A study of the Mediterranean family in the 10th thru the 13th centuries.

Dipping into "A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Vol. III: The Family", one of 6 volumes based in the contents the Cairo Geniza is like... stepping into the Geniza itself. Unless you are a scholar prepared to devote a lifetime to the subject, all you can do is pick up a document here, scan it in wonder, turn a few pages, pick up another document, scan it, and marvel at the revelation of a vanished world of the 10th through 12th century in Egypt, too vast to fully comprehend. Fortunately, Goitein did some of the comprehending for us, and here's what I got from him.

The world of men and women in Jewish Cairo was not completely separate. A young man, intent on courting, might well know the first names of several young women and recognize their faces.

A marriage was very much a business arrangement. It's fun, with the author, to look for hints and signs of love and affection, but these are clearly not the essence of the matter at all. It's all about grafting the vine of one family on to another, a vast horticultural enterprise, a great forming of alliances, across class boundaries and geographic boundaries. Even for Jews, it was often conducted under Muslim (that is to say State) auspices. That was because real money and real payments were at issue, money and payments and wealth transfers that would affect the signatories for their rest of their lives. Rabbis were not always involved, although they sought to be.

A house was the sine qua non of marriage. No marriage could take place until a residence was secured (even if with the parents.) A woman, when she married, "went into his house", or he into hers.

Marriage of course was a multi-part business agreement, taking place in stages, from engagement to betrothal to consummation, over a period of months to many years, with proscribed payments, escrow arrangements, etc. This was a merging of corporations... family corporations. It was serious, serious business.

Jewish women had the right of refusal in marriage, and they sometimes exercised this right. Fathers continually negotiated marriages and planned alliances, as did mothers, but there is no shortage of cases in which young women said "no" to these plans. (Of course those cases made it into the Geniza because they became legal cases.) While this is an old halachic principle, the custom of making plans for young girls before they were of age was so strong that Maimonides flexed on this point, unable to resist the cultural tide of fathers planning their daughters' marriages, but even he acknowledged in the end that the young women still retained the right to refuse their family's plans.

Some 45% of women, by the author's estimate were single, usually because they were widowed or divorced.

There are some remarkable stories, including one of a woman school teacher, who managed to assert her independence against her ne'r do well husband.

Women's right to their wages is continually negotiated in marriage contracts, typically around weaving and clothing production, indicating that women had some level of economic autonomy even within the confines of these medieval marriages.

The Karites (you remember the Karites? they're the folks who believed themselves to base their religious practices entirely on the written text and who scorned the Rabbinic oral tradition), the Karites were, oddly, the more upper middle class Jews. In other words their biblical fundamentalism, or what we think of as such, was in a certain sense associated with a more, not less, worldly attitude. Maimonides and general Rabbinic opinion held them to be heretics, but in Cairo of the 12th century they were also recognized as Jews, and their community does not appear to be markedly distinct. It sounds like the two communities were about as different as, say, Orthodox and Conservative Jews today.

These are the thoughts that come back to me this morning after spending a few hours in medieval Cairo last night. They do not do justice to the richness of detail that the author recovers for us. The reading is tedious and long, and yet absolutely fascinating. Leora checked this out from the library, but it's the kind of social history I'd like to have on my shelf and dip into occasionally.

I still find it amazing that a world like this can exist and then vanish (amazing!), and then through its fragmentary texts can be brought to life again (doubly amazing!)

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A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza: The Family, vol. 3 ( )