Arabic-Speaking Jews in Crusader Syria: Conquest, Continuity and Adaptation in the Medieval Mediterranean

Crusades;Crusader states;Cairo Geniza;Mediterranean History;Jewish History;Medieval Near East;Medieval Europe;History

Goldman, Brendan GPrincipe, Lawrence ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Crusades;    Crusader states;    Cairo Geniza;    Mediterranean History;    Jewish History;    Medieval Near East;    Medieval Europe;    History;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/60033/GOLDMAN-DISSERTATION-2018.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

This project asks: What can the documents of Jewish Syrians teach us about the ways medieval Near Easterners experienced the conquest and regime change of the First Crusade? It analyzes the conquest’s impact on five spheres of Jewish communal life: demographics, minority-state relations, commerce, the law and religious authority.Most of the existing literature on the First Crusade has assumed that the Franks eliminated Greater Syria’s Jewish and Muslim communities.The Cairo Genizah documents, however, demonstrate that large numbers of Jews remained in the Latin ports after the First Crusade. Moreover, these Jewish Syrians were neither segregated from European Christians nor limited to specific professions (with some very rare exceptions). They traded with Frankish merchants and served as tax-collectors and physicians for Latin lords. The Jews of Latin Syria are a particularly helpful case-study because they adhered to a different religion from either the conquering Christians or the vanquished Muslims. But far from embracing Latin-Christian culture, Jews continued to speak and write Arabic and issue Arabic legal documents throughout the nearly two-centuries of Frankish rule of the Levant (1098-1291).This seems paradoxical: Why would a community integrated into the economic and social life of its kingdom decline to adopt the language of its rulers? The answer I have found is practical necessity: After the First Crusade, the Jews of the Latin-ruled Levant continued to seek out commercial partnerships with Arabophone merchants from Cairo, Damascus and Palermo; they continued to solicit religious guidance from clergymen in Baghdad, Mosul and Fustat; and they continued to patronize religious institutions in Iraq, Islamic Syria and Egypt. In other words, they remained part of a broader, Eastern Mediterranean koinē.