The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue.

• Author: Sanders, Paula

The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. By MARINA RUSTOW. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020. Pp. xi + 597, illus. $45, [pounds sterling]35.

The late S. D. Goitein once remarked to this reviewer, "Mr. Schechter's geniza is not Mr. Goitein's geniza." By this he meant that Solomon Schechter's interest had been almost exclusively in the Hebrew literary fragments, whereas Goitein's interest was primarily (though not exclusively) in the Judeo-Arabic documentary material. With The Lost Archive, geniza scholars can say that Ms. Rustow's geniza is neither Mr. Schechter's nor Mr. Goitein's geniza. Marina Rustow has produced a monumental book that is nothing short of a masterpiece. In doing so, she has written a book that is pathbreaking as a work of geniza and broader Islamic history as well as a deep meditation on the production and consumption of writing. This, in short, is the book that Islamic historians--and particularly Fatimid specialists--have been waiting for. It is deeply learned, often witty (where else will you see al-Qalqashandl's encyclopedic Subh al-a'sha characterized as "the Swiss army knife of chancery"?), as well as a riveting story rendered in beautiful and accessible prose. And it is utterly original.

Rustow divides her richly illustrated book into four large sections, each of which asks fundamental historical questions about Islamic chancery practice and lays out a clear and incisive historiography that traverses many periods and disciplines. It is hard to think of another work that engages so many scholars working in so many fields. One has the impression that there is nothing she has not read, considered, and found valuable in her deep and broad contextualization of the Fatimid archive. Her engagement of other scholars' works is serious, deep, and respectful, even when disagreeing with them.

Rustow asks her readers to look beyond the contents of documents--the facts that we can extract from them--and ask what we can learn about the documentary culture that allows historians to understand "the scribes who wrote them and the institutional practices those scribes established and perpetuated." She makes a compelling case for a new diplomatics that the digital age has made possible, a diplomatics that allows us to understand documents as "records of the workings of power." This new vantage point in the reconstruction of an archive of a medieval Islamic dynasty also undergirds one of the most important governing arguments of the book: that the Fatimids developed an archival system that was complex and coherent, depending not on the sovereign's centrality and charisma, but rather inhering in bureaucratic routines. Near the end of this long and fascinating work, Rustow sums up her key argument succinctly: "[T]he state's deacquisitioning of decrees was voluntary and continual, not catastrophic or forcible" (p. 400). It is an argument that upends many of the assumptions that Fatimid historians--including this reviewer--have made about the nature and character of Fatimid rule, as well as many assumptions about the nature of the Cairo Geniza. While she states it explicitly...