Prof. Craig Perry Presents Paper at the "International Medieval Congress"
With support from a Judith Evans London grant, I gave a paper at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, England in July 2024. My paper, “Traversing the Eastern Desert and Living to Tell the Tale: Evidence from the Cairo Geniza,” presented my new English translation and analysis of a personal letter sent to Moses Maimonides by his brother David Maimonides in the late twelfth century. The letter is well-known among scholars of Moses Maimonides because it is the last one David would write before he perished in a shipwreck as he traveled from the Red Sea to India where he planned to do business as a merchant. Moses would later write that his brother’s death thrust him into a prolonged depression. My paper, however, studied this letter for a different and largely unexplored purpose: to illuminate the social history of medieval Africa.
David reported in his letter that he had spent Passover in a city on the southern Nile River before travelling across the Eastern Desert, a vast expanse about the size of Minnesota that lay between the Nile and the Red Sea coast. In this era, the Eastern Desert was a corridor for the lucrative trade in luxury items and other commodities that originated in China, India, East African and beyond. Though the Eastern Desert had this crucial role, not to mention its own Islamic, Christian, and pagan societies, its history has yet to be told. On his journey, David encountered highway robbers, camel drivers, water provisioners, ship captains, and other Africans. In closing his letter, he also asked Moses to send greetings to the household’s freedman, a former slave who was likely of African descent. Thus, my paper showed the scholarly audience how Jewish merchant letters from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries can be used to tell a new history of medieval African societies and peoples, a subject for which fewer historical sources has survived in the African cities and villages that I research. This research is seeding a new book tentatively entitled A Jewish History of Medieval Africa.
The Judith Evans London grant has supported this new research in its earliest stages. The feedback I have received at the International Medieval Congress from medievalist scholars has been indispensable as I drafted and revised applications for competitive fellowships to support the project. I am happy to share that this new research has received fellowship offers and funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation via the American Academy in Rome, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Published 1/23/25