Russell Explores an Armeno-Hebrew Mystery at NAASR

BELMONT, Mass.—On Thurs., Nov. 3, Prof. James R. Russell, the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University, delivered an informative, thought-provoking, and entertaining lecture entitled “An Armeno-Hebrew Mystery: Or, a 1,000-Year-Old Armenian Text in a Cairo Synagogue and the Stories It Tells” at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) Center in Belmont.

Russell opened by explaining that he gave a shortened version of the talk in Yerevan in July at the “Iran and the Caucasus” conference (the article will be forthcoming in the journal of the same name).

The lecture centered on “a short text on a small piece of paper found in the Cairo Geniza” that is “likely to be nearly a millennium old and consists of a list of 20 Judeo-Arabic words and phrases with their equivalents in Armenian written in Hebrew script.” (Geniza is the storeroom in a synagogue where materials written in the Hebrew script—and thus, not to be destroyed—were deposited.)

An Armenia that is central, not peripheral

Preparatory to his exploration of the document, Russell invited the audience to imagine a world in which Armenia and the Armenian language occupied a very different place than it does today. He invoked the example of an important source known as the Rasulid Hexaglot (meaning “six languages”), a dictionary compiled in the 14^th century for a king of Aden, an important trading hub. The six languages of the hexaglot—Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Greek, Mongol, and Armenian—were “the major political and cultural tongues of the Eastern Mediterranean world of the Mongol era,” writes Peter Golden, the editor of The King’s Dictionary: The Rasulid Hexaglot.

“The Armenians of the centuries embraced by these two glossaries were a nation of political and economic importance,” Russell emphasized. They “inhabited a homeland that encompassed large parts of modern Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Iran on the north and east, parts of northern Iraq and Syria on the south, and much of the Anatolian peninsula,” in addition to being a major presence in Constantinople, Jerusalem, Egypt, and elsewhere. In short, “Armenia was neither small nor peripheral to the Near and Middle East but central to it in demography, politics, and economy—its language, of corresponding importance. To see Armenia as small is to peer through the wrong end of the telescope. But historical myopia can warp one’s perceptions, and such distortions can affect more than scholarship.”

He noted that because there was no indigenous Jewish community to speak of in Armenia over the centuries, and hence no Judeo-Armenian dialect, as well as a general sparseness of documents on historical Armenian-Jewish interactions, the Geniza document “is of great intrinsic linguistic interest” and “may hint at a much richer reality” than can otherwise be documented. Studies have been carried out on many of the thousands of Geniza documents, and “have transformed our understanding of Jewish life and letters in the Middle Ages.”

Valuable linguistic data

The document itself, though containing only 20 words and phrases, provides unique information about the Armenian language at the time. “It is by now generally accepted that the division of a preponderance of the dialects of the language into reasonably delineable Western and Eastern categories, as we now know them, can be dated to about the 17^th century,” Russell explained. But this list suggests “the language typified by the documentation of the Cilician Kingdom, displaying the characteristically fluid phonology of that stage of the language.” The list contains “classical” forms such as siyav (black) rather than the modern sev, while other forms suggest a closeness to Modern Western Armenian that might not otherwise have been suspected. Russell compared the language found in the list to “a fly in amber.”

Most intriguing, perhaps, was who spoke the Armenian of the word list and why was the list created? It is, of course, impossible to offer definitive answers, but nonetheless Russell offered possibilities that were both imaginative and rooted in scholarly investigation. There was a sizable Armenian population in Egypt at the time, mostly “from the heartland of the country around Van, [and] many others still would have come from Syria, and Armenian converts to Islam were prominent in the Fatimid hierarchy.” Indeed, after the battle of Manazkert in 1071, some 30,000 Armenians left their homelands and settled in Egypt, and Armenian merchants and craftsmen were ubiquitous in Fatimid Egypt.

Russell speculated, therefore, that given the nature of the list (which includes, for example, the words for wine, meat, rose, various fruits, woman, virgin, female singer, how are you, and more), that we may suppose “from the contents of the word list that it was intended for social purposes, rather than, say, a legal case, a purely business transaction, or a religious disputation.” Furthermore, “the Armenian whom the Jewish owner of the word list was seeking to impress with a few words of the former’s own tongue was a fellow tradesman, possibly a merchant of means and importance, whose friendship was worth the effort, one whom he might encounter at a social gathering.”

 

A vanished cosmopolitan world

 

Russell then conjured a scene: “The Jew and Armenian perhaps meet, then, in a well-appointed majlis at a drinking party where there are beautiful girls… There are musicians, and singers. At this point, the party gets interesting,” he joked, noting that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious authorities have ample writings denouncing such gatherings. “Wine is poured, fruit is eaten, a minstrel sings. Then one realizes that one has only been gazing at a sheet of paper,” he mused, recognizing the limits of his speculations.

Russell concluded with the observation that the Cairo of the Geniza fragment is as far removed from us in time as the heyday of imperial Rome was from them. “But this equivalence of chronology is deceptive. Much of their world endured, little changed; and we have only recently been severed from it, root and branch,” he argued. After all, “the drinkers of Tiflis in the mid-18^th century could still hear the living voice of a great Armenian gusan, the polyglot bard Sayat Nova,” he stated, and “his world, with its cosmopolitan conviviality, its wine and wit, its roses and delicate maidens, its absorption in music and love, its gatherings in the majlis, is not too far from that of 11^th-century Cairo.”

However, “that life ended, in 1915, when the embattled Armenian villagers [of Musa Dagh] withstood the onslaught of the world’s first genocidal state.” And as for the Jews of Cairo, they are almost all gone, and “the Ibn Ezra synagogue has become itself a Geniza, a storehouse inhabited by ghosts.”

For more information about the lecture, call (617) 489-1610 or e-mail hq@naasr.org.