Goitein, Magic, and the Geniza

Mark R. Cohen

In his article “Reconstructing Jewish Magical Recipe Books from the

Cairo Genizah,” Gideon Bohak remarks: “The magical texts from the
Cairo Genizah have yet to receive the attention they deserve. Spurned by
many Genizah scholars, most notably Schechter and Goitein, many
thousands of fragments relating to magic and to every conceivable meth-
od of divination lay dormant in Genizah collections world-wide – un-
published, uncatalogued, and in some cases simply unnoticed.”1
That Schechter should have ignored, or in Bohak*s words, “spurned”
the magical texts in the Geniza is not surprising. Like other scholars at
the turn of the twentieth century, what animated his interest was not
social history, not the everyday life and religious practice of the average
man and woman, but rather the intellectual history of the rabbinic class
as well as literary fragments he discovered in the Geniza, beginning with
the Hebrew original of the Greek Ben Sira, the fragment that captured
his initial interest.
What about Goitein? Why does this towering scholar of Jewish social
history in the Geniza seem to have ignored the magical fragments? Goi-
tein certainly was interested in every conceivable aspect of the daily life
of the average man and woman. Why not Jewish beliefs in and practice
of magic? Why didn*t he copy such manuscripts and write about them?
These may seem difficult questions to answer. I think, however, Mir-
iam Frenkel, without touching on Goitein*s neglect of the magical frag-
ments per se, leads us in the right direction. In her article on the histor-
iography of the Jews in Muslim countries a few years ago, published in
the Hebrew quarterly Pe<amim, Frenkel assesses Goitein*s contribution.2
Goitein*s Geniza, spanning what he called the “classical Geniza period”
1 Ginze Qedem 1 (2005), English section, 9. See also Peter Schäfer, “Jewish Magic

Literature in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages,” Jewish Social Studies 41 (1990),
75–91.
2 “The Historiography of the Jews in Muslim Countries in the Middle Ages: Land-

marks and Prospects” (Hebrew), Pe<amim 92 (Summer 2002), 23–61.

Jewish Studies Quarterly, Volume 13 (2006) pp. 294—304

' Mohr Siebeck — ISSN 0944-5706
(2006) Goitein, Magic, and the Geniza 295

(from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries), coincided with “the Helle-
nistic period of Islamic civilization” and what had always been thought
of as the Jewish “Golden Age.” For Goitein, what was golden about
Jewish culture during this period was its Mediterranean quality and its
Hellenic content. In Frenkel*s words, “it was democratic, liberal, open,
rationalistic, and aesthetic. In other words, it was the perfect embodi-
ment of the western ideal, and in this respect, it was also necessarily the
complete opposite of everything that the west considered ?oriental.*
Thus, any manifestation of ?oriental-ness* (mizrahiyyut) was defined at
˙
first glance as marginal, external, or simply an optical illusion.”3 Only
after the “classical Geniza period” came to a close, in the thirteenth
century, with the advent of foreign Mamluk rulers in Egypt, did Jewish
life lose its luster and succumb to “the absence of rationalism, obscure
mysticism, superstition, corrupt and despotic governance, and to intro-
version and ignorance.”4
The religion of the average man and woman in the Geniza was
marked, in Goitein*s own words, by a “sober rationalism.”5 He found
little expression of magical superstition in the business letters he so
painstakingly transcribed and translated. The merchant had to be ra-
tional in his pursuit of profit. He was a thinking and calculating man,
carefully planning his every move, his every purchase and sale. He relied
on his carefully orchestrated partnerships, not on magical powers. If the
merchant relied on supernatural intervention, it was on God, alone.
Even the poor, who often blamed “Fate” for their poverty in their plain-
tive letters of appeal, turned to God along with their would-be earthly
benefactors to answer their prayers for help.6 Perhaps they also tried
magical recipes or amulets, but they do not speak of them in their peti-
tions. They were practical people and knew that help was easier to get
from men of flesh and blood or from God than from other supernatural
sources.
Goitein knew perfectly well about the magical fragments in the Geni-
za. Yet in A Mediterranean Society he mentions magic only cursorily.

3 Ibid., 52.
4 Ibid., 54.
5 See his “Religion in Every Day Life as Reflected in the Documents of the Cairo

Geniza,” in Goitein, ed., Religion in a Religious Age (New York, 1974), 15, and p. 8
“The religion of the geniza people was a stern, straightforward, Talmudic type of
piety … enhanced by the rigorous rationalism embraced by Jewish orthodoxy in the
wake of centuries of sectarian and theological controversies, set in motion by the con-
tact with Greek thought (of course, in Arabic garb).”
6 See now a sample of such letters of the poor in my The Voice of the Poor in the

Middle Ages: An Anthology of Documents from the Cairo Geniza (Princeton, 2005).
296 Mark R. Cohen JSQ 13

Volume one, “Economic Foundations,” contains a rare passage in this

regard, in the section called “Travel and Seafaring.”
No wonder, then, that people tried to protect themselves against the vag-
aries of a stormy sea by magical means. Formulas designed to effect this
have been found in the Cairo Geniza, and, as was to be expected, they do
not differ very much from those found in Muslim literary or documentary
sources. For superstition transcends the boundaries of religious commu-
nities.7
Elsewhere Goitein mentions merchants using divination to determine if
their journeys would be successful, and the magical fragments testifying
to this practice. But he adds, characteristically, that “[s]uch texts are
rare … and thus far, not a single reference to magical practices has
been found in a letter (his emphasis). I take this as an indication that
they were not very prominent in the minds of the travelers.”8
Only the Islamic istikhāra, the custom of “asking God for guidance to
make the best choice,” appears in Jewish letters. But Goitein seems to
have believed this was rarely magical in the strict sense, for the merchants
usually called upon God directly for His intervention to assure their suc-
cess, not upon magical powers.9 A corollary of the direct appeal to God
in the Geniza letters, Goitein notes, is “the total absence of intermedi-
aries,” the angels commonly invoked in magical fragments from the tal-
mudic period.10 Amulets were worn as jewelry, particularly the maymūn
necklace appearing ubiquitously in trousseau lists of brides-to-be, but
Goitein does not make much of this in terms of magical practice.11
As powerful as the negative evidence is, I think that Goitein under-
estimated the importance of magic during the classical Geniza period.
He employed a dichotomy between popular and official religion that in
most other societies did not apply. Jews in other parts of the world and
7 S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab

World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 5 vols. plus Index volume
by Paula Sanders (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967–1993), 1: 323. The footnote on page
483 f. cites TS Box K 1.117, the famous box containing magical fragments; and for
comparison, an Islamic “adjuration of the sea” in W. Hoenerbach, Spanisch-Islamische
Urkunden (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), 358–360. Commenting on the types of
literature in Arabic that Jews read, Joshua Blau writes: “Superstition, of course, knows
no religious bounds: it is not surprising that we find a Muhammadan book on augury,
quoting inter alia the Qur>ān, transliterated into Hebrew characters.” He refers to I.
Friedlaender, “A Muhammedan Book of Augury in Hebrew Characters,” JQR, o. s. 19
(1906–1907), 84 ff.
8 Mediterranean Society, 1:346.
9 Ibid and 5:331. On the Islamic istikhāra see Rudolf Kriss and Herbert Kriss-Hein-

rich, Volksglaube im Bereich des Islam, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1960–1962), 2:56–57.

10 Mediterranean Society, 5:336.
11 See ibid., Index volume, s. v. “amulets.”
(2006) Goitein, Magic, and the Geniza 297

in other periods–even representatives of the rabbinic class–used magic,

just as they practiced kabbalah, even if they did not officially sanction it.
This is what Peter Schäfer calls “forbidden” but “nevertheless prac-
ticed.”12 Furthermore, it is hard to understand how so many magical
fragments found their way into the Geniza if they did not play a signifi-
cant role in Jewish life.
Magic played a role, I think, on at least two levels which should be
investigated, and here I am following what others, notably Shaul
Shaked, have recommended. The first level flows from what Goitein
himself indicated in the passage I quoted from him: “superstition trans-
cends the boundaries of religious communities.” In this respect, the He-
brew and Aramaic magical fragments in the Geniza, the ones being
published systematically in Magische Texte, come into play. The incanta-
tions, adjurations, amulets, astrological guides, and recipes popular in
late Antique Judaism and which continued to be copied and used by
Jews in the Islamic period should be studied in comparison with Islamic
magical texts to identify parallels and better understand how traditional
Jewish magic dating back to the talmudic period resembled and perhaps
was modified by magic practiced by Muslims.13 The second level is re-
presented by the magical fragments in Judaeo-Arabic, which betray a
more obvious interplay between magic in the two religions. Shaked has
illustrated this interplay, pointing to a few examples from the Geniza of
magical adjurations written at least in part in Judaeo-Arabic, as well as
to fragments of Islamic literary magical treatises transcribed into Ju-
daeo-Arabic.14 In Shaked1s wake, Steven Wasserstrom has called for
the study of both “literary magic” – meaning theoretical treatises on
the subject – and “documentary magic” – represented, among other
things, by amulets – as part of an integrated social and religious history
of magic in the Geniza. In this regard, Wasserstrom extends Goitein1s
own concept of the Judaeo-Islamic “symbiosis” to a realm that the great
Geniza scholar evidently did not consider relevant.15

12 Peter Schaefer, “Magic and Religion in Ancient Judaism,” in Envisioning Magic

(Leiden, 1997), 32–33.

13 Here the spade-work for Islamic magic has thankfully been done by Manfred

Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden, 1972) and by Rudolf
Kriss and Herbert Kriss-Heinrich, Volksglaube im Bereich des Islam (see above).
14 Shaul Shaked, “On Jewish Magical Literature in Muslim Countries” (Hebrew),

Pe<amim 15 (1983), 15–28; idem, “Magic Moments,” in Cambridge University Library1s

Newsletter of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Geniza Fragments no. 9
(April 1985), 3.
15 Steven Wassterstrom, “The Unwritten Chapter: Notes Towards a Social and Re-

ligious History of Geniza Magic” (Hebrew), Pe<amim 85 (2000), 44–47. See also Was-
298 Mark R. Cohen JSQ 13

I would like, however, to qualify the strictures about Goitein*s neglect

of magic. If Goitein ignored the boxes in Cambridge*s Taylor-Schechter
Collection that contain high concentrations of magical fragments in He-
brew and Aramaic, he occasionally came across magical fragments
among the letters and other documentary sources he surveyed and he
copied them. In the Princeton Geniza Project we have spent the past
five years under funding from the Friedberg Genizah Project focusing
our energies on computerizing mainly unpublished texts that Goitein
typed and left behind in his files at his death. The New Princeton Geniza
Browser (gravitas.princeton.edu/tg/tt) contains a small handful of tran-
scriptions of documents from Goitein*s Nachlass that qualify as magical
texts. One of them, a Hebrew text, is mentioned in Mediterranean So-
ciety, not, however, for its magical content, but because it contains He-
brew terms used to describe a plague; it has since been published by
Schäfer and Shaked in Magische Texte.16 Another, a Judaeo-Arabic
horoscope, was published by Bernard Goldstein in 1977 after having
been brought to his attention by Goitein.17 A third, also in Hebrew, is
described by Goitein as “an unusual form of curses on anyone pilfering
a Torah scroll, [containing] the names of ten angels (as if the curse by
the Lord of Hosts was not enough).” Voicing the false dichotomy I
spoke of before, in his note Goitein writes: “This formulary belongs to
the world of magic rather than that of religion.”18 It was subsequently
published by Naveh and Shaked.19
As to the handful of magical fragments in Judaeo-Arabic that Goitein
transcribed, he describes them briefly on his index cards, and their full
interpretation would require the expertise of a specialist familiar with
the vocabulary of Islamic magic.20 One of these texts, Goitein writes,
contains detailed instructions for dealing with a feverish condition.21
Another contains advice on how to succeed against one*s enemies,

serstrom*s earlier article, “The Magical Texts in the Cairo Genizah,” in After Ninety
Years of Genizah Research (1897–1987), ed. Stefan C. Reif and Joshua Blau (Cam-
bridge, 1992), 160–166.
16 Westminster College, Fragmenta Cairens. 16. Mediterranean Society, 5:537n364;

Magische Texte, vol. 3 (1999), no. 55.

17 TS 12.512 mentioned in Mediterranean Society 3:233 and 476n62 (marked “to be

edited by B. R. Goldstein”); also 5:28 (at n. 82). Bernard Goldstein, “Horoscopes from
the Cairo Geniza,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 36 (1977), 120–125.
18 TS 12.41. Mediterranean Society, 5:337 and 599n33.
19 J. Naveh and S. Shaked, Magic Spells and Formulae: Aramaic Incantations of Late

Antiquity (Jerusalem, 1993), 212–214.

20 Though known to Peter Schäfer and his colleagues, these texts do not presently

fall into the purview of their publication project.

21 TS 10 J 7.9, not mentioned in Mediterranean Society.
(2006) Goitein, Magic, and the Geniza 299

and, through the above-mentioned practice of istikhāra, how to succeed

on a journey.22 There is also the beginning of a booklet of divinations,23
and a shimmush tehillim text containing various recipes, for instance,
how to protect oneself from highway robbers.24 This text, Peter Schäfer
informs me, will be published in a recently completed dissertation by one
of his students.
One of the magical texts that Goitein copied merits close attention
here because of its syncretic mixture of Islamic and Jewish elements. He
describes it on his index card as a “talisman for a safe journey.”25 He
probably took interest in this text because it begins and ends like a letter.
Specialists in magic will readily recognize this as an incantation for
averting danger, of the type found in Sefer ha-Razim and in the many
“free-form” Aramaic or Hebrew incantation texts, or “recipes,” found in
the Geniza.26
ed jr b f a eb jx w w jx i j s jym j p aqoa bli ad a mh x m yb .1
nja jb o erb y nqa jlr za ja uh e rbq d ka j .2
lf w jf //ql ar// p xea f ey mf b wr j w huj f ne xb af hof n ad a .3
p b ak f mdj Arf xg lfd c b d hs f ez ma / /. . . ff / / ne jlr l fsz .4
f lsj ezjow fg n r xf br j dr j j j Amr x fb rj dr .5
pma p ma p ma j mr a fey lk f Azma p b // j ofl s p b s// Ad br joa x f bra dr .6
Aj dj pj b j lr z auh f A ax f j la ea uh jmx a el q / /e lq/ / elq .7
ez al zl af Ao jmj jl a ea uh f Ala my j la ea uh f .8
nf lyf Aqa x j lr Al ema mr j s l[j doml a j s] ae dy .9
In the nam(e) of the Merci(ful). If a man wishes to travel on a journey,
whether near or far away, he should take seven stones, named after the seven
prophets Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Aaron, //may
peace he upon them// and say: “Terror and dread fall down upon them;
through the might of Your arm they are still as stone, till Your people cross
over, O Lord, till Your people cross whom You have ransomed” (Exodus
15:16). “May they fall down until I, Your servant //So and so the son of So
and so// the son of your maidservant and all who are with me pass by (safely).
Amen, amen, amen, selah, //selah//, selah.” Then cast a stone behind you and
a stone in front of you and a stone to your left and a stone to your right. As
for the three (others), tie them tightly on your head [in the kerchie]f of one of
your turbans. And Peace.
This is a complete incantation, as indicated by the word ve-shalom at the
end, with which Jews closed their letters. There are additional fragments

22 TS Arabic Box 46.137, not mentioned in Mediterranean Society.

23 TS Arabic Box 44.198, not mentioned in Mediterranean Society.
24 TS Arabic Box 43.200, not mentioned in Mediterranean Society.
25 TS Arabic Box 43.185, not mentioned in Mediterranean Society.
26 In the translation, Hebrew words are placed in italics. For the suggestion of the

reading of the second and third words in the final line I thank Shaul Shaked.
300 Mark R. Cohen JSQ 13

of writing in the margins at the right, top, and left of the text, also
regarding enemies and evidently related to the incantation.
This text reveals the influence of Islam. Of the seven biblical figures
called prophets Moses appears numerous times in the Qur*ān and five of
the other six are grouped together in one Sura.27 The rest of the incanta-
tion has a Jewish quality. The verse quoted is from Moses* “Song of the
Sea”– the passage expressing the terror of the peoples whom the Israe-
lites might meet on their journey to the Promised Land. It would be
interesting to know whether the Jewish elements echo a Jewish incanta-
tion dated or assumed to come from the pre-Islamic period.
We should not be surprised by how little Goitein made of this docu-
ment or, for that matter, of magic in general in the Geniza. His neglect
was purposeful. It derived from his conviction about the nature of the
society he studied as essentially rational and not given to superstitious
reliance on realms of the supernatural other than God Himself. When he
copied a text in Judaeo-Arabic like this one, he probably did so because,
as an Arabist, he was interested in the language of the fragment.
Goitein might have had a different attitude toward magic in the Gen-
iza had he lived long enough to witness the publication of Islamic docu-
ments relating to a medieval Muslim merchant family that had lived on
the Red Sea at a time contemporary with the classical Geniza period.
Let me give the background.
Between 1978 and 1982, archeologists digging near the Egyptian Red
Sea resort town of Quseir al-Qadim discovered a medieval port, which
turned out to be the site of the Ptolemaic and Roman port of Myos
Hormos, a link in the ancient trade route between India and Rome.28
In the Islamic ruins of the site they found a building that contained a
cache of hundreds of paper fragments of business accounts, letters con-
cerning personal and business affairs, and notes of deliveries of ship-
ments, all emanating from Muslims, notably one “sheikh” named Abū
Mufarrij, and dating from the first half of the thirteenth century. The
papers also comprise fragments of religious texts, including fully-voca-
lized selections from the Qur*an, poetry, zodiacs, prayers, block-printed
amulets, and other magical texts. The items were torn and tattered and
strewn all about the house, inside and out. Scholars working on the find
considered them “discarded trash.”
27 “Lo! We inspire thee as We inspired Noah and the prophets after him, as We

inspired Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes, and Jesus and Job
and Jonah and Aaron and Solomon, and as We imparted unto David the Psalms” (Sura
4:163), et al. For Adam see Sura 3:33. He is considered a Nabı̄ in Islamic literature.
28 See the Quseir website (University of Southampton) http://www.arch.soton.

ac.uk/Research/Quseir/
(2006) Goitein, Magic, and the Geniza 301

The archaeologists labeled the site “the Sheikh*s house.”29 The Arabic
word shūna, “warehouse,” appears in the correspondence. Li Guo, the
Arabic paleographer charged with responsibility for publishing the let-
ters, speculated that the building in which these papers were discovered
was the merchant*s (and his sons* and grandsons*) warehouse cum living
quarters, their permanent home being elsewhere, most likely in the Nile
Valley. The documents, in his view, formed part of the merchant*s “ar-
chive” – “in a loose sense of the term.”30
It is possible that the Quseir documents were stored as a “geniza,”
perhaps in the ceiling, which later fell in.31 The custom of “geniza” in
Islam was first brought to the attention of western scholars by Joseph
Sadan, in a pair of articles he published in 1980 and 1986, prompted by
his discovery of a late seventeenth-century Ottoman legal opinion writ-
ten in Arabic, entitled “Treatise (Risāla) on Copies of the Qur>ān That
Have Been Worn Out and Are No Longer of Use.”32 Islamic geniza is a
commonplace to observant Muslims today, though the custom appar-
ently does not have an Arabic name.
Islamic genizas include the famous storeroom of discarded Arabic
papers found in the Great Mosque of Qayrawan, which until now has
been characterized as a destroyed or neglected library,33 and the cache of
manuscript fragments that were stuffed above the ceiling under the roof
of the mosque of San<a> and exposed when the roof caved in.34 Also

29 Donald S. Whitcomb and Janet H. Johnson, “1982 Season of Excavations at

Quseir al-Qadim” (typescript), Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, 25.

30 Li Guo, Commerce Culture and Community in a Red Sea Port in the Thirteenth

Century: The Arabic Documents from Quseir (Leiden and Boston, 2004), xii, 11. See
also his earlier articles, “Arabic Documents from the Red Sea Port of Quseir in the
Seventh/Thirteenth Century, Part 1: Business Letters,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies
58 (1999), 161–190; and “Arabic Documents from the Red Sea Port of Quseir in the
Seventh/Thirteenth Century, Part 2: Shipping Notes and Account Records,” ibid. 60
(2001), 81–116.
31 See my forthcoming article, “Geniza for Islamicists, Islamic Geniza, and the

?New Cairo Geniza,*” in the Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review.
32 Joseph Sadan, “Storage and Treatment of Used Sacred Books (Genizah) in the

Muslim Tradition and Jewish Parallels” (Hebrew), Kiryat Sefer 55 (1980), 398–410;
idem, “Genizah and Genizah-like Practices in Islamic and Jewish Traditions,” Bib-
liotheca Orientalis 43 (1986), 36–58. Sadan published a related article later on: “Ritual
Purity, Impurity and the Disposal of Books in Islam and Judaism” (Hebrew), Pe<amim,
no. 70 (1997), 4–22.
33 G. Marcais and L. Poinssot, Objets kairouanais, IXe au XIIe siècle (Tunis, 1948),

cited in Sadan, op. cit., 42n21, where Sadan ventures the reasonable hypothesis, con-
trary to everyone else, that this was a “neglected depot of worn-out books,” in other
words, an Islamic geniza.
34 P. Costa, “La Moschea Grande di San<ā>,” Annali Istituto Orientale di Napoli 34
˙
(1974), 487–506, esp. 505–506 and the photograph of the geniza-like deposit, Plate
302 Mark R. Cohen JSQ 13

conforming to the ceiling geniza are the fragments discovered in 1987

beneath the roof of the library – in the past, a dervish monastery – of the
prominent Khalidi family in the Old City of Jerusalem.35
Also to be reckoned as an Islamic geniza in my view is the hoard of
documents that came to light in the 1970s in the Islamic Museum of the
Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem. It encompasses some 900 documents
(mostly in Arabic; a few in Persian) from everyday life, emanating
from the non-elite ranks of society in the fourteenth century. They in-
clude decrees, petitions, reports, estate inventories, legal depositions,
court records, contracts (including marriage contracts and leases), legal
opinions, financial statements, registers, and more, including some book
lists.36
Also to be considered an Islamic geniza, I believe (following Sadan),
is the famous Umayyad Mosque find. This collection, consisting mostly
of pages of the Qur>ān, but also including other literary fragments and a
few secular documents from daily life (e. g. deeds of sale, a quittance, a
deed of ownership, a few letters), was stored in that famous Mosque in
Damascus. Following a fire in 1893, some of its contents were trans-
XXX. The author suggests that the pages were “hidden in the ceiling … out of respect”
when the library was being reorganized during a restoration of the mosque. From
Ursula Dreibholz, the conservator on the project in Yemen, I learned (electronic letter
of 25 November, 2001), the following about the San<ā> Mosque find (I paraphrase and
quote her words and thank her for the valuable˙information). Discovered were about
15,000 fragments on parchment (earlier publications give the figure of 40,000 as an
estimate of the total number of fragments, presumably including the paper ones). Al-
most all the 15,000 parchment fragments come from more than 940 copies of the
Qur>ān. There are fewer than 150 non-Qur>ānic fragments (less than 1 %): remnants
of old documents, pages from hadı̄th, religious commentaries, medical treatises, etc.,
even 5 Hebrew fragments. No dates˙ were found on the fragments, but it is generally
agreed that they are datable to the first 3–5 Islamic centuries, i. e. from the 7th to
probably the 11th centuries C. E.. None of the Qur>āns are complete. Regarding the
parallel with the Jewish practice of geniza, Ms. Dreibholz writes: “Of course, the par-
allels to the finds in the Cairo Geniza are stunning. On the one hand, it seems to me
that the place of a mosque is a natural choice for depositing parts of the Holy Qur>ān
which otherwise cannot be easily discarded; on the other hand it should not be for-
gotten that Yemen was ruled for a short time by a Jewish king before the advent of
Islam, and that parts of the population seemingly were Jewish.”
35 Lawrence I. Conrad and Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, “Ottoman Resources in the

Khalidi Library in Jerusalem,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 35 (1994) (Aspects of Ottoman

History: Papers from Ciepo IX, Jerusalem), ed. Amy Singer and Amnon Cohen, 291–
292. Home of dervish order: Sadan, “Ritual Purity, Impurity and the Disposal of
Books in Islam and Judaism,” 5–6, note 2, which also mentions how the custom was
practiced in Turkey and Iran.
36 Donald Little, “The Significance of the Haram Documents for the Study of Med-

ieval Islamic History,” Der Islam 57 (1980), 189–219; idem, A Catalogue of the Islamic
Documents from Al-Haram Al-Sharif in Jerusalem (Beiruter Texte und Studien, Band
29) (Beirut, 1984). Little does not consider the possibility that this was a geniza.
(2006) Goitein, Magic, and the Geniza 303

ferred to Istanbul, where they now lie in the Museum of Turkish and
Islamic Art. They have been studied by two French orientalists.37 Other
fragments from the same source, stored temporarily in the Mosque"s
“Dome of the Treasury” (qubbat al-khazna) following the fire and in-
cluding some Christian writings, were discovered there in 1900 by Ger-
man scholars and later transferred to Berlin. One of the German scho-
lars who worked on these texts had no compunction about calling the
find “der Damascener Moschee-Genisah.”38 As far as I know, he is the
only orientalist to employ the term “geniza” in connection with any of
these finds.
Whether the Quseir fragments were originally stored in an Islamic
geniza, then dispersed to their present depositional context (so that
they appear as trash on the floor); or were kept originally as an archive;
or formed an archive and later were deposited in a geniza, – reminiscent
of the archive of some 400 papers of the eleventh-century Jewish
merchant Nahray b. Nissim that ended up in the Cairo Geniza – then
subsequently dispersed as archaeologists found them, what is significant
for the present inquiry is the presence of the magical fragments.
Let me close with one magical text from Quseir that gives a flavor of
this find. The text is written on the reverse side of a letter to a judge in a
different handwriting, reminiscent of the exploiting of blank sides of
pages of writing for different uses so characteristic of the Cairo Geniza
manuscripts. Specialists in Jewish magic will be interested in comparing
this with the Jewish magical material from the Geniza. They will readily
recognize it as an incantation text of the “recipe” variety, and as an
illustration of Goitein"s abovementioned observation, that “superstition
transcends the boundaries of religious communities.”
For a woman who wants [to have] a boy (li>l-mar>a arādat […]hā al-wa-
lad). In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate (followed by

37 Janine Sourdel-Thomine and Dominique Sourdel, “Nouveaux documents sur

l"histoire religieuse et sociale de Damas au moyen âge,” Revue des études islamiques
32 (1964), 1–25; “A propos des documents de la Grande Mosquée de Damas conservés
a Istanbul: Rêsultats de la seconde enquête,” ibid 33 (1965), 73–85; “Trois actes de
vente damascains du début du IVe/IXe siècle,” Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient 8 (1965), 164–185; and other articles.
38 Bruno Violet, “Ein zweisprachiges Psalmfragment aus Damascus,” Orientalis-

tiche Litteratur-Zeitung 4 (1901), 384. Dr. Maria Mavroudi discussed the “Violet Psalm
fragment,” which is written in Greek with synoptic Arabic translation in Greek char-
acters, during a lecture she delivered at Princeton"s Program in Hellenic Studies (Octo-
ber 12, 2001). She told me afterwards that she, too, would characterize the Damascus
deposit as a “geniza” – and that she believes the Christian writings were included
“because Islam acknowledges the books of the other Peoples of the Book as valid
sources of sacred history.”
304 Mark R. Cohen JSQ 13

mystical letters l-t-h-y-t-h-t-y-l). May God bless everything. “When heaven is

rent asunder and˙ gives
˙ ˙ ear˙ to its Lord, and is fitly disposed; when earth is
stretched out and casts forth what is in it, and voids itself ” (Sura 84:1–4),
every Muslim woman may cast forth [what is] in her womb. [O] Muslim
woman! Wake up, wake up from under [the effect of] your tight labor!
Cast forth and hold tight! This is your month of truth! Until the Virgin
Mary gave birth to Jesus, O Lord, peace be upon Him! “And when heaven
is split asunder, and turns like red leather – O which of your Lord*s bounties
will you and you deny?” (Sura 55:37–38).39
Here, among papers of a practical-minded Muslim merchant household
from the thirteenth century, is a magical recipe not unlike those buried
in the Cairo Geniza. Had Goitein lived to see the publication of the
Quseir fragments perhaps he would have considered the magical frag-
ments in the Geniza in a different light and integrated them more fully
into his conception of the Mediterranean merchant society about which
he wrote so eloquently.

39 Guo, Commerce Culture and Community in a Red Sea Port, 311–312.