Clinton Bailey, an American-Israeli tutorial whose analysis and documentation of the traditional traditions of the nomadic Bedouin tribes of the Center East helped protect a vanishing tradition for posterity, died on 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 some 50 years recording the oral poetry, negotiations, trials, knowledge of the elders, weddings, rituals, proverbs and tales of the tribes of the southern Israeli Negev Desert and the Sinai Peninsula. Touring by Jeep to abandon Bedouin encampments, generally becoming a member of their migrations for weeks on camel again, digicam and tape recorder in hand, he created a file of a largely unwritten tradition.
The duty was pressing, he stated, as a result of Bedouin society, then largely illiterate, was on the cusp of fast change. Fashionable borders, authorities restrictions and urbanization had been starting to encroach on their nomadic methods, and the appearance of transistor radios, automobiles and cellphones was sending the fashionable world swooshing in.
“I made a decision to attempt to seize that tradition,” Dr. Bailey stated in an interview in 2021 marking the donation of his archive of 350 hours of audio tape and a trove of prints and slides to the Nationwide Library of Israel. “I may already see it was starting to vanish.”
The library described his assortment in an announcement as “a treasure of orally transmitted historical tradition, now irreplaceable, and never out there through the youthful generations of Bedouin who grew up uncovered to modernity.”
Dr. Bailey was revered by many tribespeople, who credit score him with preserving their historical traditions. Daham al-Atawneh, a retired writer from the Bedouin city of Hura within the Negev, stated Dr. Bailey had achieved “very sacred work,” notably in accumulating poetry.
“This preserves it for eternity,” he stated. “Possibly my youngsters will wish to return to their historical past someday. There’s a file now.”
Dr. Bailey additionally advocated for the rights of the Bedouin who’ve been locked in an unresolved land dispute with the Israeli authorities because the founding of the state. Few Bedouin had paperwork or deeds proving land possession.
Dr. Bailey’s life seems to have been largely formed by his curiosity and serendipitous encounters.
Born on April 24, 1936, as Erwin Glaser, he was the youthful son of Benjamin and Edna Glaser, Jewish immigrants from Russia. Benjamin Glaser, a self-made businessman, began out with a single fuel pump and ended up proudly owning a sequence of service stations in Buffalo.
Whereas serving within the U.S. Navy after the Korean Battle, Erwin Glaser, whereas aboard a ship, met a rabbi who launched him to the Jewish literature of Japanese Europe. That led to a gathering in New York with Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Polish-born Jewish American author and Yiddishist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
After finding out sculpture in Norway for a 12 months, 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 Czernowitz, now a part of Ukraine, she had come 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 colloquial Arabic. He returned to the US and earned a doctorate in Center Japanese research at Columbia College earlier than returning to Israel in 1967.
Sooner or later within the Sixties, he modified his identify to Clinton Bailey, drawn from the intersection of Clinton Road and Bailey Avenue in Buffalo, the location of one among his father’s service stations. The change was in preparation for a visit to Pakistan, his son Michael, stated, presumably to keep away from sounding Jewish in an Islamic nation, however, he added, the true causes had been by no means clear. Dr. Bailey was additionally recognized in Israel by his Hebrew identify Itzchak, or the nickname Itzik.
Jobless, and wandering round Tel Aviv someday close to the house of David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister of Israel, Dr. Bailey ran into Paula Ben-Gurion, the chief’s partner. They obtained to speaking, and she or he invited him in for tea.
That likelihood assembly led to a friendship with the Ben-Gurions that proved formative for Dr. Bailey. Mr. Ben-Gurion helped him safe a job instructing English at an academy at 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 would generally be part of the getting older politician on his brisk walks across the kibbutz.
When out jogging alone, he would encounter Bedouin shepherds and strike up conversations. They might invite him again to their tents. He discovered their story — a life within the desert that harked again to pre-Biblical instances — compelling. “It was a narrative of survival going again 4,500 years,” he stated.
After the 1967 warfare, with Israel answerable for the Egyptian Sinai, he gained entry to much more distant tribes. He moved to Jerusalem in 1975.
Within the Eighties, as an adviser on Arab affairs in Israel’s Ministry of Protection, Dr. Bailey frequented southern Lebanon, the place Israel occupied a buffer zone. He targeted on constructing relations with the Shiite Muslims there and advisable that the Israeli authorities do the identical. However Israel as a substitute aligned itself with the Christian Lebanese militias that had been main the Lebanese authorities on the time.
The partnership with the Christian militias led to one of many darkest moments in Israeli historical past, when the nation was implicated within the massacres on the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila perpetrated by the Christian Phalange militia. Quickly Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite Lebanese militia, would emerge as a bitter enemy of Israel.
Dr. Bailey wrote 4 books on Bedouin poetry, proverbs, regulation and, most not too long ago, “Bedouin Tradition within the Bible,” printed by Yale College Press in 2018. He additionally taught Center East politics and Bedouin tradition for a few years at Trinity School in Hartford, Conn.
Along with Michael Bailey, he’s survived by his spouse and their three different sons, Daniel, Benjamin and Ariel, and 9 grandchildren.
In 2016, at age 80, Dr. Bailey discovered a brand new sort of superstar. He had interviewed his good friend Mr. Ben-Gurion over three 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 accidentally — the silent movie in a single archive in Jerusalem, the soundtrack in one other within the Negev — it grew to become the premise for an acclaimed 2016 documentary, “Ben-Gurion, Epilogue.”
Within the interview, performed 5 years earlier than his demise, Mr. Ben-Gurion supplied an unusually uncooked, contemplative evaluation of his life’s work. The documentary struck a chord in Israel, the place many individuals had been craving for extra humble leaders who confirmed extra statesmanship.
The simplicity of the Ben-Gurions’ cabin at Sde Boker was “an announcement,” Dr. Bailey advised The New York Instances on the time, including: “I don’t assume Ben-Gurion needed the perks of energy.”
The simplicity of desert life additionally drew Dr. Bailey to the Bedouin. In an effort to convey Bedouin methods to associates who had been used to a extra materials world, he would sometimes relate the story of how he had turned up unexpectedly to go to some tribesmen. Providing hospitality was a cultural crucial, so they might procure some tea from right here and eggs from there till they had been in a position to provide him a meal.
Though that they had little materials items themselves, the boys didn’t contemplate this a hardship. “A Bedouin would get up within the morning with nothing,” Dr. Bailey stated, “and would contemplate himself lucky if he had acquired one thing by bedtime.”