jews 399
and inaugurated the Middle Ages. He claimed that Jews dominated long-distance
Mediterranean commerce in the West during the early medieval economic depression
when the volume of trade was much reduced from the previous highs of the late Roman
Empire (Pirenne, 1939: esp. 79–96). Pirenne based his claim on the presence of
foreign trading colonies in many locations in the early medieval West, but scholars
now question both the existence of such communities (“Syrian” and Jewish) and the
unspoken premise that the presence of a Jewish community must indicate trade (Toch,
2013: 193–194).
Although a monopolistic model for the role of Jewish merchants in the early
medieval economic depression is untenable (Holo, 2009: 189–203), Jews came to be
explicitly associated with mercantile activity in the ninth and tenth centuries. In
Notker the Stammerer’s late ninth-century Life of Charlemagne, the emperor looks
out to sea from an unnamed coastal town in southern Francia and is able to distin-
guish the incoming ships as Viking raiders rather than Jewish merchants or other
traders (Thorpe, 1974: 158). In the tenth century, the Muslim writer Ibn Khurdādhbeh
describes Jewish merchants known as the Rādhāniyya, who mastered many languages
and plied a series of routes that spanned the Mediterranean, but also went to the
Indian Ocean and China, and by way of the Black Sea to Central Asia and “the land
of the Slavs” (Gil, 2004: 615–637). The most explicit association of Jews and com-
merce comes from the early tenth century, when the Raffelstetten toll law, written to
govern mercantile traffic on the Danube to and from Slavic lands, refers to “Jews and
other merchants” (Linder, 1997: 349). By the end of that century, Jewish participa-
tion in Mediterranean trade can be tentatively gauged by a Byzantine imperial decree
that granted trading privileges to Venice on condition that Jews, along with Lombards,
Amalfitans, and merchants of Bari, were to be banned from travelling on Venetian
vessels (Linder, 1997: 159).
Early medieval Jewish traders are barely accessible to historians on account of the
thinness of sources, but concrete evidence for the economy and society of
Mediterranean Jewish merchants bursts into view in the eleventh and twelfth centu-
ries in the documentary finds of the Cairo Geniza, most influentially studied by S.D.
Goitein (Goitein, 1967–88). This cache of documents accumulated in a storeroom of
the Ben Ezra Synagogue as a consequence of Jewish concern for proper disposal of
any written medium that includes the name of God, or even is written in the holy
language of Hebrew. Preserved for centuries by the arid Egyptian climate, the docu-
ments gradually came to the attention of nineteenth-century western scholars, and in
1896 the vast accumulation of the Geniza was brought to Cambridge University by
Solomon Schechter (Hoffman and Cole, 2011). In over 15 000 items of personal and
business documentation, including commercial correspondence whose content
encompasses medieval equivalents of such modern business instruments as bills of lad-
ing, invoices, statements, and credit notes, the Geniza materials reveal a world of
eleventh- and twelfth-century Arabic-speaking Jewish merchants whose centers of
activity were Cairo, Alexandria, Qayrawān, Palermo, and Aden, but who could also
range as far as Spain and India.
The letter written by Ḥushiel of Qayrawān mentioned above was probably carried
by a merchant about whose type we know well from the Geniza. Unlike land-based
mail, seaborne mail service was wholly informal, whereby a sender entrusted letters to
friends or business associates (or less desirably, a ship captain) who were traveling all