India Traders of the Middle Ages Documents from the Cairo Geniza. “India Book” by Shelomo Dov Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman (Leiden: Brill, 2008. 919 pages.)

Abstract

Throughout Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and our current era, the Indian
Ocean has been the economic backbone of an interconnected global community.
This inter-territorial commerce, which feeds a vast network of merchants
from the western Mediterranean to the South China Sea, probably
constitutes the single most important cultural milieu in human history.
While many existing studies highlight these networks’ significance and
even a subdiscipline in academia focuses on the “Indian Ocean,” some significant
components of the interlinking system are missing. A particularly
difficult problem is the shortage of primary material from the system’s earlier
periods, especially prior to the arrival of the Portuguese and the Dutch.
The present volume, which is comprised of annotated and translated letters
of various eleventh- and twelfth-centuryArab Jewish traders who interacted
within this larger Indian Ocean complex, provides perhaps the most foundational
source to understand the economic activities, communal organization,
family life, and material civilization of the medieval world’s Arabicspeaking
Jews. Indeed, with patience and a creative imagination, India
Traders of the Middle Ages could lay the foundation for taking this subdiscipline
in new directions ...