Joseph Santhouse (m. 2021) has recently been awarded not one, but three prestigious awards for his dissertation: ‘Jewish Divination in Medieval Egypt and Syria-Palestine, c.950-c.1250’ - including the Gladstone Memorial Prize for the best dissertation from amongst candidates of History, Economics and Social and Political Sciences, the Cambridge Historical Society award for best undergraduate dissertation, and the Council for British Research in the Levant’s award in Levantine History. 

He told us more about his research and the awards: 

Divination amongst medieval Jewish communities has been studied largely in its relation to cultural antecedents, from its Greek incarnations to its Arabic influences. My dissertation sought to go further- to find out who practised divination and why, charting the extent of its social prevalence amongst Jews throughout the Near East. I titled my dissertation, ‘Jewish Divination in Medieval Egypt and Syria-Palestine, c.950-c.1250’.  Strangely, this was not my initial title- I was drawn to the larger subject area, medieval Egypt, through Cambridge University’s very own Cairo Geniza (trans. storeroom), which houses hundreds of thousands of manuscripts deposited by Jewish communities of Cairo for over a millennium. Thanks to the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, many have been digitised, and non-digitised manuscripts, untouched for around a thousand years, were accessible only a few minutes from Trumpington Street. As I read through the documents, a new world opened up. It showed a Jewish community fraught with internal and external pressures, seeking help from the divine to remedy their woes and seek knowledge about the future. Rabbis struggled to contain it and even tacitly endorsed it; merchants and members of the Jewish elite were known to practice it, with some surprising evidence of women practitioners who were found far away from home. Lastly, dream divination featured heavily in the Geniza amongst all strata of society, with people wanting to find buried gold, or the next decision of the caliph that could affect the community. 

With this dissertation, I won three prizes: The Gladstone Memorial Prize for the best dissertation from amongst candidates of History, Economics and Social and Political Sciences, the Cambridge Historical Society award for best undergraduate dissertation, and the Council for British Research in the Levant’s award in Levantine History.

I was honoured to receive these awards, but it was only through the help of both the Peterhouse and wider Cambridge community that I was able to achieve this. In particular, the generosity of the Bruckmann Fund allowed me to learn Hebrew and basic Arabic for this dissertation. The Dean of the College, Dr Reverend Stephen Hampton, provided support throughout, as did my Directors of Studies at Peterhouse, Dr Magnus Ryan and Dr Geraint Thomas. My dissertation supervisor Professor Ben Outhwaite provided indispensable advice. He also piqued my interest in palaeography, a course which I now take here in France, where I study as an Eiffel Scholar for a masters in Medieval History. Finally, I could not have done any of this without my parents and family, whom I love so much.