The North American Character of Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society

S.D. Goitein described himself as a “medieval man”, “for whom religion is the overriding concern in life”. Yet much of his “sociography” fits the twentieth century better than the eleventh, particularly where economic life is concerned. In this presentation, I will closely examine Goitein’s discussion in A Mediterranean Society about the Jews of the medieval Islamic world and will reveal the impress of Goitein’s own North American context in the 1950s and 1960s on the work. I will begin with his treatment of commercial structures, particularly those involving the differentiation of labor into a highly-ramified professional market more reminiscent of the Industrial Revolution than trade in the medieval period. I will proceed to discuss his treatment of the slave trade and suggest that this, too, may have been shaped by the twentieth-century North American world and its concerns. In so doing, I encourage those who rely on the wealth of information in Goitein’s magnum opus to get to know the master and his life no less than his work.