CHAPTER 15

The Case of the Concubine

Aydhâb, Berbera, Present-Day Coastal Sudan
and Somaliland, December 1144

Late in 1144, an embarrassing affair rocked the port of Aydhâb. On 19 December, the twenty-first day of the month of Tevet of the Hebrew calendar, a Jewish merchant back from India, Abû Saîd Ibn Jamâhir, appealed to the Muslim chief of police to demand justice. He said he had been falsely accused by a certain Sâfî, the powerful representative of the head of the yeshiva, the Jewish high council, in Cairo. Despite his influence, Sâfî was juridically a slave, perhaps of Ethiopian origin (his name, Ṣāfī, means both “the sincere” in Arabic and “the scribe” in Ge’ez). Ibn Jamâhir produced witnesses: his Muslim associates. The chief of police moved swiftly to defuse the situation; he had Sâfî publicly flogged, threw him in prison, and released him only after the slave paid him in cash.

There were, however, other Jewish merchants in the city, who had a different take on the matter. They neither affirmed nor denied Sâfî’s accusations; they merely highlighted Ibn Jamâhir’s eagerness to quash them. They certainly knew details about the truth behind the accusation, but they were satisfied with redacting a memorandum on the events in Aydhâb so that the case could be judged in Cairo before the Jewish tribunal. It is this document that comes down to us. It is written in Arabic using Hebrew characters. It is not signed, evidence that it was never produced in court, perhaps because a settlement had been reached that, if it could not redress the harm done to Sâfî, at least cleared him of defamation. Like every written document bearing the name of God—and every document containing a salutation or oath bore the name of God—it could not be destroyed. It was kept, therefore, along with tens of thousands of others, in a room known as the geniza in the synagogue of the “Palestinian” Jews (as opposed to the Jews of Iraq or Persia, the “Babylonian” Jews) of Cairo. They were rediscovered only in 1890, when the old synagogue was razed so that a new one could be built. The documents were bought by collectors and libraries and today are dispersed among Cambridge, Oxford, New York, Philadelphia, Budapest, and other places. Private and official correspondence, judicial acts, contracts, accounts, and other business documents open a window not only on Jewish society, but on medieval Mediterranean society more broadly (for the most part, the documents date between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries), particularly an area we would know very little about without them—trade with India. The Jews played a prominent role in this trade. The papers of the geniza show us the buying and selling of textiles, dyes, medicinal plants, spices, perfumes, scented resins, copper, and tin. Their commercial universe stretched from the western shores of the Mediterranean to the southwestern coast of India; the central pivot was Cairo.

Whatever compromise had brought an end to the affair, a crime had been committed that was likely going to go unpunished: precisely the one Sâfî denounced. It was this accusation Ibn Jamâhir sought to counter by playing the outraged victim. What was the core of the accusation? The authors of the petition took care to put it directly in the accuser’s mouth: “You had a slave girl, made her pregnant, and when she bore you a boy, you abandoned her together with her boy in Berbera.” It is safe to assume the slave was Indian, and that the unfortunate girl was abandoned during a stopover between India and Aden, or Aden and the Red Sea. She had, for her part, offered the exotic pleasures of foreign travel to a merchant far from home. If she was left behind, whether by ruse or by force, on the coast of Somaliland—an unsavory back alley where men went to acquire cat skins, with little hope of turning a profit on the trinkets that were traded there—it was because Ibn Jamâhir did not want her disrupting his domestic universe at Aydhâb. Not that Cairo wasn’t already far enough away: a two weeks’ journey across the desert to the Nile at Aswan or Edfu, then more than a month downriver by felucca. But Aydhâb was a threshold between the East and the Mediterranean. And Ibn Jamâhir returned home.

We don’t know what had irritated the Jewish merchants of Aydhâb: was it that Ibn Jamâhir had kept a concubine when the rabbinic law forbade such relationships; that he had left her on a beach; that he had abandoned a newborn baby, his own son; that he had unjustly accused his denouncer? But it is understandable that the affair had caused a sensation. If it was barely possible to hide a crime carried out in secret in a harbor in Somaliland—in other words, at the ends of the earth—it was because Aydhâb was a noisy crossroads where merchants of all religions, men from East and West, mariners and businessmen, not to mention the usual port crowd, came into contact. Aydhâb was also where the kârim, the annual maritime convoy between India and Cairo, landed. And it was through Aydhâb that North African and West African Muslims passed on their way to the Islamic holy sites. The writings of one such pilgrim, Ibn Jubayr, have come down to us: “It is one of the most frequented ports of the world,” he writes of Aydhâb, “because of the ships of India and the Yemen that sail to and from it, as well as the pilgrim ships that come and go.” The man from whom our pilgrim rented his lodgings for his three-week stay was an Abyssinian; few people owned houses or boats in the city. Everything was imported, including the water. The local population, the Beja, “closer to wild beasts than they are to men,” dove for pearls, but mostly made their living by exploiting pilgrims. They charged exorbitant rates for passage to Arabia and reserved the right to load the pilgrims, “like chickens crammed in a coop,” into their jalba, skiffs made from palm planks sewn together with cord made from coconut fiber. In an environment where the boats often ran aground on reefs in shark-infested waters, their owners were eager to make a single crossing profitable. Often the boats wound up on even less hospitable shores—if that’s possible—leaving their pilgrim passengers at the mercy of the austere environment and unscrupulous bandits. “Not seldom pilgrims will stray on foot through the wayless desert and, being lost, die of thirst,” wrote Ibn Jubayr. “Those who survive and reach Aydhâb are like men quickened from the shroud. While we were there we saw some who had come in this manner, and in their ghastly shape and changed form was ‘a portent for those observed carefully’ [Koran 15:75].” Our author’s opinion of the region? “This is the country of Islam most deserving a hisbah [flagellation], and the scourge employed should be the sword.”

From the very beginning of Islam, Aydhâb allowed for the exportation of gold and slaves from its hinterlands. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century, it was, if not the hub between Africa and India—a role reserved for Aden, where the firms and the entrepôts were located—at least the hub where goods passed from ships to caravans, where customs and the obligatory contribution to the Beja were paid. Today the site of the city is largely forgotten; it lies in the Hala’ib Triangle, a disputed zone between Egypt and Sudan. The few scholars who have passed through it over the last century have seen the ruins of small stone houses and cisterns; ground covered with pieces of Chinese porcelains; and, especially, thousands of Muslim rectangular tombs made from large blocks of coral limestone—the final resting places of pilgrims who never made it to Mecca or never came back home. There is still a small police station.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The study of the exceptional material that is the Cairo geniza was the life’s work of Shelomoh Dov Goitein, to whom we owe the magisterial A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World As Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–1999); two of the volumes were published posthumously. The memorandum detailing the case of the concubine is treated in the same author’s Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), no. 79 (pp. 335–338); I have taken all details concerning the case from this book, with the exception of the hypothesis on Sâfî’s Ethiopian origins. Tim Power’s excellent article “The Origin and Development of the Sudanese Ports (Aydhâb, Bâdi‘, Sawâkin) in the Early Islamic Period,” Chroniques Yéménites 15 (2008): 92–110, covers the early history of the ports on Sudan’s Red Sea coast, while Jean-Claude Garcin, “Transport des épices et espace égyptien entre le XIe et le XVe siècle,” in Actes des Congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public, 7e congrès (Rennes, 1976), pp. 305–314, studies Aydhâb’s role in medieval Egyptian trade. Among the reports of people who have visited Aydhâb, consult G. W. Murray, “Aidhâb,” Geographical Journal 68 (1926): 235–240; and, more recently, David Peacock and Andrew Peacock, “The Enigma of ‘Aydhâb: A Medieval Islamic Port on the Red Sea,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 37 (2008): 32–48. The latter offers a brisk summary of the documentation and suggests locating Aydhâb’s harbor twenty kilometers southeast of the main site. But we should consider this a temporary, revisable hypothesis, as the observations made from satellite images have not received full confirmation on the ground. Regarding the kârim, see S. D. Goitein, “New Light on the Beginnings of the Kārim Merchants,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 (1958): 175–184. But it is Éric Valet’s study, L’Arabie marchande. État et commerce sous les sultans rasūlides du Yémen (626–858 / 1229–1454) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010), pp. 471–539, that outlines the state of the art on this matter. Ibn Jubayr visited Aydhâb in 1183. For an English translation of his travel accounts, see R.J.C. Broadhurst, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr: Being the Chronicle of a Mediaeval Spanish Moor Concerning His Journey to the Egypt of Saladin, the Holy Cities of Arabia, Baghdad the City of the Caliphs, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952). The excerpts cited here are from pp. 63–66.