Clinton Bailey, an American-Israeli educational whose analysis and documentation of the traditional traditions of the nomadic Bedouin tribes of the Center East helped protect the vanishing tradition for posterity, died Jan. 5 at his residence in Jerusalem. He was 88.
The trigger was coronary heart failure, his son Michael stated.
A local of Buffalo, Dr. Bailey spent almost 50 years recording the oral poetry, negotiations, trials, elder knowledge, weddings, rituals, proverbs and tales of the tribes of Israel’s southern Negev desert and Sinai Peninsula. Touring by jeep to abandon Bedouin camps, typically becoming a member of their migrations for weeks on camel again, digicam and tape recorder in hand, he created a document of a largely unwritten tradition.
The duty was pressing, he stated, as a result of Bedouin society, then largely illiterate, was on the verge of fast change. Fashionable borders, authorities restrictions, and urbanization started to encroach on their nomadic methods, and the appearance of transistor radios, cars, and cell telephones invaded the fashionable world.
“I made a decision to attempt to seize that tradition,” Dr. Bailey said in an interview in 2021, marking the donation of his archive of 350 hours of audio tapes and a set of prints and slides of National Library of Israel. “I might already see it beginning to disappear.”
The library described its assortment in a press release as “a treasure trove of orally transmitted historic tradition, now irreplaceable and inaccessible to youthful generations of Bedouins who’ve grown up uncovered to modernity.”
Dr. Bailey was revered by many tribes who credited him with preserving their historic traditions. Daham al-Atauneh, a retired writer from the Bedouin city of Hura within the Negev, stated Dr. Bailey had performed “a really sacred work,” particularly in accumulating poetry.
“It preserves it for eternity,” he stated. “Perhaps my kids will need to return to their story someday. Now there is a document.”
Dr. Bailey additionally advocated for the rights of the Bedouin, who’ve been locked in an unresolved land dispute with the Israeli authorities for the reason that state’s founding. Few Bedouins had paperwork or deeds proving possession of land.
Dr. Bailey’s life appears largely formed by his curiosity and probability encounters.
Born on April 24, 1936. as Erwin Glaser, he was the youthful son of Benjamin and Edna Glaser, Jewish immigrants from Russia. Benjamin Glazer, a self-made businessman, began with one gasoline pump and ultimately grew to become the proprietor of a series of gasoline stations in Buffalo.
Whereas serving within the US Navy after the Korean Warfare, Erwin Glaser, whereas aboard a ship, met a rabbi who launched him to the Jewish literature of Japanese Europe. This led to a gathering in New York with Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Polish-born Jewish American author and Yiddishist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
After finding out sculpture for a 12 months in Norway, Mr. Glaser returned to the US with the intention of finding out Yiddish at Yeshiva College, however ended up finding out Hebrew in upstate New York. There he met his first Israeli, a member of a communal farm or kibbutz. He moved to Israel in 1958, a decade after the institution of the Jewish state.
In 1959 he met after which married Maya Ordinan. Born in Chernivtsi, now a part of Ukraine, she got here to Israel as a baby.
After incomes a bachelor’s diploma in political science and Center Japanese research from the Hebrew College of Jerusalem, he spent a 12 months in an Arab village within the Galilee hills, in northern Israel, instructing English and studying spoken Arabic. He returned to the US and earned a doctorate in Close to Japanese Research at Columbia College earlier than returning to Israel in 1967.
Someday within the Nineteen Sixties, he modified his title to Clinton Bailey, derived from the intersection of Clinton Avenue and Bailey Avenue in Buffalo, the positioning of considered one of his father’s gasoline stations. His son Michael stated the change was in preparation for a visit to Pakistan, probably to keep away from sounding like a Jew in an Islamic nation, however, he added, the true causes had been by no means clear. Dr. Bailey can be identified in Israel by his Hebrew title Yitzhak or nickname Yitzik.
Unemployed and wandering round Tel Aviv someday close to the house of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, Dr. Bailey bumps into Paula Ben-Gurion, the chief’s spouse. They began speaking and she or he invited him to tea.
This opportunity assembly led to a friendship with Ben-Gurion that proved formative for Dr. Bailey. Mr. Ben-Gurion helped him get a job instructing English at an academy in Sde Boker, a distant kibbutz within the Negev desert. The Ben-Gurions later retired to Sde Boker, the place they lived in a spacious however considerably spartan cabin. Dr. Bailey typically joined the getting older politician on his brisk walks across the kibbutz.
When he went jogging alone, he met Bedouin shepherds and struck up conversations. They’d invite him again to their tents. He discovered their story – a life within the desert paying homage to pre-biblical instances – compelling. “It was a narrative of survival from 4,500 years in the past,” he stated.
After the 1967 struggle, when Israel managed the Egyptian Sinai, it gained entry to much more distant tribes. He moved to Jerusalem in 1975.
Within the Eighties, as an adviser on Arab affairs to the Israeli Ministry of Protection, Dr. Bailey steadily visited southern Lebanon, the place Israel occupies a buffer zone. He targeted on constructing relations with Shia Muslims there and really useful that the Israeli authorities do the identical. However Israel as a substitute sided with the Christian Lebanese militias that ran the Lebanese authorities on the time.
The partnership with the Christian militias led to one of many darkest moments in Israel’s historical past, when the nation was implicated within the massacres within the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps by the Christian Phalanx militias. Quickly, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite Lebanese militia, would emerge as Israel’s bitter enemy.
Dr. Bailey has written 4 books on Bedouin poetry, proverbs, regulation, and most just lately, Bedouin Tradition within the Bible, revealed by Yale College Press in 2018. He additionally taught Center Japanese politics and Bedouin tradition for a few years at Trinity Faculty in Hartford, Connecticut
Along with Michael Bailey, he’s survived by his spouse and their three different sons, Daniel, Benjamin and Ariel, and 9 grandchildren.
In 2016, on the age of 80, Dr. Bailey found a brand new sort of superstar. He had interviewed his good friend Mr. Ben-Gurion for 3 days in 1968. on movie, recording him speaking about his life and profession and the beginning of the Jewish state. The movie was then misplaced for many years and largely forgotten.
When it was rediscovered by probability – the silent movie in a single archive in Jerusalem, the soundtrack in one other within the Negev – it grew to become the idea for an award-winning 2016 documentary. “Ben-Gurion, Epilogue”.
Within the interview, performed 5 years earlier than his loss of life, Mr. Ben-Gurion provided an unusually uncooked, contemplative evaluation of his life’s work. The documentary struck a chord in Israel, the place many longed for extra modest leaders who confirmed extra statesmanship.
The simplicity of Ben-Gurion’s Sde Boker cabin was “a press release,” Dr. Bailey advised The New York Occasions on the time, including, “I do not suppose Ben-Gurion wished the perks of energy.”
The simplicity of life within the desert additionally drew Dr. Bailey to the Bedouin. In an effort to convey Bedouin manners to mates who had been accustomed to a extra materials world, he would sometimes inform the story of how he had unexpectedly turned as much as go to some tribes. Providing hospitality was a cultural crucial, so they might procure some tea right here and eggs there till they might supply him meals.
Though they themselves had few materials items, the boys didn’t contemplate this a hardship. “A Bedouin will get up within the morning with nothing,” stated Dr. Bailey, “and contemplate himself blissful if he has acquired one thing earlier than going to mattress.”
