The Ottoman Genizah

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 RSS Feed

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.

Contributor Bios

Jane Hathaway is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of History at Ohio State University. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1992 under the direction of Cemal Kafadar. She has published seven books and scores of articles related to Egypt and other Ottoman Arab provinces, the Ottoman Chief Harem Eunuch, the legendary sword Zülfikar, and the Jewish messianic figure Sabbatai Zevi.

Maryam Patton is Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University. Her research interests span the cultural and intellectual history of the late medieval and early modern Ottoman Empire, the history and theories of time and temporality, and cross-cultural transmission in the Mediterranean world, among others. She received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and is preparing her first book on the Ottoman conception of time.

Credits

Episode No. 586

Release Date: 23 May 2026

Sound production by Maryam Patton
Music: "Vibing Over Venus" by Kevin MacLeod

Images and bibliography courtesy of Jane Hathaway

Further Listening

	Marina Rustow	522 3/1/22	Locating the Lost Islamic Archive
	Nir Shafir	576 12/6/25	Pamphlets and Polemics in the 17th-Century Ottoman Empire
	Helen Pfeifer	524 3/27/22	Scholarly Salons in 16th-Century Damascus
	Jane Hathaway	369 8/5/18	The Sultan's Eunuch
	Konrad Hirschler	380 9/25/18	The Many Lives of a Medieval Library
	Cemal Kafadar	464 6/29/20	Between Past and Present, Part 1

Images

Above: A 1538 Muslim court case from Damietta, detailing repayment of a debt to Abraham Castro (Arabic). CAJS Halper 359, recto. University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Public domain. https://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0002/html/h359.html. 
 Below: Two non-consecutive pages of a work of 'ilm-i hal (Ottoman Turkish). T-S Ar. 39.153. Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 

Select Bibliography

Hathaway, Jane. “Janissaries in the Cairo Geniza: A Case from Damietta in 1708,” in The Janissaries: Socio-Political and Economic Actors in the Ottoman Empire (17th-19th Centuries), ed. Yannis Spyropoulos (Crete University Press, 2025), 413-30.

Hathaway, Jane. The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1800, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2020).

Hathaway, Jane. The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Hathaway, Jane. A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen (SUNY Press, 2003).

Hathaway, Jane. The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdağlıs (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Jefferson, Rebecca. The Cairo Genizah and the Age of Discovery in Egypt: The History and Provenance of a Jewish Archive (London: I.B. Tauris, 2022)