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 disappearing culture for posterity, died Jan. 5 at his home in Jerusalem. He was 88 years old.

The cause was heart failure, said his son Michael.

A native of Buffalo, Ph.D. Bailey spent about 50 years recording the oral poetry, negotiations, trials, wisdom of the elders, weddings, rituals, proverbs and stories of the tribes of southern Israel’s Negev desert and Sinai Peninsula. Traveling by jeep to desert Bedouin camps, 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 the Bedouin society, then mostly illiterate, was on the verge of rapid changes. Modern borders, government restrictions, and urbanization began to encroach on their nomadic ways, and the advent of transistor radios, automobiles, and cell phones challenged the modern world.

“I decided to try to capture that culture,” Dr. Bailey he said in an interview 2021, marking the donation of his archive of 350 hours of audio tapes and numerous prints and slides National Library of Israel. “I could already see it starting to disappear.”

The library described its collection in a statement as “a treasure of orally transmitted ancient cultures, now irreplaceable and inaccessible to younger generations of Bedouins who have grown up exposed to modernity.”

dr. Bailey was revered by many tribes, who credited him with preserving their ancient traditions. Daham al-Atawneh, a retired publisher from the Bedouin town of Hura in the Negev, said that Dr. Bailey did “very sacred work,” especially collecting poetry.

“This preserves it for eternity,” he said. “Maybe one day my children will want to return to their history. Now there is a record.”

dr. Bailey has also advocated for the rights of the Bedouin, who have been in an unresolved land dispute with the Israeli government since the state’s founding. A few Bedouins had documents or papers proving ownership of the land.

It seems that the life of dr. Bailey was largely shaped by his curiosity and chance encounters.

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

While serving in the US Navy after the Korean War, Erwin Glaser, while on a ship, met a rabbi who introduced him to Eastern European Jewish literature. This led to a meeting in New York with Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Polish-born Jewish American writer and Yiddishist who won the Nobel Prize for 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 came to Israel as a child.

After earning a 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, northern Israel, teaching English and learning colloquial Arabic. He returned to the United States and earned a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from 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, the site of one of his father’s gas stations. The change was in preparation for a trip to Pakistan, his son Michael said, probably to avoid sounding like a Jew in an Islamic country, but, he added, the real reasons were never clear. dr. Bailey was also known in Israel by his Hebrew name Itzchak, or nickname Itzik.

Out of work and wandering around Tel Aviv one day near the house of David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, Dr. Bailey ran into Paula Ben-Gurion, the leader’s wife. They started talking, and she invited him to tea.

That chance meeting led to a friendship with the Ben-Gurions, which turned out to be crucial for dr. Bailey. Mr. Ben-Gurion helped him secure a job teaching English at an academy in 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 hut. dr. Bailey would sometimes join the aging politician on his brisk walks around the kibbutz.

When he ran alone, he would come across Bedouin shepherds and strike up a conversation. They would invite him back to their tents. He found their story – a life in the desert that goes back to pre-biblical times – compelling. “It was a story of survival going back 4,500 years,” he said.

After the 1967 war, when Israel controlled the Egyptian Sinai, it gained access to even more distant tribes. He moved to Jerusalem in 1975.

In the 1980s, as an adviser on Arab issues in the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Dr. Bailey often visited southern Lebanon, where Israel occupied the buffer zone. He focused on building relations with the Shiite Muslims there and recommended that the Israeli government do the same. But Israel instead joined the Christian Lebanese militias that ran the Lebanese government at the time.

The partnership with Christian militias led to one of the darkest moments in Israel’s history, when the country was embroiled in massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila by a Christian phalanx of militias. Soon Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite Lebanese militia, would 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. He has also taught Middle Eastern politics and Bedouin culture for many years at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

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

In 2016, at the age of 80, dr. Bailey has found a new kind of celebrity. He 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 mostly forgotten.

When it was rediscovered by chance – a silent film in one archive in Jerusalem, a sound recording in another in the Negev – it became the basis for the 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 longed for more humble leaders who showed more statesmanship.

The simplicity of Ben-Gurion’s cabin in Sde Boker was a “statement,” said Dr. Bailey to 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. In an effort to convey Bedouin customs to friends who were used to the more material world, he would occasionally tell a story about how he unexpectedly appeared to visit some members of the tribe. Offering hospitality was a cultural imperative, so they would get some tea from here and eggs from there until they could offer him a meal.

Although they themselves had few material goods, the men did not consider it a hardship. “A Bedouin would wake up in the morning with nothing,” said Dr. Bailey, “and he would consider himself lucky if he got something by the time he went to bed.”