We are different, we are the same
The details matter but so does the connection
Hello and welcome back to Coffee with Clio,
It is finally Spring in Yorkshire. Today I heard the first blackbird of the year singing its dusk chorus and the crocuses are in bloom. It seems strange to admit but when I was younger I don’t remember really noticing the seasons. I have odd memories that are definitely from wintertime (snowmen!) and from summertime (the beach!) but mostly I remember things by other markers: what school year was I in, then which university was I at or which house was I living in then?
These days I do notice. I think it was lockdown that made the difference. I learned to pay attention to the changes right in front of me and now the change from Winter into Spring always lifts my mood.
Despite all of this sunshine and happiness, though, the story I have for you this week is a sad one. Sorry about that. I was going to write about travel and distance and that post will be coming your way soon, but then I read something that grabbed me so powerfully I had to share it with you.
You see, this week I was doing some readings for a group I’m part of. It is dedicated to Indian Ocean studies but with a historical focus a bit later than the period I usually look at. I love it: interesting, fun people and the nudge to read things that I might not normally or to read familiar things in new ways.
This time, we’d each been given a list of documents to search for references to a specific port. Our plan is to see how this port was managed, what was traded through it and anything else we can pick up.
For once, though, that is enough background. Often, I stack a lot up before we get to the really amazing stuff in the sources because the ancient and medieval world was very different. It can need some cultural translation (as well as literal translation!) to make sense of. Sometimes, though, the past reaches across centuries and smacks you right in the face and we can get to the details afterwards. Of course they help. Of course they are important, but for right now, here is a letter written in around 1170:
To my beloved brother R. Moses, son of R. Maimōn, may the memory of the righteous be blessed.
[From] David, your brother who is longing for you -- may God unite me with you under the most happy circumstances in his grace.
I am writing this letter from ʿAydhāb [a port in modern Sudan]. I am well, but my mind is very much troubled, so that I walk around in the bazaar and do not know -- by our religion -- where I am, nor how come that I did not imagine how much you must worry about me.
This is my story: I reached Qūṣ [a town in modern Egypt] and after Passover I booked for ʿAydhāb in a caravan. [There is a bit missing here that mentions Luxor, also in Egypt, so probably the caravan travelled there or David had travelled there beforehand?] So we traveled alone out of fear of him [probably a customs officer?]. No one has ever dared to embark on such a disastrous undertaking. I did it only because of my complete ignorance. But God saved us after many frightful encounters, to describe which would lead me too far afield. When we were in the desert, we regretted what we had done, but the matter had gone out of our hands. Yet God had willed that we should be saved. We arrived in ʿAydhāb safely with our entire baggage. We were unloading our things at the city gate, when the caravans arrived. Their passengers had been robbed and wounded and some had died of thirst. Among them was Ibn al-Rashīdī, but he was unharmed. We preceded him only slightly and there was only a small distance between us and those who were robbed. We were saved only because we had taken upon ourselves those frightful experiences. All day long I imagine how you must feel when you hear about ʿAṭāʾ Allāh Ibn al-Rashīdī, how he was robbed, and you believe that I was in his company. Then God comes between me and my reason.
To make a long story short: I arrived in ʿAydhāb and found that no imports had come here at all. I found nothing to buy except indigo. So I thought about what I had endured in the desert and how I was saved; then it appeared to me an easy matter to embark on a sea voyage [from ʿAydhāb to India]. I took Manṣūr as my travel companion, but not Maʿānī, for all my troubles came only from him; you know the man and how he behaves. Once, if God will, I shall tell you all that happened between us on our way from Fustat [near Cairo, in Egypt] to ʿAydhāb.
My company in the Malabar sea [the Western Indian Ocean between the Red Sea and India] will be [some names are missing here], Sālim, the son of the (female) broker and his brother's son, Makārim al-Ḥarīrī and his brother, and the brother of Sitt Ghazāl. But Maʿānī embarked, together with Ibn al-Kuwayyis on another ship, and Bu ʾl-ʿAlā remains in Dahlak [in modern Eritrea], since the ship in which he traveled foundered, but he was saved and absolutely nothing of his baggage was lost. Ibn ʿAṭiyya, however, was in another boat, together with Ibn al-Maqdisī. Their boat foundered and only their dinars [gold coins] remained with them.
Now despite all this, do not worry. He who saved me from the desert with its [words missing: presumably ‘dangers’!], will save me while on sea. [Something is missing here that mentions the desert and sea] And, please, calm the heart of the little one [a common term of endearment for wives or daughters] and her sister; do not frighten them and let them not despair, for crying to God for what has passed is a vain prayer. I am doing all this out of my continuous efforts for your material well-being [referring to ‘you’ in the plural, i.e., the whole family], although you [this time in the singular, i.e. ‘you my brother’] have never imposed on me anything of the kind. So be steadfast; God will replace your losses and bring me back to you. Anyhow, what has passed, is past, and I am sure, this letter will reach you at a time when I, God willing, shall have already made most of the way. "But the counsel of God alone will stand." Our departure will probably be around the middle of Ramaḍān.
I shall travel with [a name is missing]. Tell this to his uncle, and also that he is fine. Abraham is fine. Best regards to you, to Bū ʿAli and his brother, to the elder Bū Manṣūr and his brothers, to my sisters and the boys, to all our friends, to the freedman, and Maḥāsin.
Written on the 22nd of Iyyar, while the express caravan is on the point of leaving.
I have edited this very lightly for readability. Mainly, I have taken out brackets indicating reconstructed letters. I’ve also removed translations of people’s names and nicknames. These often meant things, like ‘God’s Gift’ (ʿAṭāʾ Allāh, incidentally also the meaning of Theodore/Theodora) and ‘Silk Merchant’ (al-Ḥarīrī). As interesting and important as these details are, they can also mess up the flow. The full transcription and translation and lots of other details can be found here, including images of the letter, which will immediately explain why there are some bits missing and why some letters have had to be reconstructed.
Still, what stands out for me, as I read this letter for the fourth time this week, is how little editing it needs to be ready for your historical coffee break. There are plenty of details packed in or hiding at the edges, but right in the middle of it all we have a man writing to his elder brother, letting him know that yes, his business trip went really, really badly - that he nearly died, in fact - but that this actually turned out better than getting robbed, which is what would have happened if he’d followed the original plan. David now realises how much his brother must have been worrying about him all this time and feels extremely guilty about that. It is almost driving him mad, but still…
David seems like a brother Moses might have worried about a lot. I felt my stomach tighten with stress as I read the final paragraphs. ‘I know I went off plan and nearly died in the desert, but now I’m going on an unplanned trip to India and seriously, don’t worry. It’ll be fine! By the way, have you heard that two of our friends were recently involved in shipwrecks? But, seriously, it’ll be fine! Absolutely fine. God looked after me in the desert so what could go wrong? Nothing to worry about. And anyway, I’m doing this to make us all rich. Hugs to everyone back home!'
It wasn’t fine.
This is the last letter David sent to Moses. His shipwreck in the Indian Ocean cost him his life and my heart broke imagining Moses looking back over these words, wanting to scream at his irrepressible, irresponsible, beloved baby brother.
We don’t have to imagine that either, though, because we also have a letter that Moses later wrote about it:
The greatest misfortune that has befallen me during my entire life—worse than anything else—was the demise of the saint, may his memory be blessed, who drowned in the Indian sea, carrying much money belonging to me, to him, and to others, and left with me a little daughter and a widow. On the day I received that terrible news I fell ill and remained in bed for about a year, suffering from a sore boil, fever, and depression, and was almost given up. About eight years have passed, but I am still mourning and unable to accept consolation. And how should I console myself? He grew up on my knees, he was my brother, and he was my student.
Sometimes history is heartbreaking. Life and death, love and grief thread the past and the present together. They are realities of human life that have the power to transcend myths about how different we are from each other.
They can also open a window onto the strangenesses of other worlds. We may all be very alike but the details matter and caring about those details - feeling our way into attitudes, routines and ideas unlike our own - is an effort. I still remember the moments that made me into a historian - those incredible revelations that the people of the past were not just shadows on a wall but whole, complex individuals. Those moments provided the motivation to dig deeper, to understand the details, to do the hard work. I think of them as the historian’s equivalent of the most effective known motivation for learning a foreign language: date somebody who speaks it! (Honest. There’s research to prove it.) That connection to each other has a power like nothing else to make us do difficult things.
So, let’s dig a little deeper into the world of David and Moses, following brotherly love into the unfamiliar.
The chances are quite good that you have already heard of one of these brothers, even if you may not know much about him (or you may!). If you have ever heard of Maimonides (usually pronounced ‘My-MON-id-ees’ in English) then you have heard of Moses. He was a remarkable man.
He was born in 1138 in Córdoba, now in the south of Spain. In the twelfth century it was in the Almoravid Empire. The Almoravids were a Muslim dynasty, ruling over a majority Christian population but with large Muslim and Jewish communities. Moses belonged to the latter. It was an exciting place for a clever child to be born: Córdoba was a rich city where lots of different languages and traditions met.
Moses excelled academically. Over his lifetime he would write major works of medicine, astronomy and philosophy. His writings on Jewish law and theology are still hugely important. His works brought together ideas from across the Mediterranean and its cultures, including the Greek philosophy of Aristotle and the medical works of Ibn Sina (who you may also have heard of as Avicenna) as well as from his own deep and broad Jewish education.
He also seems to have been, from his letters and other writings, an extremely kind, encouraging and humble man, glad to give credit to others, to connect people across his networks and to question his own ideas. Honestly, he’s just one of those people who make the rest of us feel as if we could do better! (And that isn’t a bad thing.)
Despite its importance in his early education, though, he didn’t write many of his most important works in Córdoba. In 1148, the city was taken over by another Muslim dynasty known as the Almohads, who had different attitudes to religious tolerance. Faced with the demand to convert to Islam, Moses and his family left, settling again in what is now Morocco. This was still within the Almohad’s territory, but presumably far enough from their power centre to take the heat off, at least for a while. In 1168, though, the family was on the move again, this time to Acre (and you can read more from me about the remains of the city he would have encountered there) and then Fustat in Egypt, which is where Moses was when David wrote his last letter to him.
Moses spent the rest of his life in Fustat, where he continued to write but also organised fundraising to ransom back Jews taken prisoner by Christian Crusaders and eventually becoming the official leader of the Jewish community in Egypt. He died there in 1204 at the age of 66 and as I wrote this post, I realised that I was used to imagining him as an elderly man. And it isn’t just me. There’s a definitely tendency to stereotype scholars as older men, often with beards. On top of that, when people are celebrated for their achievements, it’s quite common (and reasonable!) for that to involve picturing them in their later life, when they had actually achieved all of those things. Nevertheless, he wasn’t always.
That brings us to David, Moses’s more adventurous (reckless?!) younger brother. We don’t know how much younger he was, but Moses was only around ten years old when the Almohads took over Córdoba and David, apparently, used to sit on his brother’s knee, so for David his earliest memories must have been of disruption, uncertainty and movement. He grew up in North Africa, then the Levant and then Egypt. He became a merchant rather than a scholar and, as his last letter to his brother shows, he clearly felt fairly confident with the uncertainties of travel and the risks of business.
David talks about a wide network of associates, friends and relatives, giving the impression of a man with contacts in every port, Jewish and Muslim alike. We will never know exactly what happened between David and Maʿānī on their way from Fustat, which he says he will tell his brother all about when he returns from India. There is something about the tone of his letter, though, that makes me think David would have turned it into a good story, whatever it was, told over a long dinner with fine wine and guffaws of laughter. Moses would have sat back, happy and relaxed (and relieved).
I’m projecting here. It’s hard to help. I’m the older sibling and the scholar. My baby brother (now taller than me and a well-established professional but still my baby brother) has always been quicker to take a chance, more exuberant and a teller of hilarious tales. For a moment I can feel myself slide into that happy reunion dinner that was never to be. Perhaps when they were children, Moses also felt envious sometimes of his younger sibling’s sunnier disposition, derring-do and stacks of friends. In around 1170 though, Moses would have been just a bit younger than I am now, David perhaps just a bit younger than my brother. It’s hard not to imagine them, long past those childish conflicts, as two adults joyful and comfortable around each other’s differences. My brother, too, has a wife and a ‘little daughter’. And for Moses, David would forever be that hearty raconteur, a man in his thirties, full of tall tales and unquenchable optimism for the next great deal.
My heart breaks again. The details, the differences and the sameness slip through and past each other. Centuries, continents, religions, languages: details that matter, differences that make a life unique. But also brothers, nieces, thinkers and adventurers: they could be us and one day we them.
We have these deeply personal letters because of an amazing trove of documents, that I’ve also written about here, often referred to as the Cairo geniza. It wasn’t really an archive. Archives are places for keeping things. The geniza was the opposite: a huge waste bin. It was where members of the medieval Jewish community in Egypt could dump documents that might have the name of God written on them. Because it was in the synagogue and not just a regular rubbish tip, they could dispose of stuff without having to worry about accidentally disrespecting the name of God.
Around 400,000 documents have been recovered from the geniza, now spread across museums worldwide. They include lists, contracts, letters and inventories. Many, like this letter, are written in Judaeo-Arabic, or Arabic with lots of words and phrases specific to the Jewish networks in Egypt, with lots of Hebrew in it.
There will be more from the geniza coming up in Coffee with Clio because, with so much material, the possibilities are endless. Because it was not an official archive, the views it opens into life are often much more intimate and everyday. The sheer number of records make it possible to do statistical analysis. I’m still working on the reading group project to track down references to a specific port, but one of the reasons I love writing to you every week is because it isn’t about long-term projects or staying on goal. It is about pausing to remember why any of that is worth doing in the first place: the hard work to understand people in all their differences matters because of what connects us. We are worth understanding because we all matter and because we’re a lot alike!