In Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt, Mark Cohen has produced a pioneering study of the documents of the Cairo Genizah and what they can tell us about poverty as experienced by its Jewish community—a collection of hundreds of thousands of medieval Jewish manuscript fragments rediscovered in the genizah, or document storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Examining almost a thousand of these documents, Cohen looks at the strategies that were used to provide assistance to the Jewish poor, particularly in the context of the fact that the society in which these people lived was overwhelmingly Islamic. He sees a society in which kinship and patronage networks were incredibly important, in which the provision of charity was a kind of 'social glue' which bound the community together, and in which charity was expressed—and charitable institutions constituted—in different ways to charity as thought of in medieval Islam or Christianity. I was fascinated particularly by the documents Cohen brought together which showed just how much interaction there was between Jews from a variety of different regions at this period—from modern Iran, Turkey, Slavic regions, even some proselytes from France. Medieval Cairo was truly a cosmopolitan place.

While I confess that some of the finer points about word definition/usage and significance went a little over my head, as I know neither Hebrew nor Arabic, this is still a fascinating and important book. Cohen demonstrates that given such a cache of documents (which may, alas, be unique for the medieval Mediterranean world), it is possible to construct a history of mentalité for "regular", non-élite people. Highly recommended. ( )