Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and Their Business World

摘要

Almost from the moment that a wealth of medieval business documents was discovered in the Cairo Geniza-the synagogue storeroom for discarded writings-attempts have been made to use the information in these documents to answer "European" questions: that is, to discover precedents for, draw comparisons with, or establish connections with Europe's emerging medieval trade. In her highly readable study of the eleventh-century geniza merchants, Jessica Goldberg moves away from Eurocentric questions. Her study is based on what the author refers to as the "commercial corpus": a set of 697 business letters or fragments of letters, all from the eleventh century. A distinction between two subsets, each connected to a generation of merchants, allows for an examination of changes in trade patterns in the course of that century. The merchants who wrote the letters were Jews living in the cities and towns of the entire Islamic Mediterranean, but with a strong concentration in Cairo's twin sister, Fustat.