A Mediterranean Society: An Abridgment in One Volume (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Spring 2004) 396–399 S. D. GOITEIN. A Mediterranean Society: An Abridgment in One Volume. Revised and edited by Jacob Lassner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. xxii Ⳮ 503. S. D. Goitein’s magisterial five-volume A Mediterranean Society is one of the major twentieth-century works of Jewish history. Based on the historical documents of the Cairo Geniza, it portrays in fascinating detail the economic life, communal organization and activities, family life, material culture, and mentalité of Jews and, by extension, other groups, including the Muslim majority, on the southern shores of the medieval Mediterranean . The appearance of a one-volume abridgment constitutes an enormously valuable contribution to both the scholar and the general reader. Anyone familiar with Goitein’s opus should realize what a daunting task this must have been for the editor, especially in accommodating the publisher ’s necessarily restrictive page limit: 2,724 pages, excluding indices, have been boiled down to 482. Given this enormous challenge, we are greatly indebted to Jacob Lassner for producing an eminently readable entrée into the larger work. As this is a book that will be widely used, readers should know what it does and does not do. First, Lassner has subjected the text to substantial editing. He adds phrases for clarification, replaces awkward words with better ones, and rearranges information—even entire subsections of chapters—in an attempt to improve the presentation. The editor of the original five volumes at the University of California Press, Teresa Joseph, did a tremendous job transforming Goitein’s nonnative English into a readable narrative. Still, it has not hurt to submit the book to an additional pass, and indeed the text now reads even more smoothly. Second, Lassner has managed to convey Goitein’s conclusions even though he was forced to eliminate a great deal of the evidence. Goitein had planned to publish a companion volume of letters and other documents in translation to illustrate the sections of A Mediterranean Society. It was to be called Mediterranean People, echoing, perhaps, the title of Eileen Powers’ famous Medieval People. The collection of approximately eighty documents in his wonderful Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, Translated from the Arabic (Princeton, 1973), represented an interim selection from Mediterranean People. As time passed, and Goitein realized that he probably would never publish Mediterranean People (much of the material for it remained in his research archive at his death in 1985), he began to integrate GOITEIN, A MEDITERRANEAN SOCIETY—COHEN 397 more and more illustrative matter into the text. Goitein called this ‘‘presentation of materials.’’ We are fortunate that he did this, for otherwise scores of fascinating letters, marriage contracts, trousseaux lists, and other documents would still be inaccessible to the general reader. To a certain extent, when one reads Goitein one has the impression of losing sight of the forest for the trees, even though the trees are precisely what gives A Mediterranean Society its wonderful color and essential historical value. Generalizations, analytical insights, comparative observations, and hypotheses suggesting directions for further research are there, and the discerning reader will not miss them. These, by the way, are Goitein’s substitute for the ‘‘theory,’’ ‘‘historical paradigms,’’ and ‘‘analytical framework ’’ that Lassner, in his foreword, finds missing from the opus. Goitein considered his work to be a sketch (or, as he wrote, ‘‘spadework,’’ in A Mediterranean Society, 2:94). Indeed, A Mediterranean Society is a veritable blueprint for dozens, if not scores, of articles, dissertations, and books yet to be written. Faced with the challenge before him, Lassner had no choice but to prune most of the trees (and also to eliminate Goitein’s copious notes and rich appendices). But he has left the forest largely intact and also retained enough of the trees to whet readers’ appetites for consultation of the original for fuller evidence. This is perhaps the greatest value of the entire enterprise. The book, however, does not encompass all of A Mediterranean Society. It covers only two-fifths. Lassner confined himself primarily to volumes 2, ‘‘The Community,’’ and 3, ‘‘The...