The Documents of the Cairo Geniza as a Source for Mediterranean Social History

Abstract

THE STUDENTS of the history of the Mediterranean countries during the High Middle Ages have often complained about the almost complete absence of archives in Muslim countries. In Europe, the church, the feudal lords, the cities, and the guilds kept their documents both as titles of right and for other purposes. Nothing of the kind is to be found in Muslim countries in that period.l Now, it is possible to reconstruct the main lines of political history and to a certain extent also the life of the ruling class with the help of literary sources, supplemented by archaeology, epigraphy, and numismatics, i. e. the study of extant buildings and utensils, inscriptions, and coins. However, social and economic history, especially of the middle and lower classes, can hardly be studied without the aid of documents, such as letters, deeds, or accounts actually emanating from people belonging to these classes. Under these circumstances it is most fortunate that a great treasure of documents, hailing from all over the Mediterranean countries, mainly from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, has been preserved in the so-called Cairo Geniza.2 The Hebrew word geniza, like Arabic jandza (which means burial), is derived from the Persian. In Persian, ganj denotes a treasure, and its Biblical derivative, especially in Ezra 6: 1, stands almost for archive. In mediaeval Hebrew, Geniza, or Beth Geniza, designates a repository of discarded writings. For just as the human body, having fulfilled its task as container of the [heavenly] soul,