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Blogs by Marina Rustow

Islamic Law Blog, 2023

Notaries are the ones who wrote documents, and many of the documents they wrote never came before... more Notaries are the ones who wrote documents, and many of the documents they wrote never came before a qāḍī in court, though qāḍīs did archive some of them.

Islamic Law Blog, 2023

Thinking of studying medieval Arabic legal deeds? Here's how to begin and why it's worthwhile.

Islamic Law Blog, 2021

What medieval documents can tell us about Islamic law

Fragment of the Month, Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library,, 2021

Abraham Maimonides, the son of Moses Maimonides, handled two legal cases about Jewish traders in ... more Abraham Maimonides, the son of Moses Maimonides, handled two legal cases about Jewish traders in Southeast Asia. One of them, T-S Ar.30.42, a court testimony from 1226, is about the death of a trader in a place called Kalah, which is described as "in the lands of ...." Here I propose a reading of the partially effaced word: Java, which in medieval Arabic texts refers not to the island of Java, but to Southeast Asia in general. Its appearance in a thirteenth-century geniza fragment is even more significant for Indian Ocean historians than for geniza specialists.

Fragment of the Month, Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library, 2011

Interviews by Marina Rustow

AJS Perspectives, 2015

Below is the full interview. Read an abbreviated version of the interview here (/publications-res... more Below is the full interview. Read an abbreviated version of the interview here (/publications-research/ajs-news/interview-with-marina-rustow). Amy Weiss: Congratulations on winning a MacArthur Fellowship! How did you find out you had just won a Genius Award? Marina Rustow: I was out running errands with my four-year old. I actually was expecting a call from Chicago, but not from the MacArthur Foundation. A furniture company was supposed to call me about couch swatches. I kept getting these missed calls from Chicago and wondering why the furniture company wasn't leaving a message. When I got home I finally picked up the call and heard the voice on the other end of the line ask, "Is this Marina Rustow? Are you in a place where you can have a confidential conversation?" I thought: this can't be good. There must be some bill that never made it to my home and has now gone into collections. Or someone died. Luckily it didn't turn out to be either. It's surreal.

Zmanim, 2021

On a visit to the University of Haifa, I did an interview with a pair of dear friends. I have no ... more On a visit to the University of Haifa, I did an interview with a pair of dear friends. I have no memory of what I said, but it all sounds like stuff I would say. Only in Hebrew.

Books by Marina Rustow

Publisher's description: The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an ... more Publisher's description:

The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of this extraordinary find, inviting us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer.

Beginning with government documents before the Fatimids and paper’s westward spread across Asia, Rustow reveals a millennial tradition of state record keeping whose very continuities suggest the strength of Middle Eastern institutions, not their weakness. Tracing the complex routes by which Arabic documents made their way from Fatimid palace officials to Jewish scribes, the book provides a rare window onto a robust culture of documentation and archiving not only comparable to that of medieval Europe, but, in many cases, surpassing it. Above all, 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 understand preindustrial documentary ecology.

Illustrated with stunning examples from the Cairo Geniza, this compelling book advances our understanding of documents as physical artifacts, showing how the records of the Fatimid caliphate, once recovered, deciphered, and studied, can help change our thinking about the medieval Islamicate world and about premodern polities more broadly.

Title page, table of contents, acknowledgments and foreword.

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14841.html

Scripture and schism: Samaritan and Karaite treasures from the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, 2000

Corrections to the catalogue of the 1999 exhibition I curated together with Elka Deitsch and Shar... more Corrections to the catalogue of the 1999 exhibition I curated together with Elka Deitsch and Sharon Lieberman-Mintz.

Papers by Marina Rustow

Journal of Islamic Law

Marina Rustow notes how prevalent scholarly attention is to long-form texts of Islamic law—attent... more Marina Rustow notes how prevalent scholarly attention is to long-form texts of Islamic law—attention that she argues, comes at the expense of studying Islamic legal documents in a sufficient manner. Study of the documents is an indispensable enterprise if we are to fully understand “how law worked in practice.” In view of what we know to have been “heaps” of documents produced by Muslim judges and notaries, Rustow underscores how particularly noticeable a disjuncture there is between those documents and the long-form texts. Moreover, scholars often skip over and thus fail to avail themselves of the utility of documents in adding texture to social and legal history. She cautions social historians against “pseudo-knowledge,” that is, the temptation to overlook complex factors, usually embedded in legal documents, that render our otherwise tame scholarly perception of the past truer but more “unruly.” In the end, her invitation to join her in the study of documents and thereby improve ...

Project charter for CDH Research Partnership - Geniza 2020-2021. The charter is the foundational ... more Project charter for CDH Research Partnership - Geniza 2020-2021. The charter is the foundational document that describes the rationale, goals, plan of work, resources needed, terms and conditions, and outcomes of a Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton (hereafter CDH) project. Charters are written by core members of a project team in a series of planning meetings taking place over the course of a month. The planning process is intensive, collaborative, and requires substantial input from everyone on a team. Charters serve as formalized agreements among all team members on such crucial questions as scope, technical design, infrastructural needs, and success criteria. <br> This is a digital copy of a "living document" at a single point in time. Charters are amended as necessary throughout the project lifecycle to document major changes and note when the "Built by CDH" Software Warranty and "Built by CDH" Long Term Service Agreement take effect,...

Reconstructing a book from fragments preserved in the Genizah is like trying to complete a puzzle... more Reconstructing a book from fragments preserved in the Genizah is like trying to complete a puzzle where most of the pieces are missing. Recently, Roni Shweka pieced together six fragments of an eleventh-century rotulus of the She'iltot located in four different Genizah collections. The resulting manuscript proved of great interest in several different ways. A rotulus is a vertical scroll with the text written parallel to the short side. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, who is currently studying rotuli from the Genizah, calls it 'the third form of the Hebrew book', after the megilla (the horizontal scroll, in which the text runs parallel to the long side) and the codex (the bound book as we know it). The rotulus used to be thought of as an early and transitional book-form between the megilla (the medium preferred by Jews in antiquity) and the codex (which Jews adopted following the Islamic conquests; Christians had started using it several centuries earlier). Together with Gideon Bohak, Olszowy-Schlanger has found about three-hundred fragments of rotuli in the Genizah, many of them dating to as late as the eleventh century. The form was especially popular for copying texts for personal use, such as study copies of the Talmud or of responsa, or for liturgical poetry and hafṭarot. Because the works were userproduced and informal, they were usually written on less expensive material, often on the backs of other, disused texts. A section from a typical Genizah rotulus, containing responsa (T-S G2.20

Islamic Law Blog, 2023

Thinking of studying medieval Arabic legal deeds? Here's how to begin and why it's worthwhile.

Islamic Law Blog, 2021

What medieval documents can tell us about Islamic law

Fragment of the Month, Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library,, 2021

Fragment of the Month, Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library, 2011

AJS Perspectives, 2015

Zmanim, 2021

Publisher's description: The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an ... more Publisher's description:

Title page, table of contents, acknowledgments and foreword.

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14841.html

Scripture and schism: Samaritan and Karaite treasures from the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, 2000

Journal of Islamic Law

Jewish History, 2019

The Cairo Geniza preserved thousands of Arabic-script texts, among them documents from the Fatimi... more The Cairo Geniza preserved thousands of Arabic-script texts, among them documents from the Fatimid and Ayyubid government administration. This essay offers a brief overview of the state document corpus from the Geniza. It also surveys previous scholarship on the documents, attempting to push the material further in two ways: by reading it as evidence of Fatimid and Ayyubid strategies of rule, and by paying attention to its material clues and what they tell us about the production, storage, retrieval, and discard of state documents. The article concludes by suggesting areas for further research and offering an edition and translation of an official memorandum intended for palace officials.

Jewish History, 2019

The Cairo Geniza preserved hundreds of Arabic-script petitions to officials at the Fatimid palace... more The Cairo Geniza preserved hundreds of Arabic-script petitions to officials at the Fatimid palace. These petitions are more elaborate than those written during the rule of earlier Islamic dynasties. This essay asks three questions about Fatimid petitions and their development: Who were the scribes who wrote them? When (and why) did Arabic petitions assume the elaborate form and format characteristic of the Fatimid period? And why did Fatimid high officials hold the petition-and-response procedure to be so central to governance? The essay includes an edition and translation of an unedited petition to Sitt al-Mulk, the sister of the caliph al-Ḥākim (386–411/996–1021), who ruled the state for more than two years after her brother’s death. A comparison between this petition and another I edited in 2010 sheds light on all three questions.

Patronage, Production, and Transmission of Texts in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Cultures, 2014

From the Origins to the Present Day

The legal status of ḏimmī-s in the Islamic West (second/eighth-ninth/fifteenth centuries), 2013

Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History, 2011

Time, Astronomy, and Calendars in the Jewish Tradition , 2014

The Iraqi calendar and its 'four gates' are known from works on the Jewish calendar from ... more The Iraqi calendar and its 'four gates' are known from works on the Jewish calendar from the early twelfth century onwards to have become the dominant rabbinic calendar calculation in all parts of the Jewish world, and it corresponds to how the Jewish calendar is universally reckoned today. The Donnolo manuscript demonstrates that a full generation after the Calendar Controversy, the Jews of southern Italy still maintained a different calendar from the Iraqi one. One of the manuscripts reconstructed contains the copy of an early letter of Ben Meir. The manuscript comprises two parchment bifolios, plus several single folios (also at the Bodleian). One manuscript contains several letters of Saʿadya to his followers in Fustat, in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew. The textual evidence reconstructed so far points to the possibility that the texts were transmitted widely over the course of the subsequent two centuries. Keywords: Ben Meir; Hebrew; Jewish calendar controversy; Saʿadya

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2013

Jewish History, 2014

In his work on Iberian Jews—openly practicing ones and conversos, on and off the peninsula, befor... more In his work on Iberian Jews—openly practicing ones and conversos, on and off the peninsula, before 1492 and 1497 and after—Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi made few explicit methodological statements. But from his earliest work, he made his historiosophical commitments clear and rarely wavered from them. Those commitments included basic trust in inquisitorial sources, the investigation of both marginal and normative Jewish practices, interest in the history of mentalities, and, above all, a focus on the relationship between “immanent” and external causes in Jewish history. This article traces the influence of several mid-twentieth-century historians on Yerushalmi’s work and examines his place in twentieth-century debates on conversos and the Inquisition; it also discusses his relationship to microhistory and the problem of historical distance and perspective. The article concludes by considering the apparent contradiction between Yerushalmi’s emphasis on the agency and subjectivity of Jews and his trust in the records of an institution that some have characterized as pervasively anti-Jewish.

Jewish Social Studies, 2014

In the last 50 years, the study of the Jewish communities of the medieval Islamic world has chang... more In the last 50 years, the study of the Jewish communities of the medieval Islamic world has changed as research on Cairo Geniza documents has assumed a more central place in the field. Where historians used to characterize those communities as autonomous, self-enclosed, and hierarchical, Geniza-based work has emphasized their multiple points of contact with the state, their fluidity, and their networks of individual ties. Yet we still know very little about how communal institutions actually worked, especially rabbinical courts. Whereas work on Geniza legal documents has focused mainly on litigants and the cases they brought, we propose instead to pay close attention to scribes—to the documents’ formal and formulaic features. Here, we use a single document to illustrate how formulas can provide evidence for the relationship between litigants and the institutions they approached for legal mediation.

Journal of Islamic Law, 2021

Marina Rustow notes how prevalent scholarly attention is to long-form texts of Islamic law-attent... more Marina Rustow notes how prevalent scholarly attention is to long-form texts of Islamic law-attention that she argues, comes at the expense of studying Islamic legal documents in a sufficient manner. Study of the documents is an indispensable enterprise if we are to fully understand "how law worked in

Jewish History, 2019

What happens when we look at Genizah manuscripts not as inert vehicles for written words but as o... more What happens when we look at Genizah manuscripts not as inert vehicles for written words but as objects with biographies and social lives?

A symposium at the Bard Graduate Center, NY, November 2015

The Cairo Geniza's contents are scattered among dozens of libraries and private collections. It i... more The Cairo Geniza's contents are scattered among dozens of libraries and private collections. It is not uncommon to find two halves of a page divided by an ocean, as Hoffman and Cole put it. How to reunite the fragments? This lecture outlines three methods of finding joins: the old-fashioned, artisanal way — visual memory (warning: your hippocampus may feel the strain); algorithms developed in the field of computer visualization; and paying close attention to medieval scribal habits.

Asked to speak about the promise of digital technology for Geniza research for a second year in a... more Asked to speak about the promise of digital technology for Geniza research for a second year in a row, I expanded on my talk from Schoenberg VIII and reflected on the utility and limitations of facial-recognition software for finding manuscript joins—vs the artisinal, old-fashioned method.

For years, scholars dismissed the Arabic on text fragments from Cairo’s genizah as unimportant sc... more For years, scholars dismissed the Arabic on text fragments from Cairo’s genizah as unimportant scribbling. Then along came Marina Rustow, bona fide ‘genius.’

Imagine my delight when I found myself up in the stratosphere with Bernie Sanders and Amy Schumer.

The Princeton Geniza Lab is expanding. Details in our first newsletter.