Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders. Translated from the Arabic with introductions and notes by S. D. Goitein. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1973. Pp. xviii + 359. $12.50

Students of medieval economic history frequently decry the lack of source material on which to base their research. Therefore, much importance must be attributed to a collection of documents found towards the end of the nineteenth century in the chamber of a synagogue in the city of Fustat, near Cairo. This material had been collected in that room, known as the Cairo Geniza, in accordance with the Jewish custom of preserving in a special place any writings that might contain the name of God, so as to prevent their desecration. These documents, most of them written in Judeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew characters), are currently scattered in many libraries throughout the world, especially in the United States, but also in Hungary, Russia, and other countries. Although this material has been consulted previously by Jewish scholars in order to assist in the reconstruction of selected aspects of Jewish intellectual, religious, and communal history, now Professor S. D. Goitein, formerly of the Hebrew University and the University of Pennsylvania until his retirement in 1970, and currently a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, has devoted the past decades to a systematic examination of this corpus. On the basis of his research, he is writing a comprehensive three-volume work entitled A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (2 vols. to date, 1969, 1971). The present volume, consisting of eighty letters of traders selected from 1,200 more or less complete business letters preserved in the Geniza, was designed to present the subjective aspects of trade as seen by those who engaged in it, that is, the sociological rather than the economic aspects of overseas commerce. They are especially interesting and valuable because of their spontaneous nature, as they were not written with posterity in mind. The book is well organized in eight chapters. The first, a general introduction, briefly explains the nature of the Cairo Geniza and makes some general observations on the traders' world, the organization of overseas trade, and the goods traded. Especially noteworthy is the observation that "Trading, naturally, was interdenominational and international. . . . An important element of mutual understanding was the fact that the business ethics of the three monotheistic religions were