A guide for the perplexed: a novel
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Maimonides was a royal physician, first to the grand vizier of Cairo al-Qadi al-Fadil and subsequently to the sultan Saladin. While in Saladin’s service, he wrote a treatise on the treatment of asthma for an unnamed royal patient. (In this book I imagined the patient to be Saladin himself, though it is more likely to have been Saladin’s son or nephew.) In the medieval Islamic world of Spain and North Africa where Maimonides lived, there were no effective treatments for asthma beyond lifestyle modifications. However, ephedra sinica—also known as ma huang or Mormon tea, and currently banned in the United States, though its synthetic version, pseudoephedrine, is familiar in decongestants—has been used in China and India to treat asthma for at least five thousand years. The ancient Roman physician Pedanius Dioscorides detailed its use in his pharmacopeia De Materia Medica (On Medical Substances). This book was available in Arabic translation during Maimonides’ lifetime, though there is no reason to believe he was aware of it. Maimonides’ brother David was a merchant involved in trade with India. Jewish physicians in Egypt in Maimonides’ time often worked as pharmaceutical merchants as well as doctors, routinely commissioning the purchase of medications from other countries and selling them to patients. There is evidence from the Cairo Genizah that Maimonides was involved in this kind of work. Maimonides specifically mentioned that a great deal of his own money was also lost when his brother David drowned on his way to India. There is, however, no reason to believe that Maimonides sent his brother to India to acquire this medication or any other. In this aspect, my story is the opposite of an archive.
Much of what is known about Maimonides’ life is drawn from documents in the Cairo Genizah, which contained draft copies of his Guide as well as personal letters. The letter Schechter finds in this novel about Maimonides’ brother’s drowning was indeed found in the Genizah, though not until Schechter returned to Cambridge. The letter from Maimonides’ brother David detailing his journey to India was discovered in the Cambridge University Library among Genizah documents the library had previously purchased from Rabbi Shlomo Wertheimer of Jerusalem, a Genizah explorer who preceded Schechter. Material descriptions of medieval Fustat in this novel are gleaned from S. D. Goitein’s magisterial A Mediterranean Society, his five-volume work on the “rubbish” found in the Cairo Genizah—that is, the documents that were not literary or religious texts, but rather the detritus of daily living: letters between non-famous people, civil records, business receipts, legal documents, children’s schoolbooks, and the like. A discussion of Maimonides’ relationships with his father and brother, and much else on life in Maimonides’ time, can be found in Joel Kraemer’s masterful and beautifully written biography Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds. Many details in this novel are drawn from Kraemer’s book, including aspects of Maimonides’ personality and his rivalry with another physician in the royal court, his relationship with the grand vizier of Cairo, and the contents of his brother David’s letter from the port of ‘Aydhab.
Among the many classical and modern commentaries on the biblical Joseph story (and the seduction story within it involving Judah and Tamar) that I explored while writing this novel, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s interpretations in The Beginning of Desire and The Murmuring Deep were particularly inspiring to me. Each includes a Joseph-related chapter entitled “The Pit and the Rope.”
The modern Library of Alexandria does exist, under the name Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Its breathtaking state-of-the-art facilities can be admired online as well as in person. While I was inspired by the reality of this library (and by my brief glimpses of it as it was being completed), the characters and context connected with it in this novel are drawn only from my imagination.
MANY PEOPLE HELPED ME to make this book much better than it might have been. The curator Jacob Wisse unwittingly got me started on this novel when he commissioned an original fiction piece from me to accompany an exhibit of contemporary art on Genesis at Yeshiva University Museum. I am also grateful to the Arabic literature scholar Ariel Moriah Sheetrit, whose reflections on contemporary Egypt were helpful to me in imagining several scenes in this book. Her generous reading of the manuscript also prevented me from publishing several outrageous gaffes. I am grateful as well to the software architect Rachel Elkin Lebwohl, who also graciously read the manuscript and steered me away from mistakes in another category entirely. All remaining errors are mine alone.
Alane Salierno Mason is as thoughtful and thorough an editor as any writer could hope for, and Gary Morris is as insightful and persistent an agent as any writer could dream of. I am indebted to both of them for their years of dedication to my work.
I am grateful to my siblings, Jordana Horn (an accomplished journalist, marvelous writer, and blogger extraordinaire), Ariel Horn (author of the hilarious novel Help Wanted, Desperately, among other distinctions), and Zach Horn (an Emmy Award–winning animator), for decades of collective creativity—and especially to Ariel and her husband, Donny, in whose home I began writing this book. I am even more grateful to my parents, Susan and Matthew Horn, for taking me to Egypt years ago, and far more importantly for their active involvement as my family has expanded during the writing of this novel. This book and everything I write can be traced back to them, as well as to our family’s teacher of Torah, Dr. Nathan Winter z”l, who first introduced me as a teenager to Guide for the Perplexed.
As always, I am most grateful to my most endlessly patient reader, my husband, Brendan Schulman, who first suggested that I reimagine the biblical Joseph story in a contemporary novel, and whose professional expertise in unearthing electronic legal evidence first inspired my thoughts on what a modern genizah might be. He is my first reader, and the recorder of our life.
And finally, I would like to acknowledge the four people who tried their hardest to prevent me from writing this book: our children, Maya, Ari, Eli, and Ronen. We have photographs and records of every occasion in their lives, but I hope they will grow to remember the many blessings in between. This book is for them.
Copyright © 2013 by Dara Horn
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Horn, Dara, 1977–
A guide for the perplexed : a novel / Dara Horn. — First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-393-06489-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-393-24140-2 (e-book)
1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Kidnapping—Egypt—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.076G85 2013
813'.6—dc23
2013009456
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