12
I LEFT EGYPT in 1981, and it was not until seven years later that circumstances permitted me to begin a serious inquiry into the story of the Slave of MS H.6: in the ten years that had passed since I first came across Goitein’s brief reference to Abraham Ben Yiju and his Slave, my path had crossed theirs again and again, sometimes by design and sometimes inadvertently, in North Africa, Egypt and the Malabar, until it became clear that I could no longer resist the logic of those coincidences.
I started upon the Slaves trail hoping that I would be able to ask for guidance from Goitein himself: I took encouragement from an article published in India, in 1963, in which he had tried to interest Indians in the Geniza. But I soon discovered, to my great disappointment, that he had died in 1985, at the age of eighty-five. The only alternative left was to start by going through Goitein’s work and tracking the Slave through references to Abraham Ben Yiju.
The blitheness of that beginning did not long survive the discovery of the enormity of that task. The complete bibliography of Goitein’s writings runs into a seventy-page book, with a twenty-two page supplement. It contains a total of 666 entries in Hebrew, German, English and French. His writings were published in Europe, America, Israel, Tunisia, India and Pakistan, and they included pieces in popular magazines, a Hebrew play and, of course, innumerable books and articles. At the age of thirty Goitein had started single-handed upon the kind of project for which university departments usually appoint committees: an edition of the Ansâb al-Ashrâf, (The Noble Lineages), a 2,500 page work by the ninth-century Arab historian, al-Balâdhuri. His interest in the Geniza had begun with a visit to Budapest in 1948 and had continued through the rest of his life. His monumental study, based on his Geniza research, A Mediterranean Society, was acclaimed as a landmark in medieval scholarship as soon as the first of its five volumes appeared in 1967. It was to establish him as possibly the greatest of the Geniza scholars, the pioneering researcher without whose labours an inquiry into the lives of Ben Yiju and the Slave of MS H.6 would not be possible today.
Scanning through the relevant parts of Goitein’s oeuvre, I discovered that his interest lay, on the whole, in the broad sweep of history, so that the references to individuals, such as Ben Yiju, were scattered randomly through his writings like the windblown trail of a paperchase. Some of those references led to the work of other scholars, such as E. Strauss, who had first edited the letter of MS H.6. Others pencilled in the outlines of Ben Yiju’s career, in passing, while pointing in two further directions: on the one hand to certain specific Geniza documents, and on the other to one of Goitein’s own unfinished works, a project which he had named ‘the India Book’.
The references to this work began in the 1950s not long after Goitein first started working with the Geniza documents. His researches had led him to a large number of letters and other manuscripts referring to the trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. He soon conceived of a plan to publish them as a collection, under the title of The India Book, but as his work proceeded he found ever-increasing quantities of material, and the project was continually deferred, while other aspects of his research took precedence. The India Book was never abandoned however: he announced that the book would contain about three hundred documents, and in 1964 he even published the catalogue numbers of those documents, including those that referred to Ben Yiju, as a guide to other researchers. But despite his announced intentions, the book was still unfinished when he died in 1985, in Princeton.
The road now led directly to Princeton University, where Goitein had taught for many years: I was told that his colleagues and students in the Department of Near Eastern Studies had compiled an archive of his papers there. Eventually I went to visit the archive myself but a disappointment awaited me there: I found that access to most of his papers on the India trade was restricted because an edition of his notes for the projected India Book was in preparation, although it was unlikely to be published within the next several years. From the papers that I was allowed to see, I had the impression that Goitein had in fact already published most of his information regarding Ben Yiju’s life in scattered bits and pieces, for much of the material was already familiar from my earlier reading.
At the end of the visit it was clear to me that there was only one way forward now, and that was to go to the Geniza documents themselves, directly to Ben Yiju’s own papers. But across that road lay a seemingly impassable barrier: the obstacle of language.
Ben Yiju’s documents were mostly written in an unusual, hybrid language: one that has such an arcane sound to it that it might well be an entry in a book of Amazing Facts. It is known today as Judæo-Arabic; it was a colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic, written in the Hebrew script.
Judæo-Arabic evolved after Muslim armies, recruited mainly from the Arabian peninsula, conquered most of the Middle East and North Africa in the seventh century. The language of the conquerors soon came to supplant the other languages of the empire, including Aramaic, the language then generally in use among the Jews of those regions. But of course, Jews continued to use Hebrew for religious purposes and, in time, when they started writing in their newly adopted tongue, it was in the sanctified alphabet of their Scriptures.
From this odd smelting came an alloy that had its own distinct sheen and texture, with little resemblance to the language written by Muslim Arabs. Written Arabic, in its usual form, is the literary variety of the language and is more or less standard throughout the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq. Spoken Arabic, on the other hand, varies so much from region to region that the speech of an Iraqi is almost incomprehensible to a Moroccan. A great gulf separates the two registers of Arabic, the formal, literary language, and the slangy, regional dialects: for all practical purposes they are separate languages, with their own distinct vocabularies and grammars.
Judæo-Arabic, determinedly contrary, was not like either form of Arabic: unlike the dialects, it was a written language, and unlike written Arabic, it had the vocabulary and grammar of the spoken language. It was in a way something much simpler than either form of Arabic: a representation of colloquial speech in writing. But since colloquial Arabic has always varied between regions, Judæo-Arabic too tended to take on somewhat different colours in different parts of the Arab world. The language of the Geniza documents, for example, has a strong flavour of North African Arabic, since so many members of the community were from that region.
But although Judæo-Arabic was much closer to the spoken language than literary Arabic, it was not uniformly colloquial. The people who used it would often try to introduce Arabic classicisms into their written language, with varying degrees of success. Often they would use words and spellings which would have startled well-educated Muslim Arabs, but which they took to be elegant usage. Eight centuries later, those odd solecisms often have an awkward, endearingly human grace, where the correct form would seem merely formal or stilted.
At the same time, everyone who wrote Judæo-Arabic had a thorough knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, and though they were not usually able to use Hebrew as a language of expression, they were well able to quote in it. Thus their prose is studded with Hebrew proverbs and long passages from the bible, as well as legal and religious terms from the archaic language Aramaic.
When I first read about it, Judæo-Arabic sounded bafflingly esoteric: it is not easy, after all, to see oneself sitting down to leaf through a collection of eight-hundred-year-old documents, written in a colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic, transcribed in the Hebrew script, and liberally strewn with Hebrew and Aramaic. At its easiest, Arabic is very difficult for a foreigner, and such knowledge as I had of it was mainly of the dialect spoken around Lataifa: a broad, peasant tongue, so earthy that my accent would often earn sniffs from waiters in Cairo restaurants and provoke shopkeepers to ask to see my money before they reached for their shelves. Those experiences had given me something of the fellah’s diffidence about his language: it would never have occurred to me that this simple, rustic dialect could be of any use in so rarified a domain of erudition as the reading of twelfth-century Judæo-Arabic manuscripts.