Ghosh on the Geniza documents
By Michele Alperin
April 11, 2008

Amitav Ghosh, an Indian-Bengali writer and social anthropologist, gave the 30th-annual Drucker Lecture, titled "The Making of 'In an Antique Land': India, Egypt, and the Cairo Geniza" on March 25 at Princeton University. The lecture is in memory of Princeton student Carolyn Drucker, who died tragically at the end of her sophomore year as she was preparing to major in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

In his introduction, Mark Cohen, professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, talked about how Ghosh came to Princeton in the spring of 1988, hoping to meet Shelomo Dov Goitein, who had analyzed thousands of medieval letters, legal documents, and other historical fragments discovered in the Cairo Geniza at the end of the 19th century. Unfortunately, Goitein, who had been part of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, had died three years before.

So instead Ghosh worked with Cohen, who was director of the Princeton University Geniza Project. Cohen, who introduced Ghosh, had at first thought Ghosh must be Israeli, Amitav being a popular Israeli name and Abu Ghosh being a small town on the outskirts of Jerusalem with popular ethnic restaurants. A friendship developed between the two men, and Cohen wrote the introduction to Ghosh's book, "In an Antique Land," that weaves his experiences as a graduate student in Egypt with the saga of a 12th-century Jewish merchant and his Indian slave derived from Geniza documents.

Ghosh's book, which was translated into many languages, turned out to be great PR for the Geniza documents, and Cohen said half-jokingly, "I predicted that 'In an Antique Land' would do more to disseminate knowledge of the Geniza than I or any other scholar, and I was correct."

Ghosh spoke about the process of writing this book. When he went to prepare the Princeton lecture, he said, he remembered a few travel journals he wanted to leaf through, but encountered instead 15 closely written volumes that detailed each step along the way.

Ghosh wanted to be a novelist but opted for graduate school at Oxford in 1979, "as a way of seeing the world. I felt I lacked the richness of experience." He had already tried a couple of years earlier to accumulate some experience of foreign lands; he contacted about 30 embassies asking that they hire him as a teacher, but the few responses he received were negative. "The word 'travel,' when applied to young men from poor countries," he explained, "had the connotation of immigration, not expanding one's mind."

While at Oxford, Ghosh had chanced upon a letter from the Cairo Geniza that ended up influencing his academic and novelistic futures. "Reading the Goitein translation of a letter by a 12th-century Jewish merchant caught my attention, because of the resonance with my own experience delighting in a world new to me," he said. 

After finishing his courses at Oxford, Ghosh had to decide where to do his fieldwork. He was expected to return to India, he said, but had no interest in going home. He decided instead to go to Egypt, both because of the medieval letter and the longstanding trade relationship between Egypt and India. "I wanted to go to a place where I could find deep and textual connections with my own world," he said.

When he arrived in the small farming village of Lataifa in the spring of 1980, his proficiency in Arabic was limited to stringing together a few words, but he learned quickly.

The villagers expressed daily concern over his spiritual state. When a young man named Hamdi asked him what his father would think if he converted to Islam, Ghosh remembered thinking, "Although I was brought up in an observant Hindu family, then and now it was of a secular frame of mind." And he added from the perspective of today, "I'm more attached to it when I look at the havoc brought about by fundamentalisms that have taken root."

Ghosh eventually realized that the daily barrage of suggestions that he convert to Islam grew out of a genuine concern for his well-being. But it was also due to his being a total outsider to Egyptian village culture. "I was a creature out of place, an apparently reasonable man who would not embrace a set of beliefs that they thought inherently valid," he said. "Every society has its own way of telling an outsider of their 'alienness'."

That sense of being an outsider often becomes difficult for budding anthropologists, Ghosh explained, and it eventually became a burden for him, too. "The cumulative weight of these questions became in time almost unbearably oppressive, almost traumatic," he recalled. So he wrote his thesis at breakneck speed, returned to India, and got started on his first book, "Circle of Reason," which was published in 1986 and finished "The Shadow Lines" two years later.

But even as he pursued the life of a novelist back in his home territory, the village where he had done his fieldwork, Lataifa, would not leave him alone. "I was haunted by it, and I would dream that I was back in the village," he said.

Ghosh already knew he would have to write about Lataifa to make peace with it when he visited the United States in 1988. He also knew that the letters of the merchant Abraham ben Yiju, the Egyptian Jewish merchant who did business in India, would be his point of the departure. It would be the story of a North African in India and of an Indian slave in Cairo and would be overlaid with the depth and color of his Lataifa experience.

But when he came to Princeton, Mark Cohen, who was the custodian of the Goitein papers, told him that Goitein's translations of the Geniza letters were already with a publisher. Then Cohen suggested that Ghosh should himself translate the letters he needed.

Ghosh left feeling he was being made fun of -- after all, he didn't know medieval Judeo-Arabic and couldn't read Hebrew. It took seeing the Geniza itself in the synagogue in Egypt to make him realize that Cohen had been serious and to decide to take on the task of translating the Geniza letters.

A few months after his visit to Princeton he was in Cairo and visited the synagogue of Ben Ezra, where the Geniza resided. He described approaching it from a narrow dirt track that ended at a gate with a Star of David emblazoned on its grille. An elderly caretaker, wearing Egyptian clothes, showed Ghosh around. Although the building was in poor shape, he called it "the most romantic, picturesque place I've ever been -- completely enchanting."

The Geniza opening was a rectangular hole in the synagogue wall, an antechamber where centuries of congregants had deposited any paper that included the name of God. It had not been disturbed until the late-19th-century rebuilding of the synagogue.

Once Ghosh had decided in 1989 that translating the documents by himself wasn't such a bad idea after all, he applied for visa to Cambridge, where they were held. When his application was first denied, he joked that "they thought my reason was the most hilariously transparent ruse any aspiring illegal alien had come up with."

Eventually after protesting, writing letters, and working through some connections, "Her Majesty's government relented," said Ghosh.

That summer Ghosh met Menachem Ben Sasson, the custodian of the Geniza collection, who welcomed him. Using Joshua Blau's "Handbook of Judeo-Arabic," Ghosh said that "at first nothing made sense, but slowly the script began to acquire recognizable shapes and contours."

Then came the breakthrough, "I remember the day when the string of words made sense; it was as if I was listening to a mine shaft that reached 800 years into the past." And the dialect seemed uncannily similar to him to the Arabic he had spoken in Lataifa.