Letters, court records, accounts and lists from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat that show the working of the trade that bound Egypt to Ifriqiya, Sicily, al-Andalus, Aden and India. For the years around 1200 the material is thinner than for the eleventh century, but it includes the correspondence and legal activity of Moses Maimonides (died 1204) as head of the Egyptian Jews, letters of the Aden and India trade, and documents of the famine years 1200 to 1202 in Egypt. The documents give prices, ship names, routes, the part played by Pisan and Genoese shipping, and the names of officials, and they are the only source of this kind for Ayyubid Egypt. They are documents, not narrative, and need the editors' commentaries.
About this source
- Title
- Documents of the Cairo Geniza
- Author
- Various
- Author's dates
- merchants, judges, scribes and officials of Fustat and their correspondents, tenth to thirteenth centuries
- Written
- about 950 to 1250 for the bulk of the historical documents
- Language
- Judaeo-Arabic, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic
- Covers
- the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, with the richest run from about 1000 to 1200
- Kind
- Letters
The Princeton Geniza Project holds more than 30,000 records and several thousand transcriptions, with translations for many documents. Goitein's volumes are under copyright. Dating of individual documents is often approximate, and the Ayyubid decades are less well represented than the Fatimid.
Where to read it
Editions
- S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: the Jewish communities of the Arab world as portrayed in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols (Berkeley, 1967 to 1993) (not freely online)
- S. D. Goitein and M. A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: documents from the Cairo Geniza (Leiden, 2008) (not freely online)