Marina Rustow

Marina Rustow, Associate Professor. B.A. (Literature), Yale, 1990; M.A. (Religion), Columbia University, 1998; M.A. (History), 1998; M. Phil (History), 1999; Ph.D. (History), Columbia University, 2004; joint appointment in the Department of History and the Institute for Jewish Studies. Medieval and early modern Jewish history; Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the medieval Near East; heresy and sectarianism; the Cairo Geniza. Publications include Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008); “Karaites Real and Imagined: Three Case Studies of Jewish Heresy” (Past and Present, 2007); Scripture and Schism: Samaritan and Karaite Treasures from the Jewish Theological Seminary Library (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2000).

Most of my research is dedicated to reading sources from the Cairo Geniza, a storeroom for discarded papers found in a medieval synagogue. I am especially interested in personal letters and legal documents dating to the period between 1000 and 1250 and the way they reflect the system of manners, gestures, social relationships, and personal hierarchies prevalent in the Islamic Mediterranean. Geniza documents confirm what some social historians had proposed on the basis of other types of sources: institutions in the medieval Near East were relatively weak, political roles were flexible, and power was negotiated and renegotiated through a complex lexicon of symbolic social forms that are visible on every level of society, from begging letters of the poor to the petitions presented to caliphs and courtiers. My work asks what happens when one takes those flexible relationships into account in writing histories of religion.

My first book, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate, is about the Qaraites, a Jewish “sect” that rejected rabbinic Jews’ claim to a monopoly on interpreting the Bible. The book argues that the sect designation is misleading given the history of cooperation between the two groups: even people who exchanged bitter doctrinal invective shared financial burdens, exchanged favors, offered one another uncomplaining and lifelong friendship, and married their children off to one another. Most preferred realpolitik to ideological fervor.

My subsequent research has gone in two related directions, both having to do with the relationship between Jews and the imperial capitals in the Near East. First, I am interested in tracking and explaining the spread and ultimate dominance of the Babylonian-Iraqi school of Judaism, a process more or less complete by the twelfth century. I argue that the success, spread, and ultimate dominance of Babylonian Judaism came not with the rise of the Abbasid caliphate in the eighth century, as is usually assumed, but with its collapse in the tenth. Only with the migration of large numbers of Iraqis westward to the Mediterranean basin was the Babylonian rabbis’ position consolidated in local institutions; when the centers of trade moved west, so did the rabbis’ base of support. That shift is evident in the personal and business letters from the Geniza that show Mediterranean centers offering symbolic fealty and economic support to their far-off spiritual leaders. The letters also show rabbinic leaders enthusiastically engaging the idioms of patronage current at the Abbasid and Buwayhid courts in Iraq and Iran, a fact that helps explain why these idioms were so widely deployed in Jewish communities farther west.

The second direction has to do with the still unexplained preservation in the Cairo Geniza of large numbers of Arabic documents from the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk chanceries (tenth to sixteenth centuries). Some are petitions sent by Jews, Copts, or Muslims; others are decrees issued by the caliphs and sultans in Cairo; and many were reused for texts in Hebrew script, often by novice scribes. These texts confute the widespread notion that few original documents have survived from the pre-Ottoman Near East. Along with the tens of thousands of unpublished Arabic papyri from Egypt (most of which date from the seventh to tenth centuries), these texts demonstrate that documents did survive, even if they also raise questions about how and why they did so. My research has convinced me that it is no accident that so many petitions and decrees were preserved in the Geniza: as a minority community, Jews had an interest in learning how to negotiate and navigate mechanisms of political protection and power, and kept used documents on hand as models for their dealings with the court in Cairo.

Finally, I have a side-project on the Jews of Sicily, who present a number of interesting problems for the historian: they continued to use Arabic long after the defeat of Muslim rule on the island ca. 1060 and the expulsion of the Muslims in 1246; and Judeo-Arabic texts from Sicily become more abundant the later one goes, clustering in the fifteenth century. I am attempting to understand Arabic’s survival among Sicilian Jews from several angles: what does it have to do with the long history of polyglot traditions on the island, as evidenced by the bilingual Greek-Arabic Norman chancery and the court of Frederick II (1194-1250)? What might it owe to the role Arabic continued to play in notarial practice and Jewish communal governance? How did the transmission of Arabic learning via Sicily affect the Italian peninsula and the rest of Europe during the rise of humanism?

Curriculum Vitae