Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a translation of eighty letters by both substantial and lesser businessmen, describing conditions, inventory and some personal matters during a two hundred year period starting around 1000 CE. Recovered in Cairo in the late nineteenth century as part of a large trove of mainly religious documents, they are the most basic sort of source material that an historian might wish for. Covering the wide geographic range of the Islamic world from Spain to Indonesia, they present brief pictures, blurry or clear, of the preoccupations, experiences, and material aspects of a world otherwise lost to us.
Although lacking in the novelistic flair that a historical interpretation at its best would provide, these letters provide vivid realities. Goitein's closely related and much longer A MEDITERRANEAN SOCIETY fills in the background with greater narrative continuity.

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