Podcast appearances and mentions of marina rustow

with Marina Rustow hosted by Chris Gratien | State archives that function as a site of history scholarship are generally a modern creation. But in this episode, we discuss how past Islamic empires, while not necessarily leaving behind an organized archive used by scholars today, had much more sophisticated documentary practices than often assumed. As our guest Marina Rustow has recently shown in a new book entitled The Lost Archive, the relative absence of extant documentation, in the case of the Fatimid Caliphate of Cairo, belies a long paper trail. Using fragments of Fatimid documents surviving in the storeroom (genizah) of a Cairo synagogue, Rustow has identified traces of a lost Fatimid archive. In part one of this two-part interview with Professor Rustow, we explore how she followed a trail of scrap paper and scholarship to locate the lost archive of a medieval Islamic dynasty. « Click for More »

with Marina Rustow hosted by Chris Gratien | State archives that function as a site of history scholarship are generally a modern creation. But in this episode, we discuss how past Islamic empires, while not necessarily leaving behind an organized archive used by scholars today, had much more sophisticated documentary practices than often assumed. As our guest Marina Rustow has recently shown in a new book entitled The Lost Archive, the relative absence of extant documentation, in the case of the Fatimid Caliphate of Cairo, belies a long paper trail. Using fragments of Fatimid documents surviving in the storeroom (genizah) of a Cairo synagogue, Rustow has identified traces of a lost Fatimid archive. In part one of this two-part interview with Professor Rustow, we explore how she followed a trail of scrap paper and scholarship to locate the lost archive of a medieval Islamic dynasty. « Click for More »

Our stories so far have explored relationships between Jews and non-Jewish societies that have ranged from awkward to, well, murderous. But in this case, the social snubbing of Jews actually worked to everyone's advantage, resulting in the biggest historical discovery in the history of the world.  Here, two genius Scottish identical twins match wits with one half of a pair of genius Hasidic Romanian identical twins in order to track down some of the oldest existing manuscripts of the bible. They embark on an Indiana-Jones style adventure in 1890s Egypt, and wind up with much more than they bargained for: hundreds of thousands of centuries-old Hebrew manuscripts that are still changing the way we think about the past.  Horn also brings us to current-day attempts to preserve ancient Jewish sites in the most volatile parts of the Middle East, to uncover the rewards and perils of trying to preserve Jewish history. How do we decide what's worth saving?  Chrystie Sherman's photographs of the Eliyahu Hanavi-Jobar synagogue in Damascus are available in the online museum of Diarna. Janet Soskice's biography of Margaret Gibson and Agnes Lewis is The Sisters of Sinai. Ben Outhwaite directs the Taylor Schechter Genizah Research Unit. Marina Rustow's most recent book is The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. More information about the Cairo Genizah is also available in Sacred Trash by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Treasure by Mark Glickman, and A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo by Stefan Reif, as well as in the documentary film by Michelle Paymar, From Cairo to the Cloud. A fictionalized version of the Genizah's discovery can be found in Dara Horn's novel A Guide for the Perplexed. Dara Horn's new book, People Love Dead Jews, is published by WW Norton and is available wherever books are sold. It's also available as an audio book from Recorded Books. We hope you'll check it out.  Adventures with Dead Jews is brought to you by Tablet Studios and Soul Shop. It's created and written by Dara Horn, and produced and edited by Josh Kross and Robert Scaramuccia. The managing producer is Sara Fredman Aeder, and the executive producers are Liel Leibovitz, Stephanie Butnick, Gabi Weinberg and Dan Luxenberg. We hope you'll rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts, so that more people can join us on our adventures.

What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza's Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza's fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region's administrative culture, but with our failure to fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina's favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies.

What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marina Rustow joins us to talk about her book The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue, and about the Cairo Genizah and why it matters. Listen in for an expansive conversation about how we can consider the Genizah in new ways, what it tells us about the Fatimid state in the tenth to twelfth centuries, and how this teaches us about how documents and records function in social as well as historical terms. Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, and Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History at Princeton University, where she also runs the Princeton Genizah Lab.

narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Marina Rustow, Neelam Khoja, Zoe Griffith, and Fahad Bishara | For brief period of history, the Fatimid Caliphate based in Egypt presided over arguably the most powerful empire in the Mediterranean. Yet because the legacy of this Ismaili dynasty was erased or downplayed by its Sunni rivals and successors, the Fatimids are often misunderstood. As we show in this installment of "The Making of the Islamic World," the Fatimid period and the sources that survive from it can in fact be critical to learning more about how pre-modern Islamic polities functioned, demonstrating that the Fatimids had a much more sophisticated state apparatus than some have assumed. The statecraft of a pre-modern Islamic empire is just one of the topics we can study in the Fatimid world thanks to a rich trove of documents from the Cairo Genizah. The Genizah was a storeroom of a synagogue in Fustat that ended up containing a wealth of documents, many of them simply discarded or reused, that reveal the complexity and interconnection of the medieval Mediterranean. In this episode, we explore how scholars make use of the Genizah documents and the interconnected world stretching from Southeast Asia to Mediterranean Europe reveals in the Genizah papers. In the process, we learn about the emergence of the Fatimid Caliphate as a dynasty and state structure and the developments that took place under Fatimid rule in Cairo. « Click for More »

narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Marina Rustow, Neelam Khoja, Zoe Griffith, and Fahad Bishara | For brief period of history, the Fatimid Caliphate based in Egypt presided over arguably the most powerful empire in the Mediterranean. Yet because the legacy of this Ismaili dynasty was erased or downplayed by its Sunni rivals and successors, the Fatimids are often misunderstood. As we show in this installment of "The Making of the Islamic World," the Fatimid period and the sources that survive from it can in fact be critical to learning more about how pre-modern Islamic polities functioned, demonstrating that the Fatimids had a much more sophisticated state apparatus than some have assumed. The statecraft of a pre-modern Islamic empire is just one of the topics we can study in the Fatimid world thanks to a rich trove of documents from the Cairo Genizah. The Genizah was a storeroom of a synagogue in Fustat that ended up containing a wealth of documents, many of them simply discarded or reused, that reveal the complexity and interconnection of the medieval Mediterranean. In this episode, we explore how scholars make use of the Genizah documents and the interconnected world stretching from Southeast Asia to Mediterranean Europe reveals in the Genizah papers. In the process, we learn about the emergence of the Fatimid Caliphate as a dynasty and state structure and the developments that took place under Fatimid rule in Cairo. « Click for More »

narrated by Chris Gratienfeaturing Marina Rustow, Neelam Khoja, Zoe Griffith, and Fahad Bishara« Click for More »

A Commerce of Knowledge, authored by Simon Mills, tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Syria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, the book investigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and English scholarly and missionary interests: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. Early modern Orientalism is usually conceived as an episode in the history of scholarship. By shifting the focus to Aleppo, A Commerce of Knowledge brings to light the connections between two seemingly separate worlds, tracing the emergence of new kinds of philological and archaeological enquiry in England back to a series of real-world encounters between the chaplains and the scribes, booksellers, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs they encountered in the Ottoman Empire. This webinar is chaired by Marina Rustow, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Professor of History at Princeton University.

In this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Dr. Marina Rustow who is the director of the Princeton Genizah Lab and the Khedouri A Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton. She is also the director of the program of Near Eastern Studies. We spoke at length about the Cairo Genizah and what its findings can tell us about the everyday lives of people in Medieval Cairo, the world, and more.

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women's history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women's Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women's adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University's Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women's history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women's Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women's adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University's Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices