by Simon Schama
And if many were in the business, still more were avid consumers of spectacular cloth and clothes, for the Jews of Fustat were not a people who went around with their heads bowed, austerely dressed. In fact they condescended to Jerusalemite Jews who were the only ones in the Muslim world confining themselves to black with the odd note of red trim. In Fustat and the innumerable places to which they sent cloth, tastes were much more glamorous, both for women and men. Silks and linens (like the sha’zab interwoven with gold) that seemed to breathe and ripple were in high demand, the Jews moving among the streets and courtyards and dar, or ‘houses,’ of the bazaars in materials that shimmered and glinted. The subtler of them might adorn themselves in ‘gazelle blood’ crimson, musk or deep violet. On wedding days the well-dressed groom would be clad in pistachio green, for that was said to be the colour worn by the righteous in Paradise. The trousseau of one mid-twelfth-century Jewish bride comprised six white robes, three cloud blue, three blue and gold, one pomegranate red, three pearl-coloured, two ash grey, two deep green and two saffron – and this was for a bride of average means. She would also have had an entire array of veils, for Jewish women, as well as their Muslim counterparts, were veiled on the street. On average 40 per cent of the wealth a bride brought to the match was invested in the finery of her clothes, so the quality and colour of the garments would always be precisely specified in marriage contracts. During the early Fatimid period in the tenth century it seems clear that these requirements of mustard-coloured dress were seldom enforced, and in any case there were beautifully mixed dyes made to get around the restriction, not just ‘flame’ but brilliant colours named after the spices of turmeric and saffron.
And entirely different headdresses appear as the stock-in-trade of the Cairo Geniza documents – in fact precisely the high-status turbans that Muslims wore and which were officially denied to Jews. The documents also include orders for fine cloth for the wa-mi’jarha, a woman’s turban which wound many times till it piled up about the crown of the head, then came down around the face under the chin, from where it fell over the neck and shoulders: white if the effect was to be gracefully demure, green linen or silk threaded with gold if they had something else in mind. Male turbans worn by Jews could be just as spectacular. A baqyar, the last word, was ordered for the great scholar-merchant-poet-community leader Nahray ben Nissim, that when unwound would stretch – so it was said – a full twenty-five cubits, or rather more than a hundred metres. For the grand only the best would do, especially when it was a hulla, a complete costume for the festivals. A twelfth-century India trader made sure to order a high-status dabiqi for his son (probably in celebration of a birthday) with his name embroidered on it.14 An early-eleventh-century trader was happy to have a fine feathered garment for the community elder, Abu Zikhri, but complained about the tone of the yellow robe he had received from his shippers, and wanted, in addition, another of deepest red. A heavy damask robe, though of ‘extreme beauty’ in blue and white, was not what had been ordered which was ‘blue onion colour’ – meaning, the translator S. D. Goitein surmises, the palest shade of an opened onion, probably the colour produced by the skin of red or purple onions.15
Where could the fancy-dressers of medieval Fustat and their counterparts in Quayrawan, Sfax, Damascus and Baghdad show off their gorgeous get-ups? At private drinking parties and poetry-heavy banquets, greeting or saying farewell to eminent guests, business partners or far-flung relatives (and all three may often have combined in the same person), but not in public processions for weddings or funerals or feast days, for Jewish attendance of those stayed strictly illegal (as it was for the Christian dhimmis). However relaxed the regimes (and not all were), the Jews in this world were never the legal or social equals of Muslims and there were plenty of occasions to remind them of their inferiority.
The most aggressively punitive was the annual payment of the jaliya poll tax taken from all classes as the condition of the continued toleration of their religious observance. The jaliya was a ritual and symbolic expression of subjection and helplessness, and some medieval Islamic jurists prescribed in intimidating detail the procedures of humiliation. Collectors were supposed to keep their payers waiting, then shout at them, seize them by the scruff of the neck and even slap their faces. On no account was the payer’s hand to be raised above the hand of the receiver, a requirement demanding a physically contorted form of dextrous subservience. Payment was of course also a punishing hardship for the countless numbers of the less well-off. In the earlier centuries following the Arab conquests, there had been provision to exempt the truly indigent but even this seems to have been made less indulgent by the time we have records in the Cairo Geniza – from the early eleventh century on. For those hard pressed, the tax was the terror of their lives. Without the bara’a – the receipt certifying payment – they could be threatened, physically assaulted and imprisoned for months on end, where they languished for lack of even minimal food, and were mercilessly beaten on whim, so that, for a tax defaulter, jail was as good as a death sentence. Often, the only recourse was flight, separation from family, but since dhimmis were strictly forbidden to travel without carrying their tax certificates, the jeopardy for the tax runaways was now doubled. But invariably, personal disappearance simply transferred the burden and the fear to the remaining family members (who could be extended kin), who were held liable for the fugitive’s arrears. Sometimes those arrears could be deemed collectable from kin even after the death of the defaulter. A plea for help written in the twelfth century by an elderly silversmith from Ceuta in Morocco, fallen on hard times, sounded all these notes of desperation. He was, he wrote, ‘marked by illness, infirmity, want and excessive fear since I am sought by the controller of revenue who is hard on me, seeks out runners to track me down and, I am afraid, will find my hiding place. If I fall into their hands I shall die under their beating or will have to go to prison and die there. Now I take up my refuge with God.’16
But the picture the Cairo Geniza draws is not of a community that, tax troubles aside, lived in fear and trembling. Every so often an unstable ruler might come along – as in the case of the unhinged Fatimid caliph Hakim bin Amr Allah in the early eleventh century – who might suddenly and without much warning revert to intimidation or persecution of the dhimmi communities. After 1012 and a period of conventional toleration, Hakim ordered that Jews wear the loose black girdle (rather than the more dignified and secure belt) about their robe and be restricted to black turbans. On the street they would have to don a ‘calf necklace’, and in the bathhouse, a bell to indicate their identity. (Christians were stuck with an iron cross.) More seriously, Hakim ordered the destruction of churches and synagogues.
Mercurial tyrants like Hakim were, however, the exception. The Jewish world documented in the Cairo Geniza is rich in dinars, ideas, poetry and religious (and not so religious) philosophy; family loves and family plots; dice games on Sabbath afternoons (provided the stakes were nothing more serious than seeds); pigeon-racing from the roofs of synagogues (something of an obsession of the Jews of Fustat and Alexandria); weekly visits to the bathhouse where women friends gossiped and bonded; drinking parties in courtyard gardens and orchards in which (despite the stern prohibitions of the Quran, widely ignored) Muslim partners and acquaintances would mingle with Jews and listen to their Arabic poetry; receptions and feasts to greet incoming eminences and more again to wish them farewell and a safe voyage. The Geniza world sounds with the muttering and groans of innumerable litigations and appeals; negotiations for marriage and supplications for divorce; disputes over wills; questions put to the religious courts; complaints of the body put to the physician; of improper commercial dealing put to the courts; petitions to the well-placed; appeals for charity, mercy, consideration, favour, promotion, retribution, recognition, satisfaction and vindication, even in the hereafter. The letters form chains of connections between family, friends, relatives, even commercial competitors and adversaries, from India to the Horn of Afr
ica to the Maghrebi west and Spain, to Sicily and Italy. What they connect are the fates and fortunes of all those peoples: fears of attack apprehended and realised; sorry tales of shipwreck and drownings; of caravans lost to marauders (or just lost); of whole communities in distress and sudden destitution; captives of the Crusaders who need to be ransomed; other Jewish societies that have come into munificence; even of entire far-off kingdoms like those of the Khazars or Kuzari, who have come to Judaism. In other words, what we have here is a civilisation.
And for the first time, too, a Jewish world of paper. Not for everything: the great alterations of life – marriage contracts, divorces, manu-missions liberating slaves – were deemed too solemn for paper and continued to be written on that kosher parchment. But that still leaves around three hundred thousand separate paper documents in the Geniza: the greatest empire of paper to have survived from the medieval world. Sometime in the late ninth century, the time of the Talmud’s completion, a letter arrived in Fustat from one of the Babylonian yeshivas, written in Hebrew, on a thick leaf of paper. It is the earliest surviving paper document from the mills of Baghdad that had been established barely a generation earlier. The arrival of paper in the Islamic world has long been associated with a fable relayed by the Islamic historian Thaalibi in his Book of Curious and Entertaining Information.17 In this long-cherished tradition, the jealously guarded art of Chinese papermaking was said to have been disclosed by captives from the Tang emperor’s army defeated by troops of the Abbasid caliph at the battle of Talas in Kazakhstan in 751 CE. But Thaalibi was writing three centuries after the purported technology transfer and there is, in any case, plenty of evidence that paper made from rag-linen or beaten flax was known in Central Asia long before this date.
But not by Arabs, or Muslims of any kind including the Iranians who were closest to the Asian world of paper, nor to the Indian cultures which continued to use palm leaves. Once the new medium had caught on, however, there was no stopping it. To begin with it seems likely that Egyptian Jews imported sheets from the Iraqi makers, and from Syria as well where paper of high quality was made. By the tenth century, the high price of imports led to the obvious conclusion that there was no reason why the technology of the Mesopotamian rivers could not be reproduced along the Nile, and Fustat was perfectly situated for the industry. By the early eleventh century, paper and ink (in two kinds – brownish from gall and black from carbon, sometimes the one superimposed on the other) had become an integral part of the Jewish working world. The Cairo Geniza is full of it: judgements of the religious courts written on sheets two feet long and seven inches wide, nubbly and heavy with gravitas; little promissory notes and early forms of cheques in which the signer vouches that he is good for sums to be made available in far-off places like Aden and India so that a supplier of nutmeg or camphor or copper would release his stock to the merchant’s agent. To reinforce his credit-worthiness, little scraps, sometimes as small as three or four inches square, have certifying assurances written in three languages – Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew – with the word ‘emet’, the truth, crossing the fold or the join of bigger sheets. There was even ‘bird’s paper’ beaten to such thinness and lightness that it could be attached to the pigeons who staffed the postal services – without slowing down their deliveries.
And how word-hungry these paper-scribbling Jews were! Unlike judicial and administrative edicts issued in Baghdad, where perfect Arabic calligraphy was heightened by the lavish use of space, the Jews ran their words over every millimetre, filling margins, turning the sheets this way and that and starting again, leaving just enough space on an exterior fold to indicate a recipient and address, for there were no envelopes. The hands writing Arabic in square-form Hebrew characters are urgent, greedy, possessive, abhorring emptiness, the page, as Goitein perceptively noticed, resembling nothing so much as a densely woven carpet. Or perhaps there was another model to which they approximated and that was Talmudic commentary with its multiple voices, arguments and counter-statements crowding the page in all sizes, columns and styles. Here too in the paper world, quite different pieces of life would meet on the sheet: recipes for medicines, shopping lists, learned utterances, trousseaus, business accounts – the one kind of act jostling with the other as they do indeed in life.
So when Solomon Schechter, the Romanian-born, Vienna-educated Cambridge lecturer in Talmudic studies, climbed a ladder propped against the end wall of the ladies’ gallery of the handsome (though perpetually restored) Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat in Old Cairo in December 1896, peered through the arch-shaped hole and beheld what he described as ‘a battlefield of books . . . disjecta membra’, he was looking at nine centuries’ worth of paper as well as parchments of that community. It was, he (and the great scholar of the Geniza, S. D. Goitein) would emphasise, the opposite of an archive; rather a pell-mell depository of anything written in Hebrew characters. The immense chaos included damaged or discarded sacred books – festival and daily prayer books, the siddurim; editions of the pentateuch; Talmudic writings – which came under the prohibition on destruction. Writing and reading had, as we have seen, been the condition and means by which a Jewish identity had come into being in the first place, its books fashioned through memory and portable, even mini-aturised forms, to survive the destruction of other institutions. It was natural, then, for books which through time had ‘died’ to be treated with the reverence accorded to the Jewish people themselves. The living personality of the books, their vital essence, their nefesh, may have fled, but the remaining residual husk of their bodies needed to be stored or interred some place where they might naturally atrophy into dust. To burn or rend them was as brutally abhorrent as if the bodies of persons were likewise maltreated.
Schechter had come to Cairo after an electrifying discovery earlier that year. One of the parchments brought back to Cambridge from Egypt by two middle-aged Scottish Presbyterian sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, he recognised as a manuscript of the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, the apocryphal book known in Jewish tradition as Ecclesiasticus. Though both the sisters and Schechter are often classified as the ‘discoverers’ of the Cairo Geniza, the storehouse had been known for a long time, at least since Heinrich Heine’s picaresque great-uncle Simon von Geldern, the captain of a band of Judeo-Arab brigands, had run across it at the end of the eighteenth century. Thereafter many had noted its presence without being much bothered to explore its contents. After all, it was a paper and parchment dump rather than an archive, and the nineteenth century was the heyday of archival organisation right across Europe. Plus the Geniza papers in all their weltering abundance were neither aesthetically beautiful nor immemorially potent. There had been exceptions to this indifference by figures with a special interest, such as Firkovitch the Karaite, but it was Schechter who, following the trip to Fustat, made it his life’s passion to keep in one place as much of the Geniza as humanly and financially possible – fearing (correctly) in the age of cultural robber barons that it might be dispersed to places as far apart as St Petersburg and New York – and that that place should be the University of Cambridge, where he taught. Schechter had a patron and mentor in the great orientalist and Bible scholar of Christ’s College, William Robertson Smith (whose portrait hung in the Old Combination Room where I used to have lunch in the 1960s and 70s). There followed of course the usual tug-of-war with the deadly tooth-and-claw rival – the Bodleian in Oxford, whose collection of illuminated medieval Hebraica was rivalled only by the Vatican Library. But Schechter – a forceful cigar-chewing personality – was not, in the end, to be denied.
In the original University Library, housed in what is now called ‘The Old Schools’ where the university administration lodges, Schechter got down to work reading, translating, sorting, identifying, trying to find a path through 100,000 leaves of writing. Sometimes there was more than one document to decipher on a single page of parchment, for when every conceivable space and corner had been filled, the original surface was shaved down and a se
cond page of writing superimposed on the first, making a palimpsest. So there was much to clear away in his head if, following the great Ecclesiasticus discovery, Schechter could track down more monuments of Jewish learning and sacred knowledge: commentaries on commentaries; philosophical-religious enquiries; responses to urgent questions put to the Fustat courts and yeshivas. Incomparable illuminations were indeed lying in wait to gratify his painstaking research, including an autograph by the eminent medieval philosopher, physician and rabbi Moses Maimonides, over forty piyyutim liturgical poems from the sixth century by the master Yannai, and others by his hated pupil Qillir. And much more.
All this was and is precious, as was the immense mass of documents that Schechter would have passed over as so much junk but which for social and cultural historians (of whom Goitein has been the non -pareil) are in fact the purest gold. For it turned out that it was not only religious and high-minded books and manuscripts that were sent to the Cairo Geniza, but virtually everything coming through the community that had been written in Hebrew characters, even when the actual language was Arabic or Aramaic. They too had the dispensation of Geniza retirement and, as it turned out, imperishability (even when stained and damaged). Much of this history (though not all) was written on paper, and it is staggering in its social comprehensiveness. Scattered amid the collection are shopping lists and recipes both for feasts and medicines; formal and informal poems; primitive forms of bills of credit and exchange; household and business accounts; responsa from the religious courts or community leaders like Moses Maimonides to questions sent by the perplexed, distressed or merely curious from all over the Jewish world of the Islamic lands; alphabet exercise books of children, complete with doodles when the boy or girl tired of endlessly repeating their letters and preferred instead to turn them into cats or camels. There are personal letters from survivors of shipwrecks; begging letters from the suddenly or not so suddenly impoverished; those irritated complaints of textile orders that were incorrectly fulfilled; troubles with advance payments in distant lands needed to secure goods to be imported back to Egypt and on to customers elsewhere; prenuptial betrothal contracts; arbitrations of abstruse matters of observance where the Talmud had confused the reader or (not infrequently) contradicted itself. In other words, a world, a universe, a cosmos of being Jewish was all there in the Cairo Geniza. It is not just the richest and most remarkable of Jewish source collections; it may well be (for so much remains still to be translated and elucidated) the greatest of all medieval archives.