Ottoman History Podcast - The Ottoman Genizah

Episode Date: May 23, 2026

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.    « Click for More »

Welcome back to the Ottoman History podcast. I'm your host, Marion Patton, and it's my pleasure today to introduce you to our latest guest, Jane Hathaway, here to discuss her new book on Ottoman documents of the Cairo Ganesa. Jane Hathaway is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at Ohio State University. She received her PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1992, where her interest in the medieval Geniza began under the direction of Mark Cohen. She's a specialist in the early modern history of the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman Arab provinces, the Ottoman chief harem unic, and Jewish communities under Muslim rule. Her many publications include The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt, The Rise of the Khazdalas, a tale of two factions, myth, memory, and identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen, the chief eunuch of the Ottoman harem from African slave to powerbroker,

and the Arab lands under Ottoman rule, 1516 to 1800, as well as scores of articles and book chapters on related topics and on reactions in Egypt and Yemen to the movement of the Jewish messianic figure Sabadai Zavi. Today we'll be speaking about her book, Ottoman-era documents from the Cairoganiza, which is freely available through an open-source agreement between Cambridge Semitic Languages and Culture Series and Open Book publishers. Thank you very much, Jane, for coming on to the podcast. Thank you, Miriam. So I thought we would just begin with an overview of what is a Geniza. Okay, I will start with the Cairo Geniza and then move from the specific to the general. The Cairo Geniza is the famous collection of documents related to the Jewish community of Egypt, more specifically Cairo,

over a thousand-year period from the 10th century through the late 19th. At the end of the 19th century, the documents were removed from Cairo by various scholars and antiquarians and relocated to various collections in Europe and the United States, which is where they are today. The Cairoganiza is ordinarily associated with the bin-ezra synagogue, which is a pre-Islamic structure. It's still there in Stats, which today is a far southern neighborhood of the megalopolis, that is, today's Cairo. There was a special storeroom that was added to the synagogue, apparently, in the 10th century, and old documents were put in there. It was like a recycling bin that was never emptied. These were old documents, and this gets me into Ganesas in general.

There is the notion in many Jewish congregations that you don't destroy documents, papers, other materials that contain the name of God or allusions to him. So many synagogues today, including here in the United States, have sort of small G. Ganesas, that is cupboards or storerooms where they collect the... things like old prayer books, ritual objects like worn out philactories and things like that, or they make a call to the congregation to bring your old materials in by a certain date. So they gathered them and then they take them out to bury in a cemetery, not with bodies, but in a special section of a Jewish cemetery reserved for what are called paper graves. And in fact, we now know largely thanks to the work of Rebecca Jefferson,

who's a librarian at the University of Florida, that what we call the Cairoganesa is actually an amalgam of materials from the Ben-Ezeros synagogue's storeroom, from various Jewish cemeteries, above all the Bocetine Cemetery in southeastern Cairo, and from other synagogues. So it's really a kind of hodgepodge, and the collection process, which is what Rebecca Jefferson studied, was very, very haphazard. I've called it a paper version of the Scramble for Africa. these orientalists and antiquarians competing with each other to see who could get the most Hebrew manuscripts, as they called them.

And they got them from everywhere, not just the Ben-Ezeres Synagogue. So what this means is that the prominence of many of these documents can be a little bit problematic. We can't just assume that they all come from the Ben-Ezra Synagogue. In general, what kinds of documents do we see ending up in Genesea collections? Yeah, the medieval corpus. And by medieval corpus, I mean documents mainly from, the 11th through the, let's say, mid-13th century common era. During that time, the Ben-Ezer Synagogue really was more of a hub of Jewish communal life in the Greater Cairo area. And you

see all kinds of documents, literary, things like variant books of the Bible, most famously perhaps the letters and response of the great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, who was the head of the Jewish community in Cairo and Pustadt in the later years of his life. Poetry by eminent poets like Judah Halavi, Jewish court cases, Muslim court cases, commercial letters of all kinds, charitable lists, lists of people who receive loaves of bread, impoverished members of the Jewish community who receive loaves of bread, that kind of thing. For the Ottoman period, because the focus of Jewish life had shifted away from Pustadt, you don't see so many papers of luminaries. And of course, I am actually working on Arabic script documents

for reasons I can get into in a minute, rather than documents in Judeo-Arabic, which is Arabic written in Hebrew script. So the documents I've seen are often related to the Ottoman governing apparatus, so Sharia court summaries, petitions to governing officials, letters to governing officials, often the governor of Egypt to the extent we can tell. Again, commercial letters of all kinds, documents related to port customs, above all in Damietta and Alexandria, and some of the stranger finds, which I can get into in more detail later on, Sufi poetry in Ottoman Turkish, which I absolutely was not expecting, and a work of Il Mihal, a primer on Islamic practice, also in Ottoman Turkish. So that's a very important.

pretty wide range of genres and text. And so I actually brought up the chiroganese in a course I was teaching on the medieval Mediterranean only a few weeks ago. And I perhaps was a little simplistic in how I presented it to my students as being a place where documents that have the mention of the name of God get thrown out because you have to revere the text. Is that a fair characterization or is that overly simplistic? That's the explanation I usually use. I think there was more to it. And I think particularly in the Ottoman period, I've written and said in talks that it comes to have more the character of a rather haphazardly organized archive. And that is because, again, the focus of Jewish life had shipped it outside Fustad. And yet the Benazra synagogue had a kind of reputation as a place where you took old documents, apparently, at least until the chamber was sealed.

And the Basotian Cemetery, similarly, had a reputation. is a place where you went to bury Jewish documents. So when a luminary from the Jewish community died, usually up in Al-Qahara, the original Thadamid Cemetery, in some cases his important papers, and it was usually his important papers, not her important papers, would be collected and taken all the way to Fustadt

to the Benazara Synagogue, or alternatively to the Basitin Cemetery or other cemeteries. So there is a kind of quasi-archival process, we could say, at work here, it goes beyond just preserving the name of God in a document, although that may have been part of it still, but also preserving the papers of important members of the community. And to clarify for our readers, these are papers not codices. There's no books in this collection. It's papers that and papyrus largely, or do we also see like cotton paper? No, it is paper for the most part. There are some of the very early Ganesa documents, like the earliest in the collection from the 10th century and maybe earlier are on papyrus. But yes, even by the 10th century, papyrus and parchment, there is a fair amount of

parchment and vellum in the medieval corpus, but there's also a great deal of paper, and by the Ottoman period, it's almost all paper. You ask about books, and that's an interesting question. I would say most of these documents, both medieval and Ottoman era, are loose papers, although it's clear that the literary material from the medieval period, some of it does come from books. And there is the Ilmi Hal work in particular. It's clear that it was supposed to be folded together or even sewn together into a little pamphlet, at least. you can see marks where thread would have gone in,

and the folios are not consecutive. In other words, you have to take four folios and fold them together to get consecutive text. I really appreciated about your book that I had the images of the documents, some of them, the transcriptions, and I remember the Il Mihal. You're right, looking, you know,

like a very nice text, not something you throw out necessarily. Right, it's very clearly written, nice, clear Ottoman hand, fully voweled, very simple language. And another trend you pointed out in your book, which gets to this materiality question of the, you know, transition away from papyrus more towards paper, is the reusing of paper, right? You mentioned how the earlier, older corpus, we see

lots of different hands, lots of different texts or writings on one piece of paper. And by the later period, the autumn era, paper's abundance means people are perhaps less precious about reusing these texts. Is that fair to say? That's certainly part of the reason. It is true. One of the most famous or infamous features of the medieval Genese corpus is the reuse of paper. You know, S.D. Goitaine, arguably the greatest scholar of the medieval Geniza ever, famously pointed out documents in which you might have, for example, a letter from Maimonides on the recto that is the front side of the document, what we would call A in Ottoman Studies. And then in the margin, you might have a grocery list or the beginnings of a commercial letter

from a much later period, different script, etc. And on the verso, the flip side, you might have something completely different as well. Sometimes the blank parts of the paper were cut off so that they could be available for later writing. Sometimes the Jewish community bought trances of used Fatimid Caliphate government documents to reuse, not just like,

kind of like declassified papers and they were just right between the lines, Marina Rosto's second major book, The Lost Archive, essentially reconstructs the Fatimid Royal Archive from these papers that were reused by the Jewish community. And it's astonishing to see these widely spaced lines of formal Arabic script. And then the paper is turned sideways and someone will write in Judeo-Arabic or Hebrew. Part of the reason for that has to be the paper had not been available in the Middle East for very long at that time. and so it was much more scarce.

For the Ottoman period, it's much more abundant. It's being imported from Venice and other parts of Europe. It's being produced in Ottoman territory, but also the selection process that I spoke of a minute ago, where you're not just throwing everything into the Ben-Ezeres' storeroom. And I'm not saying that everything, everything, was thrown in in the medieval period, but a much wider range of material.

But you're seeing a sort of quasi-archival process. There's greater selection of what goes in. in the process of identifying and selecting the text that you end up including in the book, could you tell us some of your favorite discoveries or surprises in reading these documents and trying to make sense of them? Well, the obvious place to start is with the first document that appears in the book. It's a chapter of documents from Damietta, the Mediterranean Port under the Ottomans. And the first one is a Sharia court case from 1538 from Damietta, describing repayment of a debt

to the Jewish luminary Abraham Castro, who was the director of Egypt's mint in the early years of Ottoman rule and who very famously fled to Istanbul when the governor Ahmed Pasha, known as Hayin Ahmed Pasha, rebelled against Suleiman the Magnificent. Castro fled to Istanbul to warn the sultan of this revolt,

and after the revolt was put down, he was apparently given even more power than he already had, and according to some accounts basically ended up, up running Egypt himself. I guess we can take that with a grain of salt. In any case, this particular document, it's from the University of Pennsylvania Center for Advanced Udaic Studies Collection. It's an absolute paleographic nightmare. It's the hardest thing I've ever read in any script or in any language in my entire career. It's also very long. Both Verso and Recto are absolutely crammed, and there is a Judeo-Arabic filing note as well. So it took me,

couple of years to even to begin to get anywhere with this document. And I spent whole days just banging my head against a figurative wall, working on a few lines. So I took the strategy that I used with things like Ottoman documents in Siakot. You just go word by word and try to figure things out. It took me a while to figure out that it was from Damieta. I recognized the Arabic for the port of Damietta in one of the top lines. one of the things that made me feel stupid is that I figured out the name of the judge before realizing that his seal appeared twice on the document and was much more legible than it

was in the text. The judge was called Abd Rahman Ibn Hassan al-Axeraii. So someone from Oxirai or whose ancestors were from Oxirai in central Anatolia. And yet he was Hanbaly. His legal right was Hanbaly. Whereas you would expect someone from Oxirai. to be a Hanofi. And that informed the kind of background research I did on this document. Usually as I transcribed, I would start doing background research. So I did a lot of reading in Ibn Ias,

the late Mamluc chronicler, to find out if there were other Ulama in Cairo from Oxirai. There were a lot. There was kind of a channel from central Anatolia to Cairo, which was the hub of Sunni intellectual life in the 15th century. And even the early As to why he was Hanbul, I found out that judges would occasionally change mudhubs, change legal rights so that they could deal with particular kinds of cases. And the Hanbaly right was especially adept, shall we say, at adjudicating cases involving long-term rentals, especially of endowed property. It tended to be more favorable to the renters than the Hanofi school.

So that may explain why he switched. The debtors were two brothers who operated a boat in what the document calls the Isles of Tennis, which is a town. It's been destroyed since the Crusader era on the shores of Lake Monsala, which is this large lake that abuts Damietta to the east. So I did research on fishing in Lake Monsala on kinds of boats. The document explains that the two brothers are supposed to give Abraham Castro's son, was directing the customs at Damietta, 18 shares of a boat, and it describes the boat in

excruciating detail. Very technical vocabulary. I'll give a shout out at this point to my proof reader for the Arabic documents, Dr. Alan Elbaum, who was associated with the Princeton Genesea project. So this document just kept revealing as I gradually deciphered more and more of it. things about how Damietta's customs were run, you could see that the Ottomans were really trying to resuscitate trade through the Mediterranean ports after the Mamluks, who the early Mamluks had destroyed Damieta because of crusader attacks. They deliberately raised it and rebuilt the city inland. And you can really see the Ottomans trying to build and develop the infrastructure, both in the ports themselves and in Cairo and points in between that would facilitate trade.

It tells us something about Abraham Castro and his family. It tells us where the court is. It was in a particular mosque in Damietta. It tells us where the two debtors, the two brothers, lived. And oddly, I was able to find this location on Google Maps, if you can believe. And about boats, about fishing, it took a long time. And at one point, I actually got out one of my old Ottoman archival research notebooks and just got a pencil and tried to trace the screen.

the way you would with a particularly difficult Ottoman document. That was the most difficult case. With others, and even when I was working on Halper 359, just for a kind of mental relief, I would go to one of the shorter documents that were easier to transcribe. I think if I hadn't had Alan Elbaum's help, I would never have managed to finish reading it.

But yeah, Marina Rosto likes to say that it takes a village to read a Ganesa document, and she's really right. What was the most surprising discovery you encountered? in these documents. Can I have two most surprising things? Absolutely. One is the sheer number of Turkish documents. As I wrote in the afterward to the book, when I started the project, I knew of only one Turkish document. It's a document that Dutonarad published. It's a kind of mini-dictionary, many-turkish, and he published it as an English language article under the title, Let's Learn Turkish, and then a colon,

and then more details about the document. Compared to the overall number of even late documents, the number of Turkish documents is pretty minuscule, but it's probably around 100, which is many more than some of us had initially thought. And it indicates not just that members of the Jewish community have strong connections to the Ottoman administration in Egypt and even in Istanbul,

but also to some degree that there was a comfort level in the Ottoman Turkish language, probably reflecting the fact that Jewish merchants and others were serving in some capacity as bureaucrats and bankers. So that was one surprise. The other surprise was how many people I recognized from my own research. We've already established that I did not recognize Abraham Castro, even though his name was staring me in the face. But grandees, as I call them, these regimental officers and Sanjak Bays.

There's one document in particular. It's in Arabic. It's in chapter three, the commercial transactions chapter. I think it's document five. And it's a court case involving a supply of sugar and repayment of a debt to one of the Ottoman governor's Jewish bankers. The person repaying this debt is an officer

in the Mutiferica Regiment, which was an elite regiment close to Egypt's governor. And I believe he's the same person who later became Assanjak Bay, who was documented in Chronicles and who was a member of one of the two rival factions that dominated Egypt in the 17th century. The document is from 1649, I should add. And repaying this debt involved a whole raft of people, grandees of both rival factions, the Fakharis and the Cosamis. They were the subject of my book, A Tale of Two factions, over 20 years ago. And it became clear that this debt repayment and the supply of sugar was not just a personal thing between the

mutiferical officer and the Jewish banker, but was part of the overarching process whereby Egypt supplied the palace in Istanbul with sugar and other luxury goods. I was reading the Verso, which points out how the debt was repaid, and I remember looking at it and saying, that looks like Siavush, the name. And in fact, it was Siavush and Kaitas. They were senior Janissary officers whom I had found in a chronicle I was using when I worked when I was working on my dissertation who were also mentioned by Eblia Chalaby. They farm the taxes of sugar villages. This is a lot of anecdotes about this one document, but I remember thinking that one of the people involved in the debt repayment was Amir al-Hodge, the pilgrimage commander. And then Alan Elbaum told me, no, the word I'm

seeing is Wakil. And I thought that that's when it clicked. I thought, oh, my, my God, it's the Vekyll Harch, the official who guaranteed that the palace got its luxury goods. And he was always a former member of another elite regiment, the Chabushan in Egypt. So he was there trying to make sure that not only did the mutiferical officer's debt get paid, but the palace got its supply of sugar. So it's another one of these instances where individual credit and debt cases take place within the overarching structure of this imperial financial and provisioning process. It's similar to the way that when I was researching the chief harem book,

I found that there was a very blurry line between the chief eunuchs personal pious endowments and the imperial level pious endowments for the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. So that was quite a surprise. I was not expecting anything like that. I was quite surprised to encounter the Sufi poetry and the Il Mihal documents. Could you expand on that a little bit? Yes, two of the more surprising Turkish documents. The Il-Mihal, which is kind of like a primer on Islamic practice,

I had never really worked with Il-Mihal documents. This project also introduced me to a number of genres I had not previously worked with in any serious way, including Sharia court documents. So I started reading it, and I realized that it was Il-Mihal, and I did research on Tiana Kirstich's and Dereen Terziolu's, work on Ilmi Hal. And I started to realize that this was not like most Ilmi Hal works, which tend to have sort of grandstanding references to great Islamic jurists of yesteryear. This had none of that. It's almost like what you might call a grammar school reader, very simple Turkish, very, very

large, clear hand, fully vowel. And most of it consists of what are called shrewutisalat or rules of prayer, which is really how not to pray. A laundry list of all the mistakes you could make. that would invalidate one of the five prescribed daily Muslim prayers. So I got that it was Ilmi Hal. Thanks to Tiana's and Doreen's research, I could speculate that it had to be from the 16th century or later. But beyond that, we know nothing about this document. No author is given, no date, no clue as to why it was used,

and why did it end up in the Geniza? I speculated that it might have been used by a Jewish convert to Islam, as these works often were, and that could also explain the extremely simple, clear language. It could have been read aloud by some literate person, literate and Ottoman Turkish person, to family members, to colleagues, co-workers, etc. We simply don't know. As for the poetry, I had never done any serious work with Ottoman poetry before. This was clearly Sufi. It's probably part of what's known as a junk or a popular collection of Sufi poetry, not meant to be published but circulated.

The verso is a blank page with the borders drawn around it, so clearly more poems were going to be added. It contains three poems, two or at least purportedly by a known Ottoman poet, a 17th century poet named, who went by Ashik Omer. So one of those wandering, Saas playing poets, except that he also apparently attended a Madrasa. The third poem was attributed to someone called Yahya Chabush. Chavush could be a member of the Chabushan Regiment or could be a janissary, like a lower-level janissary officer. That poem is very different, both in style and in content. It's as Victoria Holbrook, my former Ohio State colleague who really, really helped me with this poem along with her colleague, Mujahad Khashar from Istanbul University. As she pointed out,

it's obviously a melami poem, meaning the author engages with this form of mysticism that's very self-deprecating, but self-degrating. In the poem itself, he asks that the people who revile him and despise him, they should always get what they wish, they should be respected, no respect for himself. Let him not get what he wants. just let the people who revile him and insult him get everything they want. This is not an attitude or a stance that we usually associate with Janissaries. Many Janissaries had Sufi connections, but not Milami. So that was a complete surprise.

It's anomalous as a work of poetry, and again, what is it doing in the Geniza? Maybe Yahyad Chibush was a convert. Maybe a Jewish person was compiling poetry from various sources. Maybe it was an accident. We simply don't know. We do have a date, though. 1758. Well, the fact that so much effort went into presenting these documents close to original form in terms of language and layout followed by your notes and transcription makes it really invaluable

as a teaching source. So I was curious if you could share what you were hoping for with this book in terms of the audience and scholars and students as well, I think, in classrooms teaching. I think there are two potential benefits of this volume. A Jewish studies benefit and an Ottoman studies benefit. Even though the documents are in Arabic script, and therefore in many cases, linked to the Ottoman governing apparatus, they do give us a kind of snapshot

of Egypt's Jewish community and really the broader Eastern Mediterranean Jewish community during the Ottoman period. And snapshot is maybe not the appropriate word because the time range of these documents is 1375, so that's still the late Mamluk period, not even late Mamluk, really. And the most recent is 1829 when Egypt is already under the dominance of Mahmhad Ali or Muhammad Ali Pasha, the autonomous governor.

These documents shed light on or confirm what we already knew about the prominence of Jewish merchants in the port customs. It's not just Halper 359. There are numerous documents that deal with Jewish directors of port customs. That's a phenomenon that you see all over the Ottoman Empire. The strong connection between Jewish merchants and military officers, above all janissary officers, and again, that's an empire-wide phenomenon. Also, the connection between the same Jewish merchants and the Ottoman governor of Egypt. It was very, very common for a Jewish merchant to serve as the seraph or banker slash money lender to the governor of Egypt. The persistence of intercommunal commerce.

Several documents point out commercial relationships. between Jews and Muslims, between Jews and Christians, among all three communities. And this really seems to have been rather routine. It's not regarded as anything atypical or new and different. Finally, with regard to the Jewish studies perspective, the nature of Jewish community leadership, one of the really notable things about Ottoman rule is that shortly after the conquest, the Ottomans abolished the office of head of the Jews or Reisal Yehoud,

which had existed since the 11th century. And this was not some kind of punishment. I think it was just recognition of a fait accompli, because in the late Mamlu period, the head of the Jews was more and more frequently a merchant, and in some cases director of Egypt's mint. And by the late Mamluk period, of course, the Sephardic refugees from Spain and Portugal had started flooding into Egypt, and they more and more were monopolizing this position. So what happens under the Ottomans is that there's a recognition that instead of one head of the entire community, you have multiple heads of an increasing variety of congregations. Then on the other end of the timescale, under Muhammad Ali or Mehmet Ali Pasha, under the reforms, the Tanzimat reforms, you see a new office, Khacham Basha, the chief rabbi ostensibly of the entire empire, but that office, like Reisal Yehud, takes several decades to gel.

And you can see this in one document in particular. It's from 1829, and it's a loan, a forced loan, it appears, that someone called Hakam Basha imposes on a specific merchant, also taking money from the Orphans Fund. And the person in question appears to be the last head of Istanbul's Jewish community before the introduction of the title of the position of Khacham Basha, and yet the document refers to him as Haqam Basha. So this tells us that it was already in use before 1835 and that it took a while really to become an empire-wide office that was recognized by all Jewish communities.

So that's the Jewish studies perspective. From the Ottoman perspective, I think that the Ganesa documents can serve as a supplement to Ottoman archival documents, both from Istanbul and from Cairo, Damascus, wherever, as well as to narrative chronicles. in both Turkish and Arabic. They can confirm trends that we see in those sources. They can introduce trends and characters that we didn't know existed who were not represented in these sources. And they can shed light on a number of issues such as legal culture, the language and format of court documents over the course of centuries. You can really see a continuity with Mamluk Sultanate documents as in Halper 359,

the paleographic nightmare court summary. and you can start to see changes, particularly as you go into the 17th century, in the kinds of language that the judge uses and so on. Epistolary culture, some of the Turkish documents are these what I call petition letters. They're not technically petitions. They are letters, but they're written in this absolutely over-the-top fawning of sequoious Turkish. Your slave, the well-wisher, kisses the dust beneath the feet, etc. it had to be written by a professional scribe. Why would a member of the Jewish community see fit to

to have something like this prepared? Broader economic and institutional trends, the kinds of goods that were traded and over what territory. With Egypt's incorporation into this huge empire, you see a much larger commercial geography and a wider variety of trade goods, and even linguistic matters, like the nature of Arabic used in Egypt at this time, a scholar named Esther Meechermis. Miriam Wagner at Cambridge University has actually published an edited volume on Ottoman Arabic, called in large part from Genese documents. You can also track changes to Judeo-Arabic and even Hebrew during this time. Because the book is open access and because I included images of the documents, which I actually obtained from the collections themselves, so they're high resolution,

It could, at least in theory, be used for paleographic training. And I just want to stress the point that I think that Ottomanists have something to bring to the study of the late Genese documents because we're trained in the institutional, political, and economic history of the empire. If I had not had this kind of training, I would almost certainly not have been able to analyze these documents in the depth that I think I was able to achieve. It was my experience at time after time, documented after document, research from my entire career, from the households book, the factions book, the Chief Haremunich book, would be called into service just to identify people mentioned in the documents, to identify processes that were going on. And I think it's a real testament also to the fact that you can find a world within a single document.

Oh, yes, absolutely. There's so much in a single text that we do ourselves a disservice if we, don't sort of read them as deeply as you do. And that's why I think books like this that present primary source materials are so valuable. And I hope it also serves as a model and inspiration for scholars, especially Ottomanists, as you point out, to go and look at the other documents, right? Because there are thousands more, presumably, in this sort of late autumn period that haven't received the same treatment yet. I will give a shout out to one scholar in particular, Dautana Rod, who's a professor at Bariland University in Israel, and who I think is the world's

leading expert on the Ottoman era corpus. He and Professor Wagner at Cambridge have recently published a co-authored book on one late Mamluk era Jewish luminary, and he has been very supportive of my project as well. So his great strength, well, he has a number of great strengths, but he can read these horrific late Ottoman Hebrew hands. He can read both Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. And so I think to a certain extent, teamwork and collaboration between more traditionally trained autumannists on the one hand and scholars like him and like Professor Wagner, I think that could be a very fruitful series of collaborations. I think that point about collaboration and inviting scholars to struggle together is a really nice point on which to end. So I wanted to thank you so much

for coming on to the podcast for sharing this work with us, for making it open access and talking, you know, very honestly about some of the struggles. I think it's always really not just comforting, but refreshing to hear that. We do struggle with really difficult subjects, and we shouldn't do it alone, especially in this age of connection and access to each other. So I really just want to thank you for that in particular and for coming on the podcast in general. Thank you very much, Maryam. This was an absolute pleasure. Listeners, as always, can find more information about our author, the book, and other resources through our website, Audubon History Podcast.com. And I look forward to joining you on the next one.

Thank you again.