The Individual: Portrait of a Mediterranean Personality of the High Middle Ages as Reflected in the Cairo Geniza

by S.D. Goitein

Book Overview

This six-volume "portrait of a Mediterranean personality" is a composite portrait of the individuals who wrote the personal letters, contracts, and all other manuscript fragments that found their way into the Cairo Geniza. Most of the fragments from the Geniza, a storeroom for discarded writings that could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, had been removed to Cambridge University Library and other libraries around the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520221621
• ISBN13: 9780520221628
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 687 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Reality of the Jewish Mediterranean Family centuries ago

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].

classic of the field.

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.