Download PDF | Mark R. Cohen - Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt_ The Origins of the Office of the Head of the Jews, CA. 1065-1126_ The Origins of the Office of the Head of the Jews, CA. 1065-1126- 1980.
396 Pages
PREFACE
THIS BOOK is offered as a contribution to the political history of the non-Muslim communities in the medieval Middle East Though disenfranchised and largely excluded from participation in the political destiny of the Muslim state, the Jews and Christians did not lack political vitality Disenfranchisement earned with it as a corollary a large measure of autonomy, which Islam granted the dhimmi (protected) communities in the expectation that they would regulate their own religious affairs and see to their communal needs This dispensation necessarily involved the non-Muslim groups in a complex system of self-government that comprehended many areas normally associated with the state In this, as in so many other instances, Islam simply continued administrative procedures current in the conquered territories, for the Jews corporate autonomy meant a perpetuation of their situation under the pre-Islamic regimes of Byzantium and Sassanian Persia Nonetheless, when North Africa and southwest Asia were unified under Islam, Jewish self-government was expanded and modified In its general contours, this transformation is rather well known to readers of Jewish history Much detail has not yet been uncovered, however, and many facets of the historical process remain to be described Fortunately, detailed study of aspects of Jewish self-government under medieval Islam is possible through the records of the Cairo Gemza A treasure-trove of manusenpts preserved for centuries in the discard-chamber of a medieval synagogue in Old Cairo, the Geniza, mirroring the characteristic preponderance of literary materials among Jewish sources for the middle ages, contains primarily fragments from books In addition, however, it is a unique deposit of several thousand original documents of a nonhterary naturethat shed light on the ambience of individual Jews and Jewish communities in the Mediterranean Islamic world during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries.
Letters, legal records, and occasional polemical pieces composed in the heat of a dispute over communal leadership, provide abundant, though disparate and unwieldy, evidence about Jewish political life. Being firsthand documents and, for the most part, free of the selectivity and tendentiousness so characteristic of medieval historical chronicles, they offer a rich and unmediated body of source material for the history of the medieval Jewish community in the Arab world.
The most significant contribution to this subject has been made by S. D Goitein. The second volume (1971) of his monumental A Mediterranean Society, subtitled "The Community," presents a richly detailed picture of the structure and functions of Jewish self-government under medieval Islam. The present book constitutes a study of Jewish administration in the country for which Geniza material is available in greatest abundance, Egypt. Its subject is the origins of the office of head of the Jews (ra'is al-yahud). Under the more commonly employed rubric of the "nagidate," a term derived from the Hebrew title of nagid associated with most holders of this office, the headship of the Jews has attracted the attention of Jewish historians since the end of the nineteenth century This attention has been well deserved. The head of the Jews served as the chief communal and religious authority over the Jews in Egypt and her Palestinian province under three successive Islamic dynasties: the Fatimids (969-1171), the Ayyubids (1171-1250), and the Mamluks (1250-1517).
During the Mamluk centuries, when the great Jewish yeshivas of Iraq and Palestine led by the gaons, as well as the royal Davidic exilarchate of Baghdad, had long disappeared from the scene, the Egyptian office of head of the Jews constituted the most powerful institution of Jewish self-government in the Islamic world, if not in the world as a whole. To this day, however, scholars are divided over the question of the origins of this significant representative of medie- val Jewish autonomy. Confusion stems, largely, from the tendency to focus upon the rise of the title of nagid rather than upon the more fundamental question of the evolution of political power and authority. Employing the latter approach, the present work subjects the problem of the origins of the headship of the Jews to comprehensive reexamination in an effort to uncover the actual, complex process by which the institution came into being. In addition to its principal relevance to medieval Jewish political history, our inquiry into the origins of the headship of the Jews in Egypt also touches on the general problem of institutional innovation in premodern societies For the middle ages, during which the constancy of religious tradition and the rigidity of social organization tended to moderate the rate of change, the elucidation of this question often involves a search for almost imperceptible alterations in the structure of society.
One helpful method of research is that of the case study An analysis of the growth of an institution in a community for which a large volume of original sources is available can lead to conclusions having general validity. We hope that our reconstruction of the origins of a particular office of Jewish self-government in medieval Egypt will provide insight into the more universal problem of the process of institutional innovation in the middle ages This book also touches on the question of the communal life of the Christians under Islam, a subject that has received scant attention. Attempting to overcome a methodological obstacle inherent in studies limited to the use of Jewish sources, ours draws upon Islamic and particularly Chnstian-Arabic sources in order to establish an external framework for the unreconstituted Jewish data stored in the Geniza fragments.
This comparative approach should be of interest to students of the other principal minority under Islam. An additional area of general interest upon which our study touches is the subject of Islamic administration. As is well known, Middle Eastern Jews were deeply acculturated to their Arabic-Islamic milieu. Though inner Jewish life has seemed remote from the social matrix of Islamic society, and though it is certain that elements of Jewish communal life had their roots in pre-Islamic times in the Middle East, it nonetheless appears that to a considerable degree Jewish communal practice mirrored Islamic political mores. Islamic historians may find, for example, that an awareness of the relations between Jewish central authorities (the heads of the Jews) and their local dependents illuminates aspects of the structure and function of Islamic government. How much of this similarity was the result of Jewish imitation and how much the consequence of shared Middle Eastern patterns of political behavior can only be decided after more research has been done on both Islamic and Jewish administration in the middle ages.
IN THE COURSE of preparing this study I incurred debts of gratitude to many individuals and institutions: to Professor S. D. Goitein, who generously placed his Geniza research archive at my disposal, thereby enabling me to locate much of the source material upon which the book is based, to Princeton University's Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences for providing funds to purchase photostats of Geniza documents and to type the final draft; to the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, which provided a subvention that I used to travel abroad to verify transcriptions of Geniza texts; to the Librarians of University Library, Cambridge, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the British Museum (British Library), London, and the Jewish Theological Seminary Library, New York, and to the Keepers and staffs who preside over the Geniza manuscripts in those institutions, for their much appreciated assistance, in particular Dr. Stefan C. Reif, director of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge, and Jewish Theological Seminary Librarian Dr. Menahem Schmelzer, who both personally facilitated my research in numerous ways; to Susan and Aaron Marcus, who advised me on the design of the tables and family tree; and to Mary Craparotta, who meticulously typed the final draft.
The doctoral dissertation in which this book had its ongins was based on a corpus of 201 Geniza documents. Subsequently, while on leave from Princeton in 1977-1978 gathering material for further studies on Jewish self-government, I collected an additional 100 or so Geniza manuscripts pertinent to the origins of the office of head of the Jews. That research was supported by a Lady Davis Post-doctoral Fellowship in the History of the Jewish People at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and by a grant from the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. In Jerusalem, the Hebrew University's Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts and the Institute's then director, Dr Malachi Beit-Ane, provided unstinting assistance Professor Ezra Fleischer, director of the Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry in Jerusalem, kindly allowed me to search through the Institute's card-index file for poems containing historical information relevant to my subject. While in Jerusalem I presented a summary of my work in progress at the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East and again at the Ben-Zion Dinur Institute for Research in Jewish History, at the invitation of their respective directors, Professor Shaul Shaked and Professor Shmuel Ettinger, and benefitted greatly both from the criticisms and from the encouragement I received. Subsequently, the Ben-Zvi Institute published that Hebrew paper in its new quarterly, Pe'amim no 2 (Summer, 1979).
Though responsibility for the book's contents is solely mine, I am indebted to several scholars who read all or substantial portions of the manuscript at various stages of preparation and made valuable criticisms and suggestions: Gerson D. Cohen, Moshe Gil, S. D. Goitein, Norman Itzkowitz, Ivan George Marcus, Raymond P. Schemdhn, Ismar Schorsch, A L. Udovitch, and Moshe Zucker. I am particularly grateful to Chancellor Gerson D. Cohen of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the supervisor of my doctoral dissertation, whose sage advice accompanied me through the stages of supplemental research and revision for publication. I greatly appreciate the helpfulness shown by Margaret Case of Princeton University Press during the editorial and publication stages. Finally, my wife, Ilene, and my children, Hanan and Tamar, deserve unbounded thanks for the patience and understanding they exhibited while I labored to bring the project to its present form. Princeton, New Jersey December 1979
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق