“Let's Learn Turkish”

DOTAN ARAD “Let’s lEARN Turkish” A TURKISH-ARABIC GlOSSARY FROM THE CAIRO GENIZAH It is well known that the most important source for the history of the Jews of the Islamic lands in the Middle Ages are the various manuscript collections deriving from the Cairo Genizah.1 The life of the Jews in the Middle East under the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Ayyubids and the Mamluks has been analyzed in light of the Genizah documents in many studies.2 It is less widely known, however, that those collections also have the potential to contribute to the broadening of our knowledge of Ottoman Jewry.3 In this article I will discuss a manuscript from the Cambridge Genizah collection4 which sheds light on the economic and Dr. Dotan Arad, The Department of Jewish History and contemporary Jewry, Bar-Ilan University [email protected] I would like to wholeheartedly thank Professors David M. Bunis, Dan D. Y. Shapira, Suraiya Faroqhi, Michel Tuchscherer, Geoffrey Khan, Joseph R. Hacker, Minna Rozen and Yaron Ben-Naeh, Dr. Hannah Neudecker, and Dr. Rachel Hasson-Kenat who read an early draft of this article, offered many helpful comments and aided me in improving my reading of the document it examines. 1 On the largest collection, that of the Cambridge University Library, see Reif, Collections. 2 The best known research in this field can be found in the comprehensive volumes of S. D. Goitein, see Goitein, Mediterranean Society. 3 One of the few scholars who have used the Genizah documents as an historical source for the Ottoman period is Abraham David, see his collected essays: David, Jewish Settlement, Id., Ḥevrah Yehudit. One of the most important sources for the history of the Ottoman Jews is the Responsa literature of the Jewish sages in the empire. In the past few years many Responsa fragments from the Genizah have been published. See Glick, Responsa Frag- ments-Mosseri Collection; Glick, Responsa Fragments-Cambridge Collection. 4 MS Cambridge, University Library, T-S Ar. 30.295. One additional page is kept under a different shelf mark: T-S Ar. 30.225. Turcica, 48, 2017, p. 451-473. doi: 10.2143/TURC.48.0.3237147 © 2017 Turcica. Tous droits réservés. 452 dotan arad cultural life of the Jews in Ottoman Egypt5 and also supplies us with new data regarding the process of the adoption of Turkish as a second (or third) language by the Ottoman Jews. Many different types of compositions and documents were preserved in the Cairo Genizah. One of these genres of writing, which is seldom addressed in academic circles, is the genre of accounting documents. Many accounting books, written in Hebrew, Arabic and other languages, were preserved in the Genizah. While communal accounting books have garnered some scholarly attention,6 the accounting documents of private merchants remain almost completely unstudied. The common scholar does not bother inspecting these pages from the Genizah, which are com- posed primarily of long lists of merchandise items, amounts and dates. From time to time this type of document arouses some interest due to the appearance of a famous personage’s name – whether as a merchant, a buyer or a debtor – but in general these pages do not draw scholarly attention. In this article, I will present the account book of an anonymous merchant which was preserved in the Genizah. The book was written in Judeo-Arabic and contains mostly lists of merchandise and prices. It contains 10 folios, written on both sides and divided into two columns (some of the columns are empty). The size of the folios is uneven, about 30.5 × 7cm. The book has not been discussed at all in the research literature,7 and none of its pages have been published yet. From the notes in the book it appears that the anonymous author was an agent for one of the European consuls, probably in Alexandria. The abundance of food items found in the list of payments in the book (see below) gives the impression that its author served as an agent in charge of supplying the consulate kitchen with food products, but there is no way to conclusively prove this. European merchants (Venetians, Genoans, Catalans, French and others) found fertile ground for their business activities in the urban centers of the Mameluke Kingdom, and later in the cities of the Ottoman Empire. The country which the consul in question served is not explicitly mentioned in the account book, but judging by the Italian words found in it, the centrality of Venetian trade during this period8 and the many 5 For a general discussion on the Jewish economic life in Ottoman Egypt see Gerber, Crossing Borders; Goffman, “Jews in Early Modern Ottoman Commerce”; Bashan, “Ḥaye ha-Kalkalah”. A few articles in this field were published by David, who used Genizah materials as the basis for describing some elements of the Jewish economy in Ottoman Egypt, see David, “Meʽoravutam”; Id., “Egyptian Jews”. 6 For example: Gil, Pious Foundations; Cohen, Poverty and Charity. 7 Except for a brief mention of the glossary by myself: Arad, “‛Aravit Yehudit ve- ‛Ivrit”, p. 104. The dating offered there for the manuscript is incorrect. 8 On the centrality of Venetian trade in Levantine trade see Ashtor, “The Venetian Supremacy”. On the Venetian trade with the Ottomans in the early Ottoman period, see Faroqhi, “The Venetian Presence”; Brummet, Ottoman Seapower, and the collected essays in: Faroqhi, Veinstein, Merchants in the Ottoman Empire, p. 3-78. “let’s learn turkish” 453 testimonies found in various sources to the ties between Jewish and Venetian merchants,9 it seems possible that our anonymous Jewish merchant worked under the Venetian consul. In February 1488 R. Obadiah of Bertinoro visited Alexandria on his way to Palestine and was hosted by R. Moses b. Judah, the head of the Jewish community of Alexandria, who served as the dragoman for the Venetian consul of the city.10 It is possible that our agent, as well, was in the employ of the Venetian consul in Alexandria. However, the option that his patron was a consul of another country cannot be denied. Clarifying the dating of the account book is a complex project. There is no doubt that it was written between the fifteenth and the seventeenth century, based on the handwriting, the content and especially the coins mentioned in it, but is it possible to pinpoint the exact time in which it was written? There is only one year mentioned in the account book. The title of one of the pages of the book is as follows: “In the name of year 77”.11 The author inscribed the ”ציון“ God, on Sunday, the 25th of as he does throughout ,הי״י number twenty-five using the Hebrew letters etc.).12 It is easy ,חי״י is 28 ,זי״י is 27 ,וי״י the account book (26 is written means 25 (and not 15) from a list of the months in the הי״י to prove that Christian calendar and their length,13 which were written in another page: “The names of the months of the European Christians: January 31, February 28, March 31, April 30, May 31, June 30… December 31”.14 15.(10+10+8) חיי The number “28” was written here is. The writer’s proficiency ציון We now have to determine what month in Hebrew is not perfect. In the list of haftarot he copied in the account instead of ”הפתרות“ ,”תולדות“ instead of ”תולתות“ book he wrote etc.16. When writing Arabic ,”כה אמר“ instead of “כא אמר” ,”הפטרות“ 9 On the Venetian-Jewish encounter see Arbel, Trading Nations. 10 “We reached Alexandria on the 14th of Shebat, tired and weary. Here God gave us favour in the eyes of a generous man who was very much beloved even by the Arabs, by name R. Moses Grasso, dragoman to the Venetians” (Adler, Jewish Travelers, p. 220). The archive of Moses ben Judah, which contained dozens of documents in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew, is due to be published soon by Arad, Wagner, Wisdom and Greatness. For a pre- liminary linguistic description of the archive’s documents see Wagner, “Subordination”. .(T-S Ar. 30.295, 6v) בסמלה נהר אל אחד הי״י פי ציון שנת שבעה ושבעין 11 .(.ibid) נהר אל אחד הי״י פי ציון... יום אל אתנין וי״י מן תריכו... יום אל אלתלת זי״י מן תריכו... 12 13 I want to thank Dr. Oded Zinger, who drew my attention to the fact that the Hebrew letters under the names of the months indicate the number of days of each month. “אסם שהור אנשרה אלאפרנג ינור א״ל פורר חי״י מרס א״ל אבריר ל׳ מיו א״ל יוניו ל׳ לליו 14 .(T-S Ar. 30.225) א״ל אגושד]![ א״ל סתמבר ל׳ אותו בריו א״ל נוו בריו ל’ דסם בריו א״ל” The names of the months are brought in their Italian form, which can perhaps testify to the fact that the merchant learned their names from Italian merchants with whom he was in contact. probably to avoid confusing between ,כ to represent 20, instead of י״י The writer used 15 .(20) כ and (2) ב the similar letters 16 See appendix. 454 dotan arad s),17 a phenomenon common for late) ס ṣ) with) צ he often replaced is actually the ”ציון“ Judeo-Arabic writing. It appears, therefore, that Hebrew month “Sivan”. We must now determine what the author meant by writing “year 77”. The Jews of the Islamic lands used three different calendric systems for counting years – the Seleucid Era calendar (minyan ha-shetarot),18 the system which counted years from Creation, known as the Hebrew Calendar and the Islamic or Hijri calendar.

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