by Moshe Yagur, Jerusalem

My current project examines spatial realities of Jewish life in the medieval Islamic cities of the eastern Mediterranean, mostly Egypt and greater-Syria, from the late 10^th to the late 15^th centuries. It is well known that Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived side by side in these cities, without a clear separation along religious lines. There was also no clear zoning of the medieval Mediterranean Islamic city to residential, commercial, industrial, and public zones. And so, Jews, Muslims and Christians lived, worked, and traded with each other in the same neighborhoods, alleys, and small courtyards, between mosques, synagogues, and churches. The aim of my current project is first to document this reality, which until today was seen as self-evident and has not received proper scholarly attention, and then to analyze these daily, individual interactions around residential areas as an arena for inter-religious encounters.

If residential areas were mixed, then what did contemporary Jews and non-Jews mean when using the term ‘Jewish neighborhood’? What do we, as modern scholars, mean and imagine when applying this term in our research? Indeed, to what extent were the dwelling places ‘mixed’ at all? Can we try and reconstruct their environment? Here the documents of the Cairo Geniza can provide us with the minutiae of medieval everyday life that are rarely preserved elsewhere. The Cairo Geniza documents can be augmented with other medieval literary sources of various genres in Hebrew, Arabic and Judeo-Arabic, written by Jews, Muslims and Christians, and with information from archaeological excavations. Taken together, these sources can flesh out the historical intricacies of living in shared neighborhoods. Revealing various details, viewpoints, and daily dilemmas, this corpus enables us to test the methodological and theoretical assumptions that modern scholars have come to hold.

While the data needed for a statistical survey of dwelling choices among medieval Jews is still lacking, we can already make some observations based on the information gathered from documents in the Cairo Geniza. For example, legal deeds of sale or lease of real estate usually include a description of properties or landmarks on the four cardinal directions surrounding the discussed property, as part of the description of the property’s boundaries. I have gathered 42 such legal deeds concerning real estate sold, leased, or bought by Jews in Fustat and Cairo from the 10^th-13^th centuries, which mention at least one neighbor (sometimes the document is torn, or the boundary description is missing, or one of the ‘neighbors’ is the alley itself). Out of the 42 documents, 26 mention at least one non-Jewish neighbor in the immediate vicinity of the property. 13 of them include more than one such neighbor. 11 documents mention only neighbors whose religious identity was not specified and whose names do not suggest their religious affiliation (in itself another marker of the deep acculturation in the medieval middle east). Only 5 documents include merely Jewish neighbors, and most of these documents are torn so they include only 1 or 2 neighbors in each document. If we count by individual neighbors mentioned in the said legal deeds, out of a total of 102 individual neighbors, 36 are not identified by religious affiliation. The remaining 66 neighbors are divided quite equally between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and include even one Samaritan.

According to the corpus of legal deeds cited above, inter-religious ‘mixture’ was the norm, not the exception – at least in Fustat-Cairo. This is thus far corroborated by other evidence, for example the various neighborhoods and streets mentioned as the dwelling places of individual Jews, which means they were not restricting themselves to a specific neighborhood or a cluster of streets there.

Once we have problematized the construct of a ̔Jewish neighborhoodʼ, we can start discerning patterns and changes across time and space. While this term is recurring quite often concerning medieval Jerusalem or Alexandria (in Judeo-Arabic ḥārat al-yahūd, or simply al-ḥāra, ̔the neighborhoodʼ), I did not encounter it even once in the sources concerning Fustat and Cairo in the classical period of the Geniza, from the late 10^th to the mid-13^th century. While their contemporary associates and relatives in Alexandria or Jerusalem used it often to describe their dwelling, ̔mixedʼ as it was, the people of Fustat-Cairo chose not to use it. What does it teach us about their perception for their city, their place in the urban fabric, the boundaries of their Jewish identity? And should we, as modern scholars, use the term ̔Jewish neighborhoodʼ when discussing medieval Fustat, if the residents of medieval Fustat did not?

My research is limited to the main urban centers of Egypt and greater-Syria during the 10^th to the 15^th centuries, under the Fatimids, the Ayyubids and the Mamluks. Most of the information comes from cities such as Fustat and Cairo, Alexandria, Kairouan, Ramla, Jerusalem and Tiberias. In these cities we are fortunate to have a combination of literary sources, Geniza documents, and archaeological information at our disposal. This can be compared to other cities from which the information is more scarce, such as Damascus, Tyre, or Gaza. 

My research is not limited to describing the phenomenon of shared dwelling, or even to discussing its implications for inter-religious interaction in the individual, private, domestic level. The wealth of bottom-up information from the Cairo Geniza, and its augmentation with archaeological data, provides us with what I call a ̔Geniza Street Viewʼ on medieval urban life in the Islamic middle east, beyond the issue of inter-religious interaction. Cairo Geniza documents mention not only dwelling courtyards but also shops, workshops, bathhouses, mills, markets, government offices, and even agricultural plots – all huddled together side-by-side. Most of this information is usually lacking, or given very sparingly at best, in other medieval literary sources. Thus, the literary sources give us the view from above, compared to a two-dimensional map. The fine details of the Cairo Geniza documents allow us the ̔street viewʼ, so to speak, the bottom-up view, compared to Googleʼs sort-of three-dimensional feature. This opens for us a window to the fabric of urban neighborhoods, the nature of urban life, what constituted an average alley, street, or neighborhood, what services one might expect to find or provide, etc. In so doing, I hope my research will be of interest beyond medieval Jewish studies or the study of the Islamic Mediterranean, to questions of urban studies on the one hand, and to questions of a comparative nature concerning other times and places.

Moshe Yagur is a social historian of the Jewish communities of the medieval Islamic Middle East, focusing on inter-religious interaction and the construction of individual identity and communal boundaries. His dissertation (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2018) dealt with conversion to and from Judaism in medieval Egypt and the Levant. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Haifa, University of Michigan, Ben Gurion University and Tel Aviv University. Starting on October 2022 he will be a post-doctoral fellow in the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University. Since 2020 he is an adjunct lecturer at the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar Ilan University. He also initiated and runs the Facebook page ̔Cairo Geniza – History of Everyday Lifeʼ (in Hebrew).

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