Customer Reviews

A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Vol. IV: Daily Life

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A Mediterranean Society is a classic and essential reading for anyone studying Arab Jews in the classical period, offering a rather different perspective to the works of writers such as Maimonides. In this magna opus, Goitein described in fine and often intimate detail the economic activities, communal organization, family life, material civilization, and mentalité of the Arabic-speaking Jews of medieval Islam during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Besides illuminating the activities of the Jewish community of Egypt and their families in the territories from the Far East to southern Arabia and the Indian Ocean, this work contain valuable information on Jewish and Islamic culture, relations between Jews and Arabs, Mediterranean culture, and Judeo-Arabic.

I have already read volumes I to III. A warning is to be made: Goitein's volumes are not all an easy reading. His complete work is over 2500 extremely dense pages, plus volume VI of cumulative indices, worth reading. Whenever I felt tempted to drop this volume and the previous ones, I recanted, and finally I read it because its matter is engaging: it deals with real people with real names.

All that and much more is developed in 360 pages (plus appendix on "the Economics of Marriage" and notes), this volume being divided in the following parts: A. "The House of the Father": The Extended Family. B. Marriage. C. "The House", or Nuclear Family. D. The World of Women.

So I recommend it, my rating being between 5 (content) and 3 (pleasure, sometimes falling to 1, sometimes raising to 5).

Other books more or less related to the subject I would suggest reading are the following: 1) as a general and very readable introduction, "A history of the Jews", by Paul Johnson; 2) "Les Juifs, Le Monde et L' Argent : Histoire économique du people juif" by Jacques Attali; 3) "Maimonides" by Abraham Joshua Heschel; 4) "The Pity of It All : A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933" by Amos Elon; and 5) "In an Antique Land" by Amitav Ghosh [I have not read it yet, it is about the thrills of the India trade as portrayed in Goitein's Geniza].

this is a 6-volume set. Goitein's text is entertaining, well-written and full of anecdotes. This is a classic in the field and a good read for non-specialists.

Goitein is an undisputed master of the Cairo Geniza, the eclectic collection 0f 20,000 documents, including marriage contracts, civil procedure and business contracts, marriage and divorce instruments, all shedding light on the most fascinating Jewish (and Islamic) Mediterranean society extending from North Africa, to Egypt and Palestine in the 10th to 13th centuries. However, unless you're working on a PhD dissertation, skip the above book and get the one volume compilation/synopsis of all of Goitein's five volumes. Volume I alone has way too much detail to be of interest to anyone except the scholar. By the way, if anyone thinks that medieval society was primitive, they should read the high moral standards exhibited by medieval Jewish society, both in terms of charity given to their co-religionists in distant parts of the mediterranean world, as well as the high business ethical and moral standards exhibited by medieval man. And working for someone as an employee (as opposed to running your own business) was considered an abomination by the geniza people. Surprisingly too, divorce was fairly common in this era. As Koheles (Ecclesiates) said with prescience: there is nothing new under the sun.