# Marina Rustow, History and Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University: Lost Archives, Sacrosanct Wastebins, and the Jewish Communities of the Medieval World (Jacobs Lectures 2019) #### calendar\_today Date and Time **April 24, 2019** 04:00PM - 04:00PM EDT #### pin\_drop Location **UMass Integrative Learning Center (ILC), Room S331, 650 N Pleasant St, Amherst, MA 01003** Jacobs Lecture 2019 *Lost Archives, Sacrosanct Wastebins, and the Jewish Communities of the Medieval World* Professor [Marina Rustow](https://history.princeton.edu/people/marina-rustow), History and Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University The medieval Middle East, where the vast majority of medieval Jews lived, is widely presumed to have preserved few documentary texts. But tens of thousands of documents have survived—for the period before ca. 1100, more than survived from Europe. This illustrated lecture focuses on the Cairo Geniza, a cache of texts preserved in the attic of a medieval Egyptian synagogue, and what they tell us about the Jewish communities of the Middle Ages. Research into these texts is evolving quickly. The geniza has cast a flood of light on unknown and unexpected corners of the Jewish world, from Cairo to India: the world of women and children, the prices of commodities, the responsiveness of rulers to petitions from their subjects and the non-rabbinic lives of some well-known rabbis. These sources invite us to revise our assumptions about the past—and, consequently, about the present as well. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ Marina Rustow is Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, where she holds the Khedouri A. Zilkha Chair in Jewish Civilization in the Near East. She also directs the Princeton Geniza Lab, which brings students and specialists together to decipher and digitize unpublished medieval documents in Hebrew and Arabic script. She is the author of *Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate* (2008)*,* and of the forthcoming book *The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue* (Princeton University Press, November 2019)*.* She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2015. See also:- [ Lecture ](/event-categories/lecture) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#) Save: [ Add to calendar calendar\_today ](https://bookhistory.harvard.edu/node/1431707/event-feed.ics) Copy link link