with Jane Hathaway

hosted by Maryam Patton

| What can a single, discarded scrap of paper reveal about life in Ottoman-era Cairo? In this episode, Jane Hathaway discusses her open-access book Ottoman-Era Documents from the Cairo Genizah. A genizah is a storeroom or repository where Jewish communities preserved worn-out texts and papers, especially those containing the name of God. Long famous for its medieval Jewish materials, the Cairo Genizah also preserves a rich and still understudied corpus of later Arabic- and Ottoman Turkish-script documents. The conversation explores some of this archive’s unexpected Ottoman afterlife, from Sharia court summaries and commercial records to petition letters, Sufi poetry, and an ilm-i hal primer on Islamic practice. The book, which presents the documents fully transcribed and translated with a scholarly commentary, sheds light on Jewish merchants and bankers, Ottoman officials, port customs in Damietta and Alexandria, sugar supplies bound for Istanbul, and the dense networks linking Cairo to the wider empire, and much more. The conversation also invites us to reflect on archives themselves: how documents survive, how scholars decipher them, and how collaborative reading can open new windows onto Ottoman and Jewish history.   

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