Clinton Bailey, an American-Israeli academic whose research and documentation of the ancient traditions of the nomadic Bedouin tribes of the Middle East helped preserve the endangered culture for generations, died on January 5 at his home in Jerusalem. He was 88 years old.
The cause was heart failure, his son Michael said.
Dr. Bailey, of Buffalo, has spent nearly 50 years recording the oral poetry, conversations, trials, wisdom of the elders, weddings, ceremonies, proverbs and stories of the tribes of Israel's southern Negev Desert and Sinai Peninsula. Traveling by Jeep to desert Bedouin camps, sometimes on camel back, camera and tape recorder in hand, he joined their migrations for weeks at a time, creating a record of a largely unwritten culture.
The task was urgent, he said, because Bedouin society, which was largely illiterate at the time, was on the brink of rapid change. Modern borders, government restrictions, and urbanization began to encroach on their nomadic lifestyle, and the advent of transistor radios, automobiles, and cell phones shocked the modern world.
“I decided to try to capture this culture,” said Dr. Bailey said in an interview In 2021, he noted that his archive, consisting of 350 hours of audio tapes and numerous prints and slides, was donated to the United States. National Library of Israel. “I could already see it starting to disappear.”
In a statement, the library described its collection as “a treasure trove of an ancient orally transmitted culture, now irreplaceable and inaccessible to younger generations of Bedouins exposed to modernity.”
Dr. Bailey was respected by many tribal people for preserving their ancient traditions. Daham al-Atawneh, a retired publisher from the Bedouin town of Hura in the Negev, says Dr. Bailey, in particular, did a “very sacred work” in collecting poetry.
“It preserves it forever,” he said. “Maybe one day my children will want to go back to their history. Now there is a record.”
Dr. Bailey has also advocated for the rights of the Bedouin, who have been locked in an unresolved land dispute with the Israeli government since the establishment of the state. Few Bedouins had documents or papers proving that they owned land.
Dr. Bailey's life was largely shaped by his curiosity and chance encounters.
Born April 24, 1936, as Erwin Glazer, he was the youngest son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Benjamin and Edna Glazer. Benjamin Glaser, his own business, started with a single gas pump and eventually owned a chain of service stations in Buffalo.
While serving in the US Navy after the Korean War, Erwin Glaser met a rabbi while on board ship who introduced him to Eastern European Jewish literature. This led to a meeting in New York with the Polish-Jewish American writer and Yiddist Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
After a year studying sculpture in Norway, Mr. Glaser returned to the United States with the intention of studying Yiddish at Yeshiva University, but ended up studying Hebrew in upstate New York. There he met the first Israeli who was a member of a communal farm, or kibbutz. He moved to Israel in 1958, ten years after the establishment of the Jewish state.
In 1959, he met and married Maya Ordinan. Born in Chernivtsi, now part of Ukraine, he came to Israel as a child.
After earning a bachelor's degree in political science and Middle Eastern studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she spent a year teaching English and learning spoken Arabic in an Arab village in the Galilee Hills in northern Israel. He returned to the United States and earned a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University before returning to Israel in 1967.
At some point in the 1960s, he changed his name to Clinton Bailey, named after the intersection of Clinton Street and Bailey Avenue in Buffalo, where one of his father's service stations was located. His son Michael said the change was in preparation for a trip to Pakistan, possibly to avoid being seen as a Jew in an Islamic country, but he added that the real reasons were never clear. Dr. Bailey was also known in Israel by the Hebrew name Itzchak or Itzik.
Dr. Bailey, who was unemployed and wandering near the house of Israel's founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion one day in Tel Aviv, bumped into Paula Ben-Gurion, the leader's wife. They started talking and he invited her to tea.
This chance meeting led to a friendship with the Ben-Gurions, which Dr. It worked for Bailey. Mr. Ben-Gurion helped him find a job teaching English at an academy in Sde Boker, a remote kibbutz in the Negev desert. The Ben-Gurions then retired to Sde Boker, where they lived in a spacious but somewhat spartan cabin. Dr. Bailey sometimes joined the aging politician on brisk walks around the kibbutz.
When he ran alone, he would meet and chat with Bedouin herders. They would invite him back to their tent. He found their story—a desert life that harked back to pre-Biblical times—compelling. “It was a story of survival going back 4,500 years,” he said.
After the 1967 war, with Israel gaining control of the Egyptian Sinai, it gained access to even more distant tribes. In 1975, he moved to Jerusalem.
In the 1980s, as an adviser on Arab affairs at the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Dr. Bailey frequently visited southern Lebanon, where Israel occupied the buffer zone. He paid attention to the establishment of relations with the Shia Muslims there and recommended the same to the Israeli government. But Israel instead aligned itself with the Christian Lebanese militias that led the Lebanese government at the time.
Cooperation with Christian militias led to one of the darkest moments in Israel's history, when the country was complicit in the massacres by Christian Phalange militias in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shia Lebanese militia, will soon emerge as Israel's bitter enemy.
Dr. Bailey has written four books on Bedouin poetry, proverbs, law, and most recently Bedouin Culture in the Bible, published by Yale University Press in 2018. Hartford, Conn.
In addition to Michael Bailey, he is survived by his wife and three other sons, Daniel, Benjamin and Ariel, and nine grandchildren.
In 2016, at the age of 80, Dr. Bailey found a new kind of celebrity. He recorded his friend Mr. Ben-Gurion interviewed on film over three days in 1968, talking about his life and career and the creation of the Jewish state. The film was then lost for decades and largely forgotten.
When they rediscovered it by chance—a silent film in one archive in Jerusalem, a soundtrack in another in the Negev—it became essential. In 2016, the famous documentary “Ben-Gurion, Epilogue”.
In an interview five years before his death, Mr. Ben-Gurion offered an unusually raw, thoughtful analysis of his life's work. The documentary caused a stir in Israel, where many people longed for more modest leaders who showed more statesmanship.
The simplicity of the Ben-Gurions' cabin on Sde Boker was a “statement,” Dr. Bailey told The New York Times at the time, adding, “I don't think Ben-Gurion wanted the perks of power.”
The simplicity of desert life also attracted Dr. Bailey to the Bedouins. He told how he would occasionally drop by to visit a tribesman to teach his Bedouin ways to his more materialistic friends. It was culturally important to offer hospitality, so they would supply him with tea here and eggs there until they offered him food.
Although they had little material wealth, the men did not consider it a problem. Dr. Bailey said, “A Bedouin would wake up in the morning with nothing and consider himself happy if he got something before going to bed.”