Jewish History -- Goitein's Unfinished Legacies

Jewish History https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-018-9311-7 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018 Goitein’s Unfinished Legacies PHILLIP I. LIEBERMAN Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA E-mail: phil.lieberman@Vanderbilt.edu Abstract Goitein’s Mediterranean Society is remarkable and paved the way for a generation —indeed, generations—of scholars. In this brief note, I discuss some of the fundamental questions Goitein left unanswered. Keywords S. D. Goitein · Economic history · A Mediterranean Society Goitein’s encyclopedic work in economic history is truly sui generis. His innovative “sociographic” approach brought forth a storehouse of detail about the structures of trade, about the commodities in which merchants transacted, and even about the biographies of some of the notables whose presence is palpable in clusters of the documents of the Geniza. Yet, for social historians, the question arises of just how coarse or fine to focus the microscope when looking at the Geniza documents. Do Geniza documents tell us about the lives of their dramatis personae as a whole, or should each letter be treated as a unique artifact pointing to a particular moment in the lives of its writer and addressee—as well as the people mentioned in it? We may be able to figure out where these particular writers came from and their life stories, but are these lives typical of those of their fellows in Fustat or in medieval Egypt or perhaps even in North Africa or the medieval Islamic world as a whole? Goitein himself seems to have been engrossed by this question. Even across the volumes of A Mediterranean Society, he progresses from the optimistic and sanguine claims of volume 1 about the economic life of Jewish society as a whole to the somewhat more humble and circumscribed profiles of specific individuals in volume 5.1 However, much work remains to be done exploring the extent to which the place of the Geniza documents and their writers can be mobilized effectively in going beyond the microhistories we might write. In his 1976 review of both volume 2 of A Mediterranean Society and Goitein’s Letters of Medieval 1 S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Por- trayed in the Documents of the Cairo Genizah, 6 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967–93). Note that the sixth volume of this work contains cumulative indices compiled by Paula Sanders. P. I. LIEBERMAN Jewish Traders, Richard Bulliet argues that Goitein’s efforts to explore “the evident convergence of Muslim and Jewish social life in the medieval period” were incomplete.2 While others have picked up Goitein’s mantle in the hopes of expanding the audience for the Geniza documents and the questions that we might answer with them, the question of convergence has yet to be interrogated in sufficient depth to plumb the richness of the Geniza documents for describing the lives of those outside the circle of writers whose written record ended up in Fustat. Here, comparative materials can provide us with untold benefit: for instance, the growth of the field of papyrology in recent decades offers an unparalleled opportunity for scholars, allowing a more nuanced understanding of how representative (or not) the Geniza documents are of the broader society from which they emerged. Finally, Goitein brought order to the chaos of the scrap heap that was the Geniza. Often, however, the underlying superstructure for that order came from Goitein’s own life experience. Yet his successors are now able to reorganize that data as they have been more fully uncovered under new paradigms that emerge from the data themselves and to connect the historical dots in new ways, introducing theoretical superstructures that may give us greater insight into the inner lives of the writers of the Geniza documents and their milieu. Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. 2 Richard Bulliet, review of S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 2, and S. D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Traders, International Journal of Middle East Studies 7, no. 3 (1976): 457–59. See also S. D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, NJ, 1973).