family and household 241
spanning two millennia which can boast, in addition to the unique evidence from the
Greco–Roman period, the vast and hardly less extraordinary medieval documenta-
tion preserved in the so-called Cairo Geniza, the household and population census
of 1848 and, indeed, some influential ethnographic studies carried out in the last
decades of the twentieth century. Such documentation makes Egypt a truly strategic
site to show the combined potentialities of history and anthropology to capture “the
flexibility and fluidity of family forms as well as the diversity of household structures
within a single setting” (Doumani, 2003: 2) and to develop a more balanced
approach that pays attention not only to family structures but also to the relations
between genders and generations in the domestic domain, and corrects on the one
hand the urban bias of family historians and their archives and on the other the
anthropologists’ rural bias resulting from a long-entrenched reluctance to work in
the cities.
variability and change within a single setting: the case of EgyptDating back from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and narrating the stories of
Jewish communities freely mixing with their neighbors not only in Egypt but also in
Tunisia, Sicily and Palestine, the highly-diverse documents stored in the Cairo Geniza,
the repository attached to a synagogue in Fustat (or Old Cairo, as it is called today),
provide—according to their foremost analyst, Goitein (1978: viii)—“not only a con-
tribution to the history of the Jewish family, but also to that of the family within
Mediterranean Islam at large, and, to some extent, within the Mediterranean area in
general.” Although the Jewish family, with its specific traditions and institutions,
certainly was distinctive in more than one respect, he believes that
in many others, the Geniza portrays an establishment the like of which used to be found
in many corners of the Mediterranean world: an extended family of strong cohesiveness,
great reverence for the senior members, prominence in the house of the old lady who
presides over a bevy of daughters, daughters-in-law and grandchildren, tender care of
brothers for sisters and vice versa, and in general a stronger emphasis on the ties of blood
than on those created by marriage. (Goitein, 1967: 73)One cannot escape noticing that the “Mediterranean family” portrayed by Goitein
is quite reminiscent of the set of domestic relations singled out by Kandiyoti (1988)
as distinctive of what she has called “classic patriarchy.” This raises again, from a dif-
ferent angle, the issue of the typicality of the patriarchal extended family in
Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history. Some demographically-orientated histori-
ans have resolutely denied it in view of the severe constraints posed by mortality: “for
simple biological reasons,” it has been argued (Gerber, 1989: 413–41), families could
not possibly be “universally as large and extended as the conventional wisdom has it.
Life expectancy was so low that families could rarely experience extension.” However,
such objections have been countered especially by anthropologists, who have retorted
that “even though demographic and other constraints may have curtailed the actual
predominance of three-generational patrilocal households, there is little doubt that
they represented a powerful cultural ideal” (Kandiyoti, 1991: 31). Anthropologists,
who have been able to eye-witness the prevalence of large patriarchal households in