From Sacred Trash to Written History; The Cairo Geniza and the Historian

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Abraham's Luggage: A Social Life f Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World by Elizabeth Lambourn is based on the India Letters found in the Geniza at Fusat in Old Cairo. Before dealing with this book, there is the facinating intellectual adventure relating to the discovery and decipherment of the records found in the Geniza, a place where any document or relic bearing the Hebrew paryer is deposited so that it is not defiled. It is an extremely salutary experience for an Indian historian like me who has worked on the Medieval History of South India to read about the great feat that lay behind the study of the Geniza Documents. The history of Israel has been a most tragic one particularly in the 20th Century when Germany perpetrated the horror of the Holocaust and it is no wonder that the study of the Jewish past/history became a passion for some historians, particularly S D Goitein whose magisterial history in five volumes the Mediterranean Society is the most elaborate and comprehensive analysis till date.

The Ben Erza Synagogue in Old Cairo is the place where it all began. Two twins, sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margret, while on a trip to the Sinai brought back to England some scraps of old documents to the leading scholar of Jewish theology and literature, Solomon Schechter, the Lecturer in Talmudic Studies at Cambridge. He at once regognized the fragments as being the oldest manuscript evidence of the Jewish prayer Ben Sira which Protestant critics of the Old Testament had dismissed as a compsition from the Second Temple Period roughly around the time of the Roman Empire. Solomon Schechter dismissed such interepretations stemmeing from the hermenutical method of Higher Criticism practiced in Germany and later in England as tinged with anti Semeticism as it denied the Prophetic Tradition underlying Jewish historiography, If a fragment of the ancient text could be broght tolight this controversey could be laid to rest. Off he went to Cairo and in 1896 when Cairo was under French and British political control, e succeeded in removing 190,000 documents from the Geniza nd transported them to the Univerity of Cambridge which hosts the worlds largest collection of these documents.

Soloman Schechter held Rabbnic Judaism in high esteem and was keen on studying early Jewish texts dealing with Ritual, Liturgy and Paryer. Indeed the early study of the Geniza was entirely devoted to Jewish liturgy and Ritual. Whlie the Geniza records written in Hebrew script and Arabic language contain a large number of documents dealing with Law, Social Customs, Contracts with Merchants and shipers, Marriage Contracts, Divorce settlements, Lists of Dowries,merchant correspondence etc, they facinated early Rabbanic scholars as they also ontained religious advice on such mundane issues as: Can Jews have sex  on Sabbath,? Can slave girls be laid? Questions that are quaint by today's standards but in an age infused with religion such questions were deeply meaningful. The Rabbis were audacious inventors of History and hence there was a great deal of real and imagined history in their religious opinions. Schechter was disdainful of the scholarship of his day and in a letter to a friend even said that Christian scholarship on the Nation of Israel is "higher anti semiticism". The same can be said of the scholarship from several white countries including USA which demean and humiliate an Old Civilization like India in rder to further their geo political ends and objectives. India Phobia is now the ruling idelogy of white Social Sciences. And in rejecting the Christian view, he was al negating the work of the Oxford School of Judaic studies. In the initial years of the 20th century, the Geniza was exploited almost entirely for textual criticism and for Talmudic sudies. Te turn to social and economic history came when S D Goitein entered the field.

S D Goitein (1900 -1985) like his more famous contemporary, Fernand Braudel studied the Mediterranean but from the Cairo end which was the refuge of Jews from Tunisia, Sicily, Spain and North Africa. Braudel's longue duree was his abstract division of time and temporality in the famous triptych of Geographical Time, Structural Time and Individual Time. S D Goitein measured time with the rhythym set by the fortunes of the Jewish people as they reponded to the challenges of the Reconquista, the Faimid Conquest, the Crusades and the Ottoman Conquest of Egypt. Each age brought its own set of challenges and the Geniza was a palimpsest inscribed with the trials of the moment. For a Historian who was a witness to the horrors of the Holocaust, the  medieval world would certainly appear more civilized and appealing and this perhaps expalins the fact that Goitein dedicated almost his entire life t the study of the Geniza. The last volume was published the day before he died in 1985. 

S D Goitein was a Monravian Jew who was educated in Hungary where he learnt Arabic, Hebrew and the Talmud from the leading scholars of his day and at the age of 24 he migrated to Israel. He taught at the Hebrew University and was considered for the post of Minister for ducation by that great hero, David Ben Gurion. The loss to the world of politics was certainly a fortune for the world of Historical Scholarship. Goitein in his methodology was a practioner of "thick description" one that brings the past alive by a close and systematic examination and analysis of empirical evidence, documents, arifacts, records etc. He was conscious of the position of jews as non muslims in an Islamic society: their life was full of "horror, dread and misery" and indigenus people f India can relate to this as India was under savage Mughal rule and before that the rule of the Turks and Afghans. The jews were dhimmis, peope of the Book unlike the indigenus people of India whose status was less than a dhimmi. Indian ideologues writing thie Party sponsored fairy tales for their faithful ignore the horrendous suffering of the indigenous people and of course, India cannot have a Historian of such towering eminence as S D Goitein.

The document on the left is the one that started S D Goitein on his life long intellectual adventure. This is the document which Elizabeth Lambourn analyses in her rather turgid post colonial cultural materialist exposition on the List of items of Luggage carried by Abraham from the coast of Mangalore back to Egypt after a stay of eleven long years in India. He must have landed on the Aabian Sea coast crossed the Desert and then sailed down the Nile to reach Cairo. In all he discovered 21 fragments in all which he published in his book on the India Trade and Indian ideologues use these documents to speak of the Cosmopolitan arena of the Malabar and the Indian Ocean. This trade with Malabar was in the hands of Tunisian merchants who lived in Egypt and traded with ports all alonf the Arabian Sea coast. This particular letter belongs to the 11th century when good commerical relations existed between India and the Red Sea. In a moment of epihany almost like that of Gibbon, Goitein writes: The idea for this book was conceived by me on September 17, 1954 while in Oxford, searching the treasure of the Bodleian Library. Soon he realized that the Indian trade was part of the larger commercial nexus radiating from the Mediterranen Sea and hence he had to venture far into the North African Mediterranean, not too distant fom that of Phillip II. 

This trader ran a bronze factory at Mangalore and ran what appears from the documents a successful venture. The Geniza Records display a wide variety of scripts, languages and scribal skills. An interesting feature was the durability of the documents. There were sveral instances when douments whose primary text lay in the 9th or 10th century contained writing from 2 or even 3 centuries later. Since paper was scarce, old documents continued to be used long after theyhad server their primary purpose. Therefore the Geniza was not an archive. It was merely the place where documents were shifted without the thought of reuse. Goitein was a firm believer in Israel and its Destiny and was therefore an honest historian not given to distortions like South Asian "historians" for whom the past is only a political artifact. He said; I regard my work as that of a Histrian and philologist not that of expounder of socio economic or political theories".

There cannot be a more searing indictment of Marxian pretentions than this statement.

Part II will deal with Abraham's Luggage

Delhi Riots 2020: A Chronicle and a Searing Indictment

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

The series of riots in Delhi 2019 to Febuary 22nd to 14th centering around the Act passed by Parliament, the ammendment to the Citizenship Act, is extensively documented in this short and well documented book written by three women who call themselves, a Group of Intellectuals. This is a welcome step in the right direction as Riots are nt documented and hence a fake narrative soon replaces the real sequence of events and the White Media is ever keen to misreport and misrepresent the events making victims the villians, the perpetrators of violence the heroes or sheroes, and completely distort the rea;ity in order to further the agenda f hostile countries/societies. In recent years, the Western Media particularly the American Media which once enjoyed an enviable reputation for fair reporting has now degenerated into an agenda driven woke inspired propaganga machine of almost Orwellian dimensions.

The authors rightly start with the genesis of the riots which they trace to the concerted, organized and deliberate infiltration of anti Indian propaganda into a purely domestic matter which has been hanging fire since 1947. The Partition in 1947, hasty, brutal, ill conceived and anarchic was imposed on India by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mountbatten. In the violence that followed Jawaharlal Nehru's Tryst with Destiny, at least 3 to 4 million Hindus and Sikhs were killed and many more displaced. The Prime Minister of Pakistan and of India agreed in the famous Liaqat-Nehru Pact to repatriate indigenous people still left in Pakistan. This became necessary as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was created exclusvely for Moslems while India true to its liberal ethos did not insist on an exchange of Population. Unfortunately over the years the indigenous people of India left behid in the "belly of the beast" have had enormous suffering imposed on them. Forced conversion, abduction of young women and girls, discrimination in employment, violence directed at community leaders, lack of edcational opportunities and the consequent ghettoization of the indigenous communities consisting largely of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhist, Jain and Christian. Even Christians, recognized as People of the Book, have been systematically persecuted under the draconian Anti Blasphemy Laws. Right from the time of Nehru the issue of granting relief to the indigenous people has been hanging fire and the BJP had promised the CAA not only in the 2014 Eletion Manifesto but also in 2019. In December 2019 the CAA was passed and in January 2020 it became Law after securing the assent of the President of India.

Deliberate concentrated and sustained propaganda was set afoot to incite Muslims all over India. The CAA was not designed to take the Citizenship away form Indian Muslims and though the educated ones were aware of this fact they deliberately colluded with ant Indian elements to propagate the view that Indian muslims would lose their Citizenship. Also the legal requirement of a verified National Population Register (NPR) which will be initiated soon was invoked as an assault of Mslems being equal citizens of  India. Unfortunately Moslem Identity Poltics which had its origin in the Khilafat Agitatin of 1921 and led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has not been countered effectively by the pabulum called Secularism. And since the time of Nehru successive Congress and non Congress regimes have incited Moslem Identity assertion and its accompanying baggage of victimhood to shepherd them into a reliable votng block, the infamous Vote Bank that political reporters speak of.

Against this background, the victory of the BJP twice in a row deeply affected the interests and offered a serious challenge to the self image of its so called intellectual elites who have lorded over the Academia, Media and the Entertainment world. The CAA provided just the pretext for a show of strength, the aar paar ki ladai as the leader f the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi put it. A fight to end all fights would be a rough translation. The students of the Left leaning JNU, Moslem universities like JMI and AMU were mobilized and funds from Western countries and from the Middle East were pumped in to set the Riots in motion. For months from December 2019 Shaheen Bagh a predominantly Moslem area was virtually a no go zone much like the "liberated zones" of USA taken over by the Black Lives Matter agitators. Te Government of India showed enormous patience and did little to have the squatters evicted and in the Shaheen Bagh and many felt that the Gvernment of India has suddenly goe soft on the agitators. After the visit of President Trup was confirmed, the agitators started ramping up the agittion and scaling it up to draw the attention of the international/White Media.

The image reproduced on the left is an iconic image of the Shaheen Bagh Agitation. It shows a man firing at the police and there are several such images. In pursuit of one such violent gang the Delhi Police in a hot chase entered the seat of the agittion, the Jamia Milia Islamia University as the rioters had taken refuge there. And a pliant media was ready at hand to project that as an asssault on an "educational institution" and "ppor inncent students". Short heavily edited videos were circulated on the Social Media Platforms, particularly Telegram and WhattsApp to incite more violence. All these facts are ably brought out in the book.

The preparations for the violence was systematic, particularly in East Delhi. Tahir, a respected leader of the Moslems had organized acid, pistols, stones, gas cylinders, catpults and firearms on high rise buildings to attack the Police and one Intelleigence Officer Ankit Sharma was caputred and tortured by the molem supporters of Tahir for more than 7 hours before he was killed and his body dumped in a drain. (picture on the left).

The Delhi Riots were a terrible disaster that visited Delhi and on a smaller scale it had all the hallmarks of the 1984 anti Sikh Pogram organized by the Congress party under Rajiv Gandhi. There was considerable planning for violence, the core constituency was radicalized, weapons and arms gathered and the Foreigh Media was kept briefed about the events from the perspective of the rioters

This book is valuable contribution and it is a pity that a white male orgnizer of literary events who grandly calls himself a "historian" used the colour of his skin, white privilege, to ensure that this piece of credible documentation lies burried forever. It is a sign of the times that he did not succeed.