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THE GENIZAH and JEWISH COMMUNAL HISTORY Marina THE GENIZAH AND JEWISH COMMUNAL HISTORY Marina Rustow Of the total number of documentary sources from the Cairo Genizah, currently estimated at fifteen thousand items, roughly forty percent are now available in published or on-line form.1 Of those, the vast majority 1 I arrived at this total in consultation with Mark R. Cohen, Director of the Princeton Geniza Project. Princeton’s on-line database, which is equipped with a search engine for Hebrew and Arabic characters and includes document descriptions in English, houses more than four thousand documents, of which about half are published edi- tions and half are provisional editions typed by S. D. Goitein and found in his files. The database includes the texts in J. Mann, The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine under the Fâtimiḍ Caliphs: a Contribution to their Political and Communal History, Based Chiefly on Genizah Material Hitherto Unpublished (2 vols; New York, 1970); J. Mann, Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature (New York, 1972); S. Abramson, In the Centres and the Peripheries during the Geonic Period: the History of the Geonim and Exilarchs in Palestine and Babylonia and the Sages of Egypt and North Africa, based on Genizah Documents (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1965); E. Ashtor, History of the Jews in Egypt and Syria under the Rule of the Mamlûks: Genizah Documents (Hebrew; 3 vols; Jerusalem, 1944–1970); M. Gil, Documents of the Jewish Pious Foundations from the Cairo Geniza (Leiden, 1976); M. A. Friedman, Jewish Marriage in Palestine: a Cairo Genizah Study (2 vols; Tel-Aviv, 1980); S. D. Goitein, Palestinian Jewry in Early Islamic and Crusader Times in Light of Geniza Documents, edited by J. Hacker (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1980) insofar as not published elsewhere; M. Gil, Palestine During the First Muslim Period (634–1099) (Hebrew; 3 vols; Tel-Aviv, 1983); S. D. Goitein, The Yemenites: History, Communal Organization, Spiritual Life (Selected Studies), edited by M. Ben-Sasson (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1983); M. A. Friedman, Jewish Polygyny: New Sources from the Cairo Geniza (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1986); E. Bareket, The Jewish Leadership in Fustat in the First Half of the Eleventh Century (Hebrew; Tel Aviv, 1995); A. Ashur, Engagement and Betrothal Documents from the Cairo Geniza (unpubl. diss.; Tel Aviv University, 2007); the documents from Goitein’s provisional editions that were later edited in M. Ben-Sasson, The Jews of Sicily, 825–1068: Documents and Sources (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1991) and M. Gil, In the Kingdom of Ishmael (Hebrew; 4 vols; Tel-Aviv, 1997); documents from the first part of S. D. Goitein and M. A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (‘India Book’) (Leiden, 2008), as checked and corrected by M. A. Friedman and insofar as not otherwise included in the database; and virtually all the documents that Goitein pub- lished in articles, with his later corrections. It also includes unpublished texts edited by A. L. Udovitch, M. R. Cohen, and others. There are also numerous published texts not in the database, for instance those in G. Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge, 1993); J. Olszowy- Schlanger, Karaite Marriage Documents from the Cairo Geniza: Legal Tradition and Community Life in Mediaeval Egypt and Palestine (Leiden, 1998); and (except for a few previously published or transcribed by Goitein) M. Gil and E. Fleischer, Judah Halevi and His Circle: Fifty-Five Geniza Documents (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 2001). 290 marina rustow have become available in the past thirty years—not coincidentally the period that coincides with Stefan Reif’s tenure as Director of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Unit. But even these impressive statistics do not tell the entire story: knowledge progresses in an exponential rather than linear fashion, and deciphering new texts facilitates the understanding of previously obscure ones. This is particularly true for a dense cache such as the Genizah, in which the majority of the main protagonists during any given period of time knew one another or were connected by one or two degrees of separation. A single new fragment, or even the juxtaposition of two known ones, can yield an entire new world of knowledge that in turn changes the larger picture. Given that, the purpose of this article is to offer thestatus quaestionis on the problem of Jewish communal organisation in the late tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries in light of the Genizah’s documentary corpus and to offer some comments on the Jewish community’s shape, structure, and functioning. What follows is, then, both historiographic and historical. The historiographic section is intended to follow up on previous articles on the subject by Mark Cohen and Haggai Ben- Shammai.2 The historical section is intended to take stock of the aggregate picture of Jewish communal life, particularly in light of Moshe Gil’s collections of published Genizah documents on the Jews of Palestine and Iraq, and to argue that the models we have inherited from mid- twentieth-century historians require some alteration in light of this new material. Scholarship on the Genizah as a Mirror of Jewish Historiography Since Jacob Mann’s publications of the 1920s, Jewish communal organisation has dominated discussions of the documentary portion of the Cairo Genizah.3 Why is this so? On the one hand, the nature of the Genizah cache itself has both propelled and justified a focus 2 M. R. Cohen, ‘Jewish Communal Organization in Medieval Egypt: Research, Results and Prospects’, Judaeo-Arabic Studies 1 (1997), pp. 73–86 (which incorporates the documents from Gil’s 1983 corpus selectively but not those from his 1997 corpus); H. Ben-Shammai, ‘Medieval History and Religious Thought’, in S. C. Reif (ed.),The Cambridge Genizah Collections: Their Contents and Significance (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 136–150. 3 Mann, Jews in Egypt and in Palestine..
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