Joseph Sadan (born January 17, 1939) is emeritus professor of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Tel-Aviv University. He has also taught and research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and research institutions in Europe, as well as at Haifa University and Menashe College. Sadan studied at the Hebrew University (1958–1963) where he received his BA and MA degrees (Profs. Joshua Blau, Eliahu Ashtor, M.J. Kister and others). Between 1965 and 1969/70 he worked on his Ph.D. thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris (Profs. Claude Cahen, Charles Pellat and Jeanine Sourdel-Thomine). The subject of the dissertation was furniture in the Middle East in medieval times. In 1989 he was promoted to Full Professor and retired in 2007. He held the Irene Helmus Chair for Arabic Literature until October 2009.
His research
In his research, Joseph Sadan focused on social and material culture (furniture, drinks), medieval Arabic literature, especially prose (adab), and Jewish-Arab relations, including studies on Yehuda Alharizi and on the Sabbatean movement. In recent years he has also worked on the publication of forgotten stories, pre-modern novels of sorts on the Arabian Nights model (see below).
Furniture in the medieval Middle East
In 1976 Sadan's study Le mobilier Proche-Orient medieval was published by Brill, Leiden in 1976. In this book he focused on aspects of everyday life, especially among the lower classes, that had been ignored in the scholarly literature and are only very rarely mentioned in literary and historical texts. Sadan unearthed the relevant facts in chance comments found in texts and also in some works of art (iconography). He filled in missing information also through a perusal of dowry lists of Jewish brides discovered in the Cairo Geniza, mostly in Judeo-Arabic.
Still More Arabian Nights
Published in 2003 by Am Oved, this book consists of stories found in previously unpublished manuscripts. The quality and beauty of these stories would have made them good candidates for inclusion in The Arabian Nights, but fate decreed otherwise. The book reveals an entire world existing side-by-side with The Arabian Nights, of novel-like pre-modern compositions that reflect a measure of folk culture, a tradition of oral storytelling whose tales were occasionally also put to writing (whenever there are two versions of a story, they are not similar, since the narrator usually does not copy the story, but just tells it in a different way). A few noteworthy texts are replete with poetry and demonstrate quite clearly that even narrators of folktales in a sense continued the tradition of Classical Arabic poetry. Subsequently the book was published in a French edition under the title Et il y eut d'autres nuits (2004), and an Arabic edition is forthcoming. The texts claim to reflect Abbasid or Mamluk culture, but quite a few of the extant manuscripts are later, and are dated to the beginning of the Ottoman period.
Arab humor
In 2007 an improved edition of Sadan's book on Arab humor, which originally appeared in 1984/5, was published in Beirut and Cologne. Sadan studied the differences between canonical texts and a more folksy type of humor, various variations and even reversals of the same humorous theme, attributed to different people in different times. The need for humor in light of the stiff and boring atmosphere imposed by court etiquette gave rise to jokes and encouraged the presence of jokers and other strange characters, who engendered an enjoyable "anti-formality" atmosphere, for which there were specific terms in the medieval world. In other words, this is a literature of humor with a social background. The book focuses especially on witticisms concerning boring people (thuqalâ’). The reason for this is that in this culture good style, elegant speech and correct manners where highly appreciated, so bores became the butt of jokes.