Fischel on Sumayr

Can any kind soul assist?

Medieval sources repeatedly mention a Jewish guy variously called Sumayr or Sumoir (or indeed all sorts of variants on the modern Samir). In the 15th century Maqrizi was quite clear that Sumayr was the man who created the enormously influential Islamic weight system of ‘Abd al-Malik around 697-99 AD.

Modern academic scholarship seems to have turned its back on Sumayr – bit I chanced upon a reference to this book (which the reference suggests makes a bigger effort to account for the event (?))

Walter J. Fischel, Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Medieval Islam. Revised ed. New York 1969

I suspect a scan of a couple of pages of text and maybe a page of footnotes will cover what is there, if any generous person has access to it and can supply.

My local university has a copy, but I am shut out due to covid, and there are no cheap 2nd hand copies in the UK.

BTW – I already corresponded with a fellow who seems to be a current world academic expert on this matter, and he instructed me to believe that Samayr did not exist. Did not offer any evidence. Since I already long since believed academic life has been going to the dogs since about 1970, I discounted that.

Rob

PS write me direct for contact details

 

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@EWC3, your collective question is so good, it Begs for an answer. Very best of luck, not least getting your hands on a copy of the book.
...I hope this isn't the kind of question that's too good to find an answer. ...Along the lines of how the Oscars should have a category for "Movies that were Too Good to get and Oscar." I can write someone I know and ask him if he knows anything about this.

 

Rob, I have access to the book and would be glad to help you. Yet, Sumayr is not mentioned in Fischel's index, and I didn't find the relevant section by superficially thumbing through the volume. As you know, I'm not an expert on this subject. Does the reference you mentioned maybe give a page number so I know where to look?

The table of contents of the chronologically arranged book starts with the Abassid Caliphate, so much later than 697–99 (see below). Thus I'm a bit unsure where to find the section you are looking for.

 

@Orielensis, you're just That Good!!! :<}

 

Many thanks indeed @Orielensis

I am just as puzzled as you

The text I got my info from is here

https://archive.org/stream/Shekel1987v20n1JanMar/Shekel1987v20n1JanMar_djvu.txt

See the piece by Samuel Lachman, Haifa (page 9)

he states:

The Sumairi dirhems were so called because they were first struck by a Jew named Sumoir, who recommended them to Hajjaj ibn Yusuf,^^ at the time of the coinage reform.

Fischel,^^ basing his description on Ibn al-Athir^® and Maqrizi,^® presents the following story: Under the Umayyad Caliphate there arose to prominence Sumair al-Yahudi (c. 695) who, as keeper of the Mint in Damascus, as an expert in coins, purveyor of metals and provider of loans for the Court, served the fiscal administration for many years. Fischel’s references are of the 13th and 15th century. So far no earlier supporting sources have been traced.

The footnote to the text ^^ must be 14 - (you have to scroll down a bit as OCR has mixed it into the next article). That gives a page reference which OCR renders as XXn. So it looks like the comment is maybe in his introduction - maybe on page 20. But does your copy even have a page 20 in its introduction???

Very best wishes (and Merry Christmas)

Rob

 

Just for further info - there is considerable agreement that Sumayr created and struck some rare but lovely coins for Hajjaj ibn Yusuf - below is the Wiki picture of one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Hajjaj_ibn_Yusuf

My interest is in the further comment by al-Maqrizi that he subsequently devised the new weight standards a couple of years later. Fischel putting him at Damascus by then would support that..............

 

I heard from the numismatist I wrote about this (Alan DeShazo, published in The Celator, and I don't know where else). He sent links to these articles, airing skepticism that Sumayr was mentioned in the first one. Hopefully, between them, they have some useful context, at least.
https://www.persee.fr/doc/numi_0484-8942_2009_num_6_165_2879

https://www.icsai.org/procarch/8iclice/8iclice-096.pdf

 

Many thanks! A few questions follow, but first I think I should show what Maqrizi actually wrote about Sumayr - probably in 1405 AD. [Translation is by Allouche, “Mamluq Economics”, Salt Lake City, 1994]




To questions

@Orielensis Fischel cites the 1969 revised edition of the Fischel work. Is it possible you scanned from the earlier 1937 edition?

@+VGO.DVCKS two questions:

(1) Alan DeShezo takes the orthodox line that Sumayr did not exist – but does he offer any evidence for that view? In particular is there anything specific in either linked piece supporting that position?

On the Treadwell piece – an erudite effort of course but it never addresses what I take to be the key point - the important metrological reform – rather it gets lost in other details of the affair.

On the Kassim piece – I judge that "the dirhem must be 7/10 of the mithcal" is not in itself a tenant of orthodox Islam. At least I have orthodox Muslim friends in London who reject it for a more scientific approach. However Kassim is writing in Malaysia, not London, where some people, it seems, think differently.

(2) The second rather simpler question. If Treadwell and Kassim get the dinar weight right and Maqrizi gets the relationship right – what does that make the dirhem weigh?

If you can get to a correct answer to (2) it might then lead us to interesting insights concerning what was going on in 699 AD, and also, what was going right in 1405 that is going wrong in 2020…….

Rob T

 

I'm afraid you're right. I have access to a 1968 edition of Fischel (title page below), which I suspect to be a reprint of the 1937 edition. I seems to have been revised and published once more a year later in 1969. My edition does not have the page XVII mentioned in the article by Lachman your link leads to, and doesn't mention Sumair. (I gave it another, closer look this morning.)



Judging from this short review by Georges Vajda in Revue des études juives (1970), I assume the 1969 edition has an added preface, which appears to be the part mentioning Sumair that is of interest to you:

Unfortunately, the two academic libraries I have access to don't hold a copy, and HathiTrust doesn't have it either. Thus I'm afraid my offer to help was somewhat overhasty. Maybe someone else can get their hands on that book?

 

@EWC3, I did hear back from Alan DeShazo. May the record show that, while he's something of a numismatic and linguistic polymath (cf. his contributions to academia.edu), he didn't have an opinion on this subject; he's only citing people in his acquaintance. He wrote someone, who weighed in as follows (from his forward of the email).

"Hi, the point of the story is that a Jew named Sumayr, "little charmer," explained everything to al-Hajjaj: how to make good coins, and how to make a set of weights to weigh them. I believe it was composed as an attempt to explain a coin nickname, sumayri, applied, it seems, to some of the Arab-Sasanian dirhams. I'm working on it a bit, trying not to. So far I found the story only in French and Arabic. The earliest version we have seems to be in a legal text by al-Mawardi written in the first half of the eleventh century, that is about 350 years after the purported event, but it's unlikely that al-Mawardi composed it himself."

I'm a little nervous about citing the source, without checking in with Alan (...and the sender) again. Sorry if that amounts to erring, literally, on the side of caution. And Yes, I can always do that.
It's the kind of story anyone would wish is true. Alan has written me about the way the Sassanians themselves, no less than the early Caliphates, appointed Jews to high levels of adminstrative office.

 

Interesting – perhaps something that could be chased up off group. For my own part I have had discussion about this with Wasserstein – who I felt was dismissive and alongside gave an incorrect account of dirhem weight (in line with Bates and Bacharach to name but a few). I also discussed it at length with Lutz Ilisch, who as ever was enormously helpful. Lutz cites a much earlier source – he wrote:

“The earliest tradition about Sumayr is probably still in the Kitab
al-Kharaj of Abu-Yusuf Ya'qub, a treatise on taxes composed at the end
of the 8th century.”

I have two problems with this opinion

1) its clearly incorrect – very few people “wish” this to be true - seems to be mostly Maqrizi, Fischel and myself. Almost the entire academic community – including Wasserstein, Ilisch and Alan’s anonymous chum - “wish” this to be false.

2) Anyhow what people “wish” is irrelevant. The only important question is – where does the evidence point?

Sadly nobody had a shot at my simple question –

If Treadwell and Kassim get the dinar weight right and Maqrizi gets the relationship right – what does that make the dirhem weigh?

so I will make it even simpler.

If the dinar weighed 4.25g and Maqrizi says the weight ratio to the dirhem is 87:60 – what does Maqrizi say the dirhem weighed? Surely that is easy enough?

Rob

 

Many thanks anyhow for the attempt. Sumayr is sure turning out to be a difficult guy to track down!

Rob

 

You're welcome.
I'm sure my, um, very Jewish correspondent would concur. The email he forwarded was from Michael Bates, whom he described as "the curator of Islamic coins for the ANS [, ...and] still active in the subject," with the further observation that "you can bet that anything he says is well researched."
Right, part of Bates's email I omitted was his wishes that my correspondent, and his family (including his wife, who is observant, by way of a local Conservative synagogue), had a good Hannukah.
To put it a little differently, for anyone I know, antisemitism is effectively off the radar.
...Hope you did, too. Otherwise, Just, Thing.

 

Adds to what Alan DeShazo already told me via Academia.

I first came across Michael Bates at a conference in London (1976?). The great Turkish numismatist Cuneyt Olcer has travelled from Istanbul to give a charming and light hearted talk on Ottoman coppers. Michael made quite merciless criticisms from the floor.

Thus when the WWW and Yahoo appeared I took that as a kind of licence, and my subsequent long debates with Michael rather took the appearance of a blood sport. All to the good, much as Voltaire said about pens and such.

Anyhow, with such thoughts in mind, I would like to point out that if I ask what
4.25 x 60/87 is and you reply by rambling about Hannukah - this seems a disappointing attack on rationality itself.

For me - further evidence that scholarship has caught a fatal illness. Caught it round about 1970 in my judgement.

Even Michael and I might agree on that. I will ask him and see.

Rob

 

Some of us could say the same of civility.

 

Raising questions about my attitude to antisemitism was both completely unwarranted and deeply offensive

Honi soit qui mal y pense

 

Which (thank you, Saw his achievements in Canterbury Cathedral), kind of gets to go right back at you.
I cordially regret having been naive enough to do what I could to help out.

 

I have no idea what you are referring to.

Who are you talking about, and what achievements?

Rob

 

Edward the Black Prince, son of Edward III, whose motto for the Order of the Garter you quoted. ('Honi soit qui mal y pense.') The former's 'achievements' (heraldic and armorial artefacts) hang above his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral.
Figured you would know all that, having been good enough to quote the slogan. Sorry for the mistake.

 

OK so your “ achievements” here is a somewhat archaic usage. But that leaves us with a mock-logical argument. The first clause does not support the second - which is just a further fiction of your own making.

I am choosing to prolong this tiresome matter because this has been happening again and again and again on Cointalk. Genuine attempts at objective scholarship are repeatedly being traduced by bogus arguments of the “thought police” variety.

Any who have followed the course of some of these incidents in a fair minded and objective way will see that part of the problem has its source within the modern academic hierarchy itself.

Is there anyone here who understands why I am saying this – if so, and understandably you prefer not to reveal it, please do write me privately. I am not alone in seeing what is going on within modern professional academic life and I would gladly exchange opinions. The great majority seem now to be at worst stoking, or at best complacently ignoring, the warnings about great dangers clearly stated by such as Russell, Popper, Jung and Orwell.

Whither scholarship?

Rob