I just came across something too interesting to leave buried in the interwebs, so here it is. A little over a century ago, scholars uncovered a number of manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah written by one "Ovadiah HaGer", or Ovadiah the Proselyte. Ovadiah, born Johannes in the Italian town of Oppido in the late 11th century, was an aspiring priest. The story of the conversion to Judaism of Andreas, Archbishop of Bari, inspired Ovadiah to delve into Tanach in the original and he ended up converting as well. Of course, conversion to Judaism at this point in history was a bit of a health hazard, so Ovadiah fled to Constantinople and then to Baghdad, settled for some time in Egypt, and ended up in the Land of Israel. We know all this from his own memoir, which was partially preserved in the Genizah and is available at the following remarkable website (you can view the manuscripts, transcriptions and translations): https://johannes-obadiah.org/index.html
(Edit: I feel that I should put an attribution in the body of this post, although it appears pretty clearly on the website itself and in the comments. The website was put together by Prof. Gary Rendsburg and Peter Moshe Shamah. I certainly didn’t expect this post to receive the kind of attention it did, and prior to this my average likes per post was something like 0.218, so I felt like linking to the site would suffice. But now that more people are looking at this, those names ought to be more prominently displayed here.)
The memoir is incredible. Two points I found especially interesting:
1) Ovadiah records the appearance of THREE (consecutive) false messiahs, at least one of whom won the hearts and loyalties of numerous Jews at the time (spoiler: it did not end well). The third one, whom Ovadiah meets in the Land of Israel, claims that redemption is nigh and within a few months someone is going to bring the Jews back to the Land. When Ovadiah inquires how exactly this fellow has come by the information, he says that, as it happens, he himself is the guy that the Jews have been waiting for. To which Ovadiah says, Huh, funny thing, I converted to Judaism nineteen years ago and I have yet to hear that the Jews are hoping to be redeemed by a Cohen. The way I heard it is that we're waiting for Elijah to come and point out someone from the seed of David and, well, you being a Cohen, I'm not sure this is going to work out! ZING!
2) Ovadiah records that the Jews of Baghdad under the vizier Ibn Shuja had to wear lead pendants with the word "dhimmi" inscribed on them, that Jewish women had to wear one black and one red shoe, and that the the Jews paid a graduated head tax of 4.5 drachmas for the wealthy, 2.5 drachmas for the middle-class, and 1.5 drachmas for the destitute. If someone died in arrears, the authorities would not permit him to be buried until the Jews paid up all the taxes that he owed. The authorities threatened that if they didn't pay, the body would be cremated.
Also of great interest is that Ovadiah seems to have written the very first piece of notated Jewish music in history! He set several verses and what looks like his own poetry to music which he notated using neumes, a precursor of our musical notation which was used for Gregorian chant:
I've zoomed in on one part so that you can see the notation system better--the alef-beis going up the page denotes C, D, E, etc. and is in place of a staff:
I've transcribed the first line into the notation common today (other transcriptions exist but seem to have erred in a couple of places--also, I assume that alef here stands for C):
