Clinton Bailey, American-Israeli Who Preserved Bedouin Culture, Dies at 88

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 a vanishing culture for posterity, died on Jan. 5 at his home in Jerusalem. He was 88.

The cause was heart failure, his son Michael said.

A native of Buffalo, Dr. Bailey spent some 50 years recording the oral poetry, negotiations, trials, wisdom of the elders, weddings, rituals, proverbs and stories of the tribes of the southern Israeli Negev Desert and the Sinai Peninsula. Traveling by Jeep to desert Bedouin encampments, sometimes joining their migrations for weeks on camel back, camera and tape recorder in hand, he created a record of a largely unwritten culture.

The task was urgent, he said, because Bedouin society, then largely illiterate, was on the cusp of rapid change. Modern borders, government restrictions and urbanization were beginning to encroach on their nomadic ways, and the advent of transistor radios, cars and mobile phones was sending the modern world swooshing in.

“I decided to try to capture that culture,” Dr. Bailey said 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 National Library of Israel. “I could already see it was beginning to disappear.”

The library described his collection in a statement as “a treasure of orally transmitted ancient culture, now irreplaceable, and not available via the younger generations of Bedouin who grew up exposed to modernity.”

Dr. Bailey was revered by many tribespeople, who credit him with preserving their ancient traditions. Daham al-Atawneh, a retired publisher from the Bedouin town of Hura in the Negev, said Dr. Bailey had done “very sacred work,” particularly in collecting poetry.

“This preserves it for eternity,” he said. “Maybe my children will want to go back to their history one day. There is a record now.”

Dr. Bailey also advocated for the rights of the Bedouin who have been locked in an unresolved land dispute with the Israeli government since the founding of the state. Few Bedouin had documents or deeds proving land ownership.

Dr. Bailey’s life appears to have been largely shaped by his curiosity and serendipitous encounters.

Born on April 24, 1936, as Erwin Glaser, he was the younger son of Benjamin and Edna Glaser, Jewish immigrants from Russia. Benjamin Glaser, a self-made businessman, started out with a single gas pump and ended up owning a chain of service stations in Buffalo.

While serving in the U.S. Navy after the Korean War, Erwin Glaser, while aboard a ship, met a rabbi who introduced him to the Jewish literature of Eastern Europe. That led to a meeting in New York with Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Polish-born Jewish American writer and Yiddishist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

After studying sculpture in Norway for a year, 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 his first Israeli, a member of a communal farm, or kibbutz. He moved to Israel in 1958, a decade after the establishment of the Jewish state.

In 1959, he met and then married Maya Ordinan. Born in Czernowitz, now part of Ukraine, she had come to Israel as a child.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science and Middle Eastern studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he spent a year in an Arab village in the Galilee hills, in northern Israel, teaching English and learning colloquial Arabic. 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, drawn from the intersection of Clinton Street and Bailey Avenue in Buffalo, the site of one of his father’s service stations. The change was in preparation for a trip to Pakistan, his son Michael, said, presumably to avoid sounding Jewish in an Islamic country, but, he added, the true reasons were never clear. Dr. Bailey was also known in Israel by his Hebrew name Itzchak, or the nickname Itzik.

Jobless, and wandering around Tel Aviv one day near the home of David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister of Israel, Dr. Bailey bumped into Paula Ben-Gurion, the leader’s spouse. They got to talking, and she invited him in for tea.

That chance meeting led to a friendship with the Ben-Gurions that proved formative for Dr. Bailey. Mr. Ben-Gurion helped him secure a job teaching English at an academy at Sde Boker, a remote kibbutz in the Negev desert. The Ben-Gurions later retired to Sde Boker, where they lived in a spacious but somewhat spartan cabin. Dr. Bailey would sometimes join the aging politician on his brisk walks around the kibbutz.

When out jogging alone, he would encounter Bedouin shepherds and strike up conversations. They would invite him back to their tents. He found their story — a life in the desert 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 in control of the Egyptian Sinai, he gained access to even more remote tribes. He moved to Jerusalem in 1975.

In the 1980s, as an adviser on Arab affairs in Israel’s Ministry of Defense, Dr. Bailey frequented southern Lebanon, where Israel occupied a buffer zone. He focused on building relations with the Shiite Muslims there and recommended that the Israeli government do the same. But Israel instead aligned itself with the Christian Lebanese militias that were leading the Lebanese government at the time.

The partnership with the Christian militias led to one of the darkest moments in Israeli history, when the country was implicated in the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila perpetrated by the Christian Phalange militia. Soon Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite Lebanese militia, would emerge as a bitter enemy of Israel.

Dr. Bailey wrote four books on Bedouin poetry, proverbs, law and, most recently, “Bedouin Culture in the Bible,” published by Yale University Press in 2018. He also taught Middle East politics and Bedouin culture for many years at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

In addition to Michael Bailey, he is survived by his wife and their three other sons, Daniel, ⁠Benjamin and Ariel, and nine grandchildren.

In 2016, at age 80, Dr. Bailey found a new kind of celebrity. He had interviewed his friend Mr. Ben-Gurion over three days in 1968 on film, recording him talking about his life and career and the birth of the Jewish state. The film was then lost for decades and largely forgotten.

When it was rediscovered by accident — the silent film in one archive in Jerusalem, the soundtrack in another in the Negev — it became the basis for an acclaimed 2016 documentary, “Ben-Gurion, Epilogue.”

In the interview, conducted five years before his death, Mr. Ben-Gurion offered an unusually raw, contemplative analysis of his life’s work. The documentary struck a chord in Israel, where many people were yearning for more humble leaders who showed more statesmanship.

The simplicity of the Ben-Gurions’ cabin at 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 drew Dr. Bailey to the Bedouin. In an effort to convey Bedouin ways to friends who were used to a more material world, he would occasionally relate the story of how he had turned up unexpectedly to visit some tribesmen. Offering hospitality was a cultural imperative, so they would procure some tea from here and eggs from there until they were able to offer him a meal.

Although they had little material goods themselves, the men did not consider this a hardship. “A Bedouin would wake up in the morning with nothing,” Dr. Bailey said, “and would consider himself fortunate if he had acquired something by bedtime.”