Marina Rustow
Image by Anya Ulinich
Marina Rustow got the phone call informing her that she was officially a genius while shopping for clothes with her 4-year-old.
Rustow, 46, a Princeton University professor who has plumbed unexplored depths of the Cairo Geniza, this year became the first academic expert in Jewish studies to win one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grants” since the 1990s.
Being an official genius hasn’t changed everything. “I’m still going to be a mediocre Scrabble player,” Rustow said. “I’m not very good at reading maps.”
The recognition has brought new notice to Rustow’s academic work. She believes that this attention will allow others to benefit from her methods as well as her specific scholarship, which in recent years has specialized in examining overlooked fragments from the Cairo Geniza, a trove of ancient documents uncovered in an Egyptian synagogue.
While most of the scholarship on the Cairo Geniza has focused on its Hebrew texts, Rustow has specialized on Arabic fragments. Her discoveries have provided a key not only to how Jewish communities intersected with the Fatimid Caliphate, which ruled much of North Africa from the 10th through the 12th centuries, but also to how the Caliphate itself operated.
She has shed new light on the cooperation of Islamic factions and sects who were previously assumed to be at loggerheads.
“Our best source for the kind of fine-grained picture of how government worked in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries in the Middle East comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue,” Rustow told the Forward.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
