De-theologising Medieval Palestine: Corpus, tradition and double critique

The writer shows the necessity of de-theologise the historiography of inheritance, to which Palestinian history and cultural heritage have been subjected. He begins by defining concepts such as middle ages, corpus, tradition and minor literature, operational in mapping the immediate object of investigation, framing Palestinian medieval history and heritage as a privileged site of contested narratives. As an example of minor literature, the author continues the discussion of Goitein in “What would Jewish and General History Benefit by a Systematic Publication of the Documentary Geniza Papers?”. While Goitein and the “Princeton School” are right in calling upon scholars of medieval Islamic history to reintegrate what they call “Documentary Geniza” (DG) as witness for both Jewish and Islamic Mediterranean history, including Palestine, DG is not exclusively Jewish, but rather a shared lieu de mémoire, an archive or, if we use Steinschneider’s terminology, bibliotheca Judaeo-arabica, which has been de-canonised from Zionist and modern Arab-Islamic historiographies. Jacque Derrida has warned us that any act of “privileging of one sign or element above others is fundamentally, or rather structurally theological”. Historiography begins with being aware of the pitfalls of the asymmetry of sources, canons, and identity politics.