A Mediterranean Society, An Abridgment in One Volume

A Mediterranean Society

by S.D. Goitein

S. D. Goitein's magisterial five-volume work on Jewish communities in the medieval Mediterranean world offers an unparalleled view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. Living under Muslim rule, the Jews became increasingly urbanized and played a significant part in an expanding world economy. As major actors in the flourishing intellectual life of the period, they forged much of what constitutes traditional Judaism today and served as a conduit of Islamic learning to the Christian West.

Goitein's masterpiece is now abridged and reworked by Jacob Lassner in a single volume that captures the essential narratives and contexts of the original. To understand the value of this distillation, we need to picture the remarkable, all-but-impenetrable cache of unique letters and documents found by accident in a geniza , or repository of sacred writings, in Old Cairo. These materials, unlike historical chronicles and literary texts of the time, represent the living experiences of people in a wide variety of settings throughout the entire Mediterranean and stretching as far east as the Indian subcontinent.

Goitein explored and interpreted these texts as no other scholar had. Lassner, in turn, makes Goitein's findings available to a wide audience and then moves on to raise a host of new and tantalizing questions about the Jews of the Geniza and the relationship of their community to the hegemonic Muslim society.

Genres: History, Jewish, Africa

528 pages, Paperback

First published January 9, 2000

About the author

Shelomo Dov Goitein, who was associated with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University at the time of his death in 1985, was honored with the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Society and the National Jewish Book Award for A Mediterranean Society. Teacher, administrator, and prolific writer, he was a preeminent scholar in the areas of Jewish-Arab relations and Islamic culture.

Reviews

[Aditya Jain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goitein's scholarly work is legendary, and the Genizah documents are a once-in-a-lifetime treasure. Super rich, lots to unpack!

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

It seems unfair to give this a bad rating, because it is unclear exactly what I am grading here. I did not read Goitein's five volume epic study of the Jewish community of medieval Egypt, and he clearly intended for his work to consist of all of those volumes. This is abridged, and maybe the abridgement is just bad? Then again, am I evaluating Lassner? He edited the five volumes down to one thick volume, and maybe that was kind of misguided, but it was his job, he had to do it. I'm sure I couldn't do a better job editing all that text down to one readable (well, somewhat readable) tome.
I think Goitien's study maybe should only exist as five books. It should be something that college libraries have on the shelf, and when you want to do some research you can explore all of his scholarship to your heart's content. Hardly anyone is going to check one of the volumes out and take it to the beach, but who cares? Again, this is just personal preference, but this abridgement did not work for my class at all because we were studying traders, primarily, and Lassner decided to cut almost all of the detailed trade correspondence in order to talk more about the structure of the community in Fustat/Cairo. Which, fine, I'm sure there are people who are more interested in that, but they can check out volume two of the whole set and I can check out volume one. As long as you have all the unabridged volumes. If you only have this I'm out of luck.
See what I mean? Anyway, I'm just still a little disappointed. Abridgements, man, you got to be careful with abridgements.

[Hana · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Cairo Geniza is a treasure trove of over 200,000 Jewish texts, letters, marriage and business contracts, prayer books and sacred writings, first discovered in late 1800. The texts were stored in a loft in an old synagogue and date from 11th to 19th centuries. Many of the texts are in fragments and are still being explored; they provide a unique window into everyday life in the Mediterranean and along the trade routes of those times--with some letters that were sent from as far away as India.

S.D. Goitein, a German-Jewish scholar of Arabic and the Islamic world, made the geniza papers his life work and he died on the day he sent the last volume (Number 6!), to the publisher, February 6, 1985. This book is a superb and very readable abridged version of Goitein's work and well worth reading for anyone with more than a passing interest in the era and culture.

I read this several years ago and I'm planing on re-reading it--this time posting notes.