INTER-CULTURAL SHARED LITERATE NETWORKS
IN THE MEDIEVAL MEDITERRANEAN
A study of the Caïro Geniza
Introduction‘Networks are present everywhere.
All we need is an eye for them.’[1] The French historian Fernand Braudel has repeatedly claimed that the Mediterranean is a constant ‘exchange’, a web of lines crisscrossing the Mediterranean Sea circulating goods, ideas, peoples and languages, connected on all sides of the sea. This exchange and the transmission of knowledge implies the existence of networks. The inter-cultural exchange is most evident in areas where there is long-term contact or maybe even some form of shared heritage between different cultures. The medieval Mediterranean world provided an ideal setting for such exchange. A shared past and culture helped establish network patterns of ongoing contact around the Mediterranean sea. With the emergence of Social Network Analysis scholars started to structurally examine encounters between different cultures. They studied the philosophical aspects of these encounters as well as the concrete documents reflecting those experiences. By describing the patterns we can learn how network structures constrain social behavior and social change. The Mediterranean world during the Middle Ages provides us with excellent insight into the interactions between peoples, religions and languages. Besides the economic and political relations, it is possible to recognize countless cultural, mercantile, linguistic and even literary and artistic contacts.
In the past century, our knowledge of these networks and the mutual influence of cultures in the Mediterranean world has grown. There is one discovery in particular that contributes to our understanding of the wider social history of the Mediterranean world : the findings of the Cairo Geniza, the world's largest and most important single collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts fragments. We owe much of our knowledge of these writings to S. D. Goitein, who devoted much of his time to deciphering and explaining the contents of these fragments. In his work A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza he writes about all aspects of Jewish economic, social, cultural and religious life. Just as Fernand Braudel he saw the Geniza documents as a way to study not only medieval Jewish life but also wider cultural history throughout the medieval Mediterranean sphere. In order to fully understand these texts, one has to understand the language of their writers. These texts were not written according to the rules of classical grammar and must be interpreted in their own historical context. In her article ‘Friendship and Hierarchy: Rhetorical Stances in Geniza Mercantile letters’ Jessica Goldberg shows that language and grammar were not adopted as a whole, but rather selectively borrowed and re-shaped to serve a new purpose. Certain kinds of rhetoric or formulaic language were brought into the protocols of different types of letters and adopted by the everyday writing in the Geniza, each protocol serving a different rhetorical strategy. This process of ‘borrowing’ becomes even more clear when the materials from the Geniza are put into the larger context of Arabic documents. Social Network Analysis can also be applied to study the use of language in a community, examining the patterns and structures of different languages and looking at the similarities between them. Through Social Network Analysis we can distinguish a network of lines crisscrossing the Mediterranean based on the fragments of the Caïro Geniza. Using a linguistic approach I will prove that these fragments can function not only as sources of data but also as literary artifacts, focusing on the process of borrowing or filtering down of formulaic language and vocabulary and the influence that adapting these models and protocols had on a world of mixed cultures. An in-depth analysis of the parallelism between the Jewish documents and writings of the Arabic world can show us if and how the two were related and to what extend they shared a literate culture. The Caïro GenizaIn a famous expedition from 1896–97, Cambridge scholar Dr. Solomon Schechter traveled to Caïro together with his patron Dr. Charles Taylor (Master of St. John's College in Cambridge) to bring back one of the world's largest collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts fragments. These fragmentary texts were recovered from the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo, Egypt. For over a thousand years the Jewish community had placed worn-out books and other (sacred) writings in the genizah (a storeroom) of the Synagogue. The collection includes a literature of the sacred, the heretical and the mundane that reaches as far back as Biblical times and extends forward into the 19th century. The fragments of the collection are written in several languages, the most prominent being Judaeo-Arabic, a version of Arabic written in Hebrew characters. This was commonly used by Jewish communities in the medieval Islamic Mediterranean. Examples of practically every kind of written text produced by the Jewish communities of the Near East can be found in the Geniza Collection including not only the expected religious works, such as Bibles and prayer books, but also nonspiritual works and everyday documents such as personal letters, business accounts, marriage contracts, pages from Arabic fables, medical books and even shopping lists. A close study of these fragments can shed light on the mundane as well as the religious and cultural activities of that world.
The commercial letterFor my in-depth analysis I have examined a small corpus of mercantile letters. For the selection of my corpus I was dependent on those fragments that have already been translated by others. I relate most on the translation by Goitein (Letters of medieval jewish traders, 1973) supported by the later interpretations of Goldberg (Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean, 2012) and Mark Cohen (The voice of the poor in the Middle Ages, 2005). However, in their research they have approached these letters from a social-economic perspective, underpinning their theories of Mediterranean unity with theories of economy. Looking at the social uses of commercial correspondence, examining the economical relevance and focusing on the content of the correspondence. I have focused on the linguistic aspects of the commercial correspondence in the medieval Mediterranean. This linguistic approach can provide us with new insight into the medieval Jewish community and its connections throughout the Mediterranean.
The analysis is based on a collection of commercial letters selected on grounds of rhetorical and diplomatic norms of composition, looking for patterns across either the entire body of text, or within particular subsets of it. By examining these letters we can prove that commercial correspondence was a distinct genre of writing with its own rules of composition and rhetoric distinguishing it from other kinds of correspondence found in the Cairo Geniza. Geniza business letters developed their own protocol and norms of composition. It is within this protocol of the commercial letter that I have measured the filtering down of language and the interaction between Arabic and Hebrew creating an inter-cultural network throughout the medieval Mediterranean world. The interaction of languagesJewish writers often incorporated their Arabic texts with Hebrew words and phrases. This influence is mutual, one can find both Hebrew translations of Arabic phrase and Judeo-Arabic expressions that seem to be influenced by Hebrew. Indeed, my analysis of the parallelism between the Jewish documents and writings of the Arabic world has shown us that there are some fascinating parallels and contrasts between the two. A look at the introduction of mercantile letters shows a close adherence to the form of Islamic writings. There are similarities in the way Jewish merchants address their recipients, never addressing one directly by name but using honorifics deriving from Islamic culture. The opening formulas used in the letters also show parallelisms with Arabic idiom. However, the purpose of these greetings were different. In their greetings Geniza merchants paid little attention to the status of their recipient, as was customary in Arabic literate culture. The influence of the Arabic community on Hebrew writings can also be seen in the salutations of these letters. Geniza merchants used standard forms to address their partners and business relations, deriving from a social construction of formal friendship of the Islamic culture. It is clear that there has been language transfer between Hebrew and Arabic in the medieval Mediterranean world. This interaction of language indeed shows us that there were (business) connections between Jewish and Islamic merchants living together in the Mediterranean world indicating a shared a literate culture.
The value of a linguistic approachCompared to the earlier research done on the interconnectedness of the Mediterranean world by historians such as Braudel, Goitein, Goldberg and Cohen, this linguistic approach to the Geniza fragments provides us with a new perspective to look at the cross-cultural exchange in the medieval Mediterranean world, broadening our horizon and recreating the ties though which ideas, resources, services and even the languages themselves were transmitted from one community to the other. It is only over a longer period of time that this language transfer can take place, insisting on the longue durée of Mediterranean patterns. By focussing on this longue durée the linguistic approach has helped us to examine the culture shifts that caused the adapting of these models and protocols and the influence they had in a world of mixed cultures looking at the long term cultural differences in the medieval Mediterranean.
Of course, this is just one way to approach the development of networks in the Mediterranean world. My research is just a small contribution to what is possible in the field of literary history of the interplay of Hebrew and Arabic in the medieval Mediterranean. I think it must be seen as complementary to the other approaches dealing with the Jewish communities of the Arabic world as portrayed in the documents of the Cairo Geniza. It is the joint effort of both content and form that can reveal the bigger picture of social networks in the medieval Mediterranean. |
A letter from ‘Ayyash b. Sadaqa, in Fustat, to Nahray b. Nissım, in the village of Busır.(Cambridge University Library, TS 13 J 13.11).
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Constable, O. R. Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (London: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Decter J. P. e.d. Studies in Arabic and Hebrew Letters in Honor of Raymon P. Scheindlin (New Yersey, Gorgias Press, 2007).
Goitein, S. D. Letters of Medieval Jewish traders (New Yersey, Princeton Univercity Press, 1973).
Goitein, S. D. The Mediterranean Society: The Jewisch Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza Volume I: economic foundations (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1999).
Goitein, S. D. The Mediterranean Society: The Jewisch Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza Volume III: the family (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1978).
Goldberg, J. ‘Choosing and Enforcing Business Relationships in the Eleventh-Century Mediterranean: Reassessing the ‘Maghribi Traders’’, Past and Present 216 (2012) 3-40.
Goldberg, J. ‘Friendship and Hierarchy: Rhetorical Stances in Geniza Mercantile letters’, in A.E. Franklin, R. Margariti, M. Rustow & U. Simonsohn, Jews, Charistians, and Muslims in medieval and early modern times: a festschrift in honor of Mark R. Cohen (Leiden 2014) 273-286.
Goldberg, J. ‘The use and abuse of commercial letters from the Cairo geniza’ in: Journal of Medieval History (2012), 127 – 154.
Goldberg, J. Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and their Business World (London, Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Lopez, R. S. (ed.). Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World: Illustrative Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
Malkin I. e.d. Greek and Roman networks in the Mediterranean (Routledge, New York 2009).
Wellman, B. ‘Network Analysis: Some Basic Principles’ in Sociological Theory, Vol 1 (1983), 155-200.
Illustrations (from top to bottom)
Image 1: Cambridge University Library (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/audioandvideo.html - 04-06-2015)
Image 2: Image from the English Wikipedia page (https://www.flickr.com/photos/9679871@N04/1020948362 - 04-06-2015)
Image 3: Image from the English Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Geniza - 04-06-2015)
Image 1: Cambridge University Library (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/audioandvideo.html - 04-06-2015)
Image 2: Image from the English Wikipedia page (https://www.flickr.com/photos/9679871@N04/1020948362 - 04-06-2015)
Image 3: Image from the English Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Geniza - 04-06-2015)
E.R.