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Ottoman-Era Documents from the Cairo Genizah - cover image

Copyright

Jane Hathaway

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-758-2
Hardback978-1-80511-759-9
PDF978-1-80511-760-5

Language

  • English

THEMA

  • QRJ
  • NHG
  • 1QBCS
  • CFL

BISAC

  • HIS055000
  • HIS026000
  • HIS054000
  • HIS049000
  • HIS001020
  • LAN009000

Keywords

  • Genizah
  • Ottoman Empire
  • Ottoman Egypt
  • Mamluk Sultanate
  • Cairo, Damietta, Alexandria
  • Jewish communities in Egypt
  • Intercommunal networks
  • Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic

    Ottoman-Era Documents from the Cairo Genizah

    • Jane Hathaway (author)
    FORTHCOMING
    This groundbreaking volume marks a rare and transformative contribution to studies of the Cairo Genizah, a vast trove of documents generated by Egypt’s Jewish community between the 10th and 19th centuries. While the Cairo Genizah has long yielded extraordinary insights into Jewish history in the greater Mediterranean region, attention has focused overwhelmingly on documents from the ‘classical’ period (11th–13th centuries). Documents from the later period, when Egypt was ruled by the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire, remain woefully underexplored. This book helps to change that, presenting a meticulously curated collection of later Genizah documents that expand the boundaries of current scholarship.

    Moving beyond the more familiar Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic texts, the author ventures into neglected terrain, offering expert translations of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish texts in Arabic script. The collection is rich with remarkable ‘firsts’, including a Jewish funerary prayer on the reverse of a letter from a military commander, fragments of Sufi poetry, and a primer on Muslim practice. The author uses her training in Ottoman history to analyse and contextualise these documents fully. As a result, each document opens new avenues of inquiry, linking Egypt’s Jewish community to wider intra- and intercommunal networks in the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

    With a lucid introduction, well-structured chapters, and a thoughtful conclusion, the book illuminates networks of exchange in the early modern Mediterranean. It will appeal to scholars of Jewish history, the Cairo Genizah, the Ottoman Empire, and early modern Egypt; students of Middle Eastern languages and religions; historians of intercommunal relations and trade; and librarians, archivists, and general readers fascinated by Middle Eastern manuscript culture and the vibrant religious and commercial networks of the early modern Mediterranean.

    Contributors

    Jane Hathaway

    (author)
    Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at Ohio State University

    Jane Hathaway is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at Ohio State University. She received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1992; while at Princeton, she worked on the medieval Genizah under the direction of Mark R. Cohen. She is a specialist in the early modern history of the Ottoman Empire and, in that context, on the Ottoman Arab provinces, the Ottoman Chief Harem Eunuch, and Jewish communities under Muslim rule. Her publications include The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdağlıs *(Cambridge, 1997), *A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen (SUNY, 2003), The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker (Cambridge, 2018), and The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1800 (2nd ed. Routledge, 2020), as well as scores of articles and book chapters on related topics and on reactions in Egypt and Yemen to the movement of the Jewish messianic figure Sabbatai Zevi.