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Arabic-Speaking Jews in Crusader Syria

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Arabic-Speaking Jews in Crusader Syria ARABIC-SPEAKING JEWS IN CRUSADER SYRIA: CONQUEST, CONTINUITY AND ADAPTATION IN THE MEDIEVAL MEDITERRANEAN by Brendan G. Goldman A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland July 2018 © Brendan G. Goldman 2018 All rights reserved Abstract This project asks: What can the documents of Jewish Syrians teach us about the ways medieval Near Easterners experienced the conquest and regime change of the First Crusade? It analyzes the conquest’s impact on five spheres of Jewish communal life: demographics, minority-state relations, commerce, the law and religious authority. Most of the existing literature on the First Crusade has assumed that the Franks eliminated Greater Syria’s Jewish and Muslim communities. The Cairo Genizah documents, however, demonstrate that large numbers of Jews remained in the Latin ports after the First Crusade. Moreover, these Jewish Syrians were neither segregated from European Christians nor limited to specific professions (with some very rare exceptions). They traded with Frankish merchants and served as tax- collectors and physicians for Latin lords. The Jews of Latin Syria are a particularly helpful case-study because they adhered to a different religion from either the conquering Christians or the vanquished Muslims. But far from embracing Latin-Christian culture, Jews continued to speak and write Arabic and issue Arabic legal documents throughout the nearly two-centuries of Frankish rule of the Levant (1098-1291). This seems paradoxical: Why would a community integrated into the economic and social life of its kingdom decline to adopt the language of its rulers? The answer I have found is practical necessity: After the First Crusade, the Jews of the Latin-ruled Levant continued to seek out commercial partnerships with Arabophone merchants from Cairo, Damascus and Palermo; they continued to solicit religious guidance from clergymen in Baghdad, Mosul and Fustat; and they continued to patronize religious institutions in Iraq, Islamic Syria and Egypt. In other words, they remained part of a broader, Eastern Mediterranean koinē. ii Primary Reader: Professor Marina Rustow Secondary Readers: Professor Gabrielle Spiegel, Professor Tamer el-Leithy, Professor Paul Cobb and Professor Lawrence Principe iii Acknowledgements First, I thank The Johns Hopkins University Department of History for supporting my research and providing me with an academic home over the past seven years. I am also grateful to the department for funding my studies during the 2017/2018 academic year through the Kagan Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Furthermore, I thank the Association for Jewish Studies for their financial backing during the academic year 2016/2017. I am also grateful to Hopkins’ Programs in Islamic Studies and Jewish Studies, which have provided generous grants to support my language study. Since I was a junior in college, I have had the privilege of studying with some of the best up- and-coming—now arrived—scholars in the field of Genizah studies. My most substantive training in reading and analyzing Genizah documents, however, took place under the wing of my primary advisor—and mindfulness guru—Professor Marina Rustow. Marina’s incisive questions, rigorous expectations and painstaking attention to detail have challenged me to become a better writer, problem solver, thinker and teacher. She also has the uncanny ability to explain to me what I am writing before I know myself. Whatever merits this work has, they are a tribute to her mentorship. Professor Gabrielle Spiegel is a brilliant scholar and an even more brilliant human being. Professor Spiegel has been there for me throughout my graduate training. She has always been ready to give of her time to read my work, write recommendations, and/or provide professional counsel. She taught me how to read chronicles and literary sources and how to interrogate historical truths (except when lecturing to undergrads). Gaby would want you to know that I remain bearded despite her iv opposition, which she has expressed every time we see each other, usually at multiple points during each conversation. Professor Tamer el-Leithy has been my mentor for over a decade—first, as an undergraduate at NYU and, then, as a PhD student at Johns Hopkins. I would never have entered the field of academic history without his guidance, not least because he single-handedly dragged me through my undergrad honors thesis. He remains as valued a teacher today as he was then. Professor Paul Cobb is an outstanding teacher and a mensch. A few years ago, he not only agreed to let me join his Islamic sources course at The University of Pennsylvania, but also consented to oversee my field on medieval Islamic social history, taking dozens of hours of his own time to sit down and talk history with me. Those hours have proven invaluable in the writing of this dissertation. Professor Kenneth Moss has been a mentor and advocate for me since I entered Johns Hopkins. Despite making clear on multiple occasion that he never had and never would have any interests in the Crusades, he came to my seminars and offered ways to put my work into dialogue with broader trends in Jewish history. I am grateful for his time and support. In addition to my primary mentors, I would also like to thank Professors Lawrence Principe, Dovid Katz and Pawel Maciejko for their part in my graduate training. I thank Larry for teaching me everything I know about premodern science and philosophy. I am grateful to Rabbi Katz for teaching me how to read sheʾelot and teshuvot and how to rummage somewhat efficiently through the Talmud. I thank Pawel for introducing me to the world of early modern Jewry and for being an advocate and guide for me in the world of Israeli academia. v In addition to my mentors at Hopkins (and Penn), I am also grateful to the following scholars: To Professor Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman, an exceptional scholar who brought me into the world of the Genizah by convincing me to quit my undergraduate Mandarin class and study Judeo- Arabic with him. Phil has been a treasured friend and mentor ever since. To Professor Michael Pregill, a fantastic scholar and teacher who let a bright-eyed, over confident freshman into his senior seminar on Jews and Arabs at NYU. Professor Pregill led me to discover my love of the premodern Middle East—a gift for which I remain ever grateful. To Professor Jessica Goldberg, who took me on as a research assistant at Penn and thus exposed me to the Genizah merchants’ letters. Jessica’s work has also had a profound impact on how I think about geography, communication and medieval commerce, as reflected in the footnotes below. To Professor Benjamin Kedar, who was kind enough not only to send me a number of sources of which I was not aware, but also to provide his thoughtful interpretations of them. His substantial contributions to the history of minorities in the Crusader states have also informed much of my analysis below. I have learned almost as much from my colleagues at Johns Hopkins as I have from my mentors. First and foremost, I want to thank my partner in crime, Jennifer Grayson, with whom I spent long nights drinking mediocre wine, debating obscure Talmud passages and struggling over the existence (or lack thereof) of various types of Genizah formulary. I have presented a version of almost every chapter of this dissertation to The Johns Hopkins European History Seminar. I was consistently gratified by the caliber of questions and comments I vi received at these presentations, especially from scholars whose work was most far afield from my own. I would like to thank my colleagues in the seminar for all they have done to shape my writing and research. These colleagues include: Neil Weijer, Yuval Tal, Yonatan Glazer-Eitan, Jonathan Megerian, Christopher Consolino, Nathan Marvin, Nathan Daniels, Kalina Hadzikova, Asmin Omerovic, Alexander Profaci, Meredith Gaffield, Jessica Keene and Jeremy Fradkin. Special thanks go to Professor Michael Kwass for regularly joining the seminar and providing comments on my work; and to Heather Stein, who provided critical editing and formatting suggestions on this manuscript. I have also benefited from the insights of a new generation of Genizah scholars among whom I am privileged to count myself. Thank you Oded Zinger, Moshe Yagur and Craig Perry. I offer a special thanks to Eve Krakowski, who has provided guidance not only on writing and researching, but also on navigating the academic job market. I thank Megan Zeller—the boss—who has kept everything in my professional life (and the department’s) running as smoothly as possible. Her compassion and competence are both beyond measure. I thank my close friends in Baltimore for making the last seven years a time of fantastic food, dance, drink and conversation. Thanks to Allon Brann, Christopher Consolino, Yonatan Glazer-Eitan, Jennifer Grayson, Nathan Marvin, Jonathan Megerian, Yuval Tal, Heather Stein and Neil Weijer. I also thank my brothers and sisters from other mothers in Chicago and Singapore: Daniel Bender, Daniel Fischer, Sarah Gulezian, Samuel Hunt, Leon Kong, Peter Ruger and Caroline Snyder. vii I thank my brilliant sister, Rabbi Megan Goldman, for being an exemplary older sibling, feeding me, introducing me to her ridiculously large network of friends, bragging about me…etc. And her wife, Paige, for bringing some much needed humor and levity to my life and the lives of my family. I thank my beloved father, Dr. Morris Goldman, for modeling empathy and critical thinking— two skills that are invaluable to any psychiatrist, historian and human being. Finally, I dedicate this work to my mother, Professor Hilarie Lieb, without whose unending support I would never have found my way to finishing this work.
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