decisions but this authority doesn't necessarily establish itself without any objections in fact a major objection takes place at the end of the 700s in the late 8th century where a man was passed over for the reishkeluta he thought he was deserving and someone else was passed over of course he becomes jealous his name is anand ben david he ultimately decides that not only is the system corrupt because he was passed over but the whole system is made up these rabbis are claiming an oral torah that was given to moses and they've made all these laws no says anan ben david they're wrong it should be only the tanakh only the hebrew bible that we read the written scriptures that's it and he ultimately founds an offshoot of rabbinic judaism that's known as the karaites there are still keraites around by the way but the karaites wanted to go back to the mikra to the scripture in fact you can even hear in the word quran in arabic the calling out the reading out of the words the kerahites are claiming to go back to the hebrew scriptures in some ways modeled on the muslim reliance on the um the scripture of the quran now the karaites for example would be more literalists i mentioned previously in exodus 35 where it says you will kindle no fire on shabbat they would have no fires lit on shabbat whereas the rabbinites or the rabbinic judaism under the oral torah could have lights lit that were lit ahead of time or they had one discussion of the talmud what if you take a bag of oil and poke a hole in it and you have a little bit of oil dropping onto a flame over the course of shabbat is that allowed and the answer is yes because you're not actively doing work to do it the keroites would have said no no no no no that's that's too creative that's too beyond the letter of the law uh now the kerahites ultimately create communities in many different uh parts of the jewish world there's even one group of cairoites that makes their way as far north as lithuania and are still there in the 1900s but they also create a provocation for rabbinic jews because the rabbis now have to justify their interpretations of the hebrew bible and so that's when you begin to see those citations of biblical quotes added to the talmudic text that we saw last time looking at the example of a talmud page and again another provocation to saudi again and other writers to write bible commentaries so that they can explain why the key rights are wrong where they claim that the rabbis just made up this rule here's where it actually comes from in the hebrew bible and trying to connect the oral torah with the written torah in one complete version of rabbinic ideology now you might ask from where do we know all this stuff how do we find out about what's happening in this time period and what jewish life is like and what the medieval traders would trade and how far did they travel and uh how did the keroites get along with the rabbits and so on well we have a few different sources we have rabbinic literature that's been passed down by the rabbis again copying text after text we have arab historians who have written about not only arab conquest but also the peoples they found along the way there are a few interesting travelogues where people have traveled around and talk about the interesting communities they visited including jewish travelers by the way like uh most famously benjamin of tudela who traveled around and talks about how many jews in each community he went to and then there was the accidental discovery the accidental discovery is called the cairo ganesa now here you have a picture of solomon schechter before he started a franchise of jewish day schools that's a joke when he was a scholar at the university of cambridge and one day he was sitting in his office and a couple of women who in fact were themselves expert at the day was called an orientalist and who were very fluent in arabic and hebrew and other languages brought to him a parchment an ancient script uh and text that they had purchased in the marketplace in cairo on their recent trip to egypt for his evaluation and he took a look at this document and when he read it he realized that what he was reading no one had read in hundreds even thousands of years because he was reading the text of a book called the wisdom of ben sira which appears in the apocrypha again the books that are included in the catholic bible but not in the hebrew bible jews didn't choose to save them at the beginning of the book of ben sira there's a little preface that says i'm the grandson of ben sira and i thought his book was so good that i translated it into greek so that everybody could learn from his wisdom for centuries people had figured that was just a sort of making it sound older kind of advertising and it didn't really happen but when schechter looked at this document he realized he was reading the hebrew original for ben sira and he asked these women where did you find this and he got on a boat right away to go to cairo and he went to fustat which is old cairo and found a synagogue there called the ben ezra synagogue and in the back room of the synagogue was a huge room filled from floor to ceiling with documents looking like this you can see these are all crates that have just been thrown together of all these documents you can see him trying to work at his table here trying to decipher what the documents look like now through this trove of documents he found an amazing amount of insight into what it was like living in this mediterranean medieval society because what happened in fostot was a unique circumstance first of all it's a dry climate so the documents would be preserved for longer that was also one reason why the dead sea scrolls lasted for as long as they did the second thing that happened was the jewish community had what's called a geniza now a geniza is where you store old books with god's name on them because you can't take them in vain and throw them away until you get enough of them and you take them to the cemetery in a ritual and you bury them there that's the proper disposal sort of like you know you think you wouldn't bury god's name but the proper disposal for burning for for dealing with an old american flag is actually to burn it that's what you're supposed to do to properly dispose of it so in this case again to properly dispose of old holy documents you're supposed to bury them in the cemetery take them out of the knees in a long procession well what happened in fostot was that at one point the jews were making this kind of funeral procession for the documents and they were accused of being too loud and noisy remember one of those provisions in the pack of omar don't be too loud when you're walking in the street doing your religious rituals well in fact they were there was a riot and what happened was after a certain point the jewish community didn't take their stuff out to the cemetery anymore they just kept piling it up in the ganesa they figured maybe things will change at some point we can deal with it but they just kept piling it up and adding space and piling it up and then this is the most interesting part they decided to start saving not just books and documents that had god's name in it but anything written in hebrew letters in the holy language so that means they started saving ketubahs they started saving letters they started saving inventory sheets they started saving legal documents and court testimony they started saving everything and they even saved some arabic documents because in the ancient world paper was so expensive you would write on the back of things so sometimes on one side you'd have a letter that your brother wrote you from wherever and then on the back of it you take inventory in arabic or you know or you're writing a bill of sale for someone else but you save the document because of the hebrew side or you'd erase the letters and then write new stuff on it but scholars today can go back and you know recover the old writing that was underneath in the first version so the cairo geniza was this treasure trove of a dump because they're dumping this documents on it and of course the piles fall over and you know one of the one of the challenges when you're excavating a site is to keep it in order right you want to excavate a layer at a time so that you can tell what's older and what's younger because you figure what's underneath is what's older but if you've got piles of documents that all fall over on each other how are you supposed to know what's older and what's younger and how do you date it now the end result of this trove has been fantastic it's been we found maimonides handwriting because we have examples of things that he wrote in those documents we have examples of ketubahs marriage agreements written between a karaite family and a rabbinite family where each partner has the right to practice their own style of judaism in one home because of the negotiations between the families there was a scholar named solomon goytein who wanted to study the ganesha he actually initially wanted to write a book about the trade with india because there are records of jewish traders going all the way to india and back and what do they sell and why do they do it and so on but he realized no one had written a survey book to explain the whole setting and so it took him 30 years to finally study the entire corpus of the geniza and create this portrait of what's called a mediterranean society is his multi-volume history and one of the tragedies is he had just sent off the proofs for his fifth volume to the printers with the final edits and he was about to turn to his notes for the india trade book that he wanted to write before and he had a heart attack and he died as he was at the end of his life um but what he left us is this wonderful portrait of what it was like living in this society based on all these documents and you get to hear so much you don't normally hear women's voices because women are writing these letters you know that's not included in the rabbinic corpus so ironically we know a tremendous deal about the society because of this accident of a trash dump that never got taken out and buried and that got broadened in its collection to everything with hebrew letters and so now we have this window into the society we wouldn't have had any other way and so we're very fortunate to live on this side of having discovered the ganesha

Channel: IISHJvid

Views: 971

Rating: 4.7837839 out of 5

Keywords: Secular Humanistic Judaism, Humanistic Judaism, Jewish History, Adam Chalom, Jews and Muslims

Id: jxruR2JITR4

Length: 41min 13sec (2473 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021