New Faculty: Jennifer Grayson
Profile written by Alana Goldman, ’24, the Center’s Lori and Eric Sklut Undergraduate Intern for 2023-24.
Jennifer Grayson is an assistant professor of medieval/early modern Jewish history and the Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat Fellow in Jewish History in the department of history. She joined Carolina in fall 2023.
Jennifer Grayson studies medieval Jewish communities in the Islamic world. She studied medieval history as an undergraduate and was struck by its ubiquity while studying abroad in Morocco. Simultaneously, she found the ubiquitous Jewish history there to be fascinating. Grayson’s professors encouraged her to combine her interests and keep pursuing this topic. Today, Grayson studies medieval manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza, a collection of manuscripts found in the geniza, or storeroom, in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo. The synagogue dates back to the 11th century. The Jewish community deposited their old writings into the geniza chamber off of the synagogue’s attic. These writings, in Hebrew, Greek and Arabic, include personal correspondence, business contracts and marriage documents. The Cairo Geniza constitutes the largest collection of premodern documents ever discovered.
Grayson is currently researching the Jews of medieval Baghdad and their relationship to the Muslim government. Baghdad was the capital of the Abbasid caliphate the site of the largest and most concentrated Jewish population in the world. Baghdad became the seat of the Babylonian Geonim, the heads of major rabbinical academies that developed the methodology for deriving Jewish law. It was a major Islamic imperial political center and also a major Jewish spiritual and cultural rabbinic center. Grayson’s research strives to understand what these two had to do with each other, how rabbinic Jews related to the Muslim government, and how these relationships changed over time.
Grayson taught three classes last year: “Muslim Societies to 1500,” discussing pre-modern Islamic civilization and medieval history from a non-European perspective; “Travel and Globalization in the Middle Ages,” seeking to understand why medieval people traveled and the experience of travel; and “The Renaissance and the Jews,” following early modern Jewish history in Europe and discussing the Renaissance from a Jewish perspective.
Grayson hopes students take away the importance of asking questions; to ask who’s included in the dominant historical narrative and who isn’t. To examine the sources we have and ask why we have these sources and not others. To consider what the absences in our source material can tell us. Many Jewish historical sources, like the Cairo Geniza, survived by chance, so scholars have to be creative with Jewish history. Saying that we don’t know or don’t have the sources isn’t enough. We must ask questions to expand our understanding