S. D. Goitein (1900–1985)
Author of Jews and Arabs: A Concise History of Their Social and Cultural Relations
About the Author
S.D. Goitein (1900-1985), scholar, administrator, professor, and author worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton until his death
Image credit: Shlomo Dov Goitein
Series
Works by S. D. Goitein
A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza,… (1899) 52 copies
A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza,… (1978) 42 copies
A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza,… (1983) 39 copies
A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza,… (1988) 39 copies
A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza,… (1972) 38 copies
A Mediterranean society; the Jewish communities of the Arab world as portrayed in the documents of the Cairo Geniza (1968) 21 copies
A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza,… (1994) 20 copies
Religion in a Religious Age: Proceedings of Regional Conferences Held at The University of California, Los Angeles and… (1974) 3 copies
Twelve Pages from the Cairo Geniza 2 copies
ha-Yishuv be-Erets-Yiśrael be-reshit ha-Islam uvi-teḳufat ha-tsalvanim le-or kitve ha-genizah 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Goitein, S. D.
- Legal name
- Goitein, Shelomo Dov
- Other names
- Goitein, Fritz
- Birthdate
- 1900-04-03
- Date of death
- 1985-02-06
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Germany (birth)
USA (naturalized) - Country (for map)
- Germany
- Birthplace
- Burgkunstadt, Bavaria, Germany
- Place of death
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
- Places of residence
- Frankfurt, Germany
Jerusalem, Israel
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Haifa, Israel - Education
- University of Frankfurt (Ph.D|1923)
University of Berlin - Occupations
- Arabist
ethnographer
historian
author
playwright - Relationships
- Agnon, S.Y. (friend)
Scholem, Gershom (friend) - Organizations
- University of Pennsylvania
Institute for Advanced Study
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Israel Oriental Society
Reali School - Awards and honors
- MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1983)
American Philosophical Society (1970)
Harvey Prize (1980)
National Jewish Book Award (1984)
Guggenheim Fellowship (1965) - Short biography
- Shelomo Dov Goitein (known as Fritz)) was born in Burgkunstadt, Germany to a distinguished German-Jewish family. His father came from Hungary and was descended of a long line of rabbis. Goitein received both secular and religious educations. In 1914, his father died and the family moved to Frankfurt, where he completed secondary school. From 1918 to 1923, he studied Arabic and Islam at the University of Frankfurt under the guidance of the famous scholar Josef Horovitz while continuing Talmudic study with a private teacher. He graduated with a Ph.D. and a dissertation on prayer in Islam. A leader in the Zionist Youth Movement, Goitein fulfilled a lifelong ambition in 1923 when he emigrated to Palestine, together with Gershom Scholem. He first lived in Haifa and taught at the Reali School, later moving to Jerusalem, where he was appointed Professor of Islamic History and Islamic Studies at the new Hebrew University there. He married Theresa Gottlieb, a teacher, and the couple had three children. In 1927, Prof. Goitein wrote a play called Pulcellina about the 12th-century blood libel killings in Blois, France. He founded the School of Asian and African Studies and the Israel Oriental Society. In 1928, he began his research of the language, culture and history of the Yemeni Jews. In 1949, he conducted research in Aden, interviewing Jews gathering there from all parts of Yemen in preparation for being airlifted to Israel as citizens. From 1938 to 1948, he served as Senior Education Officer in Palestine, responsible for Jewish and Arab Schools, and published books on the best methods of teaching the Bible and Hebrew. From 1948, he began his life's work analyzing the Cairo Geniza documents. After deciphering the documents, Prof. Goitein vividly reconstructed many aspects of Jewish life in the Middle Ages in North African countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. In 1957, the family moved to the USA, where Prof. Goitein felt better able to focus on his work. He settled in Philadelphia and took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In addition to his histories, Prof. Goitein's lengthy correspondence with his friend, Nobel-prize winning author S.Y. Agnon, was published by his daughter in 2008.
Members
Reviews
From the land of Sheba: tales of the Jews of Yemen by S. D. Goitein
Yemen had a thriving Jewish population for about a thousand years; after most of them relocated to Israel in 1949-1950, Goitein collected personal recollections, folktales, and history of the Yemeni Jews. I really enjoyed this collection, although I would have appreciated some footnotes for context.
½
A study of the Mediterranean family in the 10th thru the 13th centuries.
Dipping into "A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Vol. III: The Family", one of 6 volumes based in the contents the Cairo Geniza is like... stepping into the Geniza itself. Unless you are a scholar prepared to devote a lifetime to the subject, all you can do is pick up a document here, scan it in wonder, turn a few pages, pick up another document, scan it, and marvel at the revelation of a vanished world of the 10th through 12th century in Egypt, too vast to fully comprehend. Fortunately, Goitein did some of the comprehending for us, and here's what I got from him.
The world of men and women in Jewish Cairo was not completely separate. A young man, intent on courting, might well know the first names of several young women and recognize their faces.
A marriage was very much a business arrangement. It's fun, with the author, to look for hints and signs of love and affection, but these are clearly not the essence of the matter at all. It's all about grafting the vine of one family on to another, a vast horticultural enterprise, a great forming of alliances, across class boundaries and geographic boundaries. Even for Jews, it was often conducted under Muslim (that is to say State) auspices. That was because real money and real payments were at issue, money and payments and wealth transfers that would affect the signatories for their rest of their lives. Rabbis were not always involved, although they sought to be.
A house was the sine qua non of marriage. No marriage could take place until a residence was secured (even if with the parents.) A woman, when she married, "went into his house", or he into hers.
Marriage of course was a multi-part business agreement, taking place in stages, from engagement to betrothal to consummation, over a period of months to many years, with proscribed payments, escrow arrangements, etc. This was a merging of corporations... family corporations. It was serious, serious business.
Jewish women had the right of refusal in marriage, and they sometimes exercised this right. Fathers continually negotiated marriages and planned alliances, as did mothers, but there is no shortage of cases in which young women said "no" to these plans. (Of course those cases made it into the Geniza because they became legal cases.) While this is an old halachic principle, the custom of making plans for young girls before they were of age was so strong that Maimonides flexed on this point, unable to resist the cultural tide of fathers planning their daughters' marriages, but even he acknowledged in the end that the young women still retained the right to refuse their family's plans.
Some 45% of women, by the author's estimate were single, usually because they were widowed or divorced.
There are some remarkable stories, including one of a woman school teacher, who managed to assert her independence against her ne'r do well husband.
Women's right to their wages is continually negotiated in marriage contracts, typically around weaving and clothing production, indicating that women had some level of economic autonomy even within the confines of these medieval marriages.
The Karites (you remember the Karites? they're the folks who believed themselves to base their religious practices entirely on the written text and who scorned the Rabbinic oral tradition), the Karites were, oddly, the more upper middle class Jews. In other words their biblical fundamentalism, or what we think of as such, was in a certain sense associated with a more, not less, worldly attitude. Maimonides and general Rabbinic opinion held them to be heretics, but in Cairo of the 12th century they were also recognized as Jews, and their community does not appear to be markedly distinct. It sounds like the two communities were about as different as, say, Orthodox and Conservative Jews today.
These are the thoughts that come back to me this morning after spending a few hours in medieval Cairo last night. They do not do justice to the richness of detail that the author recovers for us. The reading is tedious and long, and yet absolutely fascinating. Leora checked this out from the library, but it's the kind of social history I'd like to have on my shelf and dip into occasionally.
I still find it amazing that a world like this can exist and then vanish (amazing!), and then through its fragmentary texts can be brought to life again (doubly amazing!)
… (more)
The world of men and women in Jewish Cairo was not completely separate. A young man, intent on courting, might well know the first names of several young women and recognize their faces.
A marriage was very much a business arrangement. It's fun, with the author, to look for hints and signs of love and affection, but these are clearly not the essence of the matter at all. It's all about grafting the vine of one family on to another, a vast horticultural enterprise, a great forming of alliances, across class boundaries and geographic boundaries. Even for Jews, it was often conducted under Muslim (that is to say State) auspices. That was because real money and real payments were at issue, money and payments and wealth transfers that would affect the signatories for their rest of their lives. Rabbis were not always involved, although they sought to be.
A house was the sine qua non of marriage. No marriage could take place until a residence was secured (even if with the parents.) A woman, when she married, "went into his house", or he into hers.
Marriage of course was a multi-part business agreement, taking place in stages, from engagement to betrothal to consummation, over a period of months to many years, with proscribed payments, escrow arrangements, etc. This was a merging of corporations... family corporations. It was serious, serious business.
Jewish women had the right of refusal in marriage, and they sometimes exercised this right. Fathers continually negotiated marriages and planned alliances, as did mothers, but there is no shortage of cases in which young women said "no" to these plans. (Of course those cases made it into the Geniza because they became legal cases.) While this is an old halachic principle, the custom of making plans for young girls before they were of age was so strong that Maimonides flexed on this point, unable to resist the cultural tide of fathers planning their daughters' marriages, but even he acknowledged in the end that the young women still retained the right to refuse their family's plans.
Some 45% of women, by the author's estimate were single, usually because they were widowed or divorced.
There are some remarkable stories, including one of a woman school teacher, who managed to assert her independence against her ne'r do well husband.
Women's right to their wages is continually negotiated in marriage contracts, typically around weaving and clothing production, indicating that women had some level of economic autonomy even within the confines of these medieval marriages.
The Karites (you remember the Karites? they're the folks who believed themselves to base their religious practices entirely on the written text and who scorned the Rabbinic oral tradition), the Karites were, oddly, the more upper middle class Jews. In other words their biblical fundamentalism, or what we think of as such, was in a certain sense associated with a more, not less, worldly attitude. Maimonides and general Rabbinic opinion held them to be heretics, but in Cairo of the 12th century they were also recognized as Jews, and their community does not appear to be markedly distinct. It sounds like the two communities were about as different as, say, Orthodox and Conservative Jews today.
These are the thoughts that come back to me this morning after spending a few hours in medieval Cairo last night. They do not do justice to the richness of detail that the author recovers for us. The reading is tedious and long, and yet absolutely fascinating. Leora checked this out from the library, but it's the kind of social history I'd like to have on my shelf and dip into occasionally.
I still find it amazing that a world like this can exist and then vanish (amazing!), and then through its fragmentary texts can be brought to life again (doubly amazing!)
… (more)
This entire series is a tremendous work of scholarship. This volume is the fourth out of six. In essence, the author treats the entire series as a single work, which means that he does not divide this book into individual chapters, a somewhat disconcerting experience. Instead, Goitein relies heavily on an outline format carried across all of the volumes: the fourth volume is section IX. It is divided into A. the home, B. clothing and jewelry, C. food and drink, and D. mounts. Goitein is very specific and detailed in each of these categories, relying extensively on quotes from the Geniza documents to illustrate his conclusions and arguments and densely footnoting each section. And because he is using entirely textual sources, he pays great attention to questions of terminology, language, translation, etc., which is very useful for my purposes. I found the whole thing quite interesting and useful, leading to new sources of information and insights into the middle class of the 10th to 14th centuries in the Cairo area. Admittedly, he focuses on Jewish middle class society, since the Cairo Geniza consists of documents from that community, which is less useful for my purposes. So my challenge is interpreting how much this material applies to Muslims and Christians and also how much they apply beyond the vicinity of Cairo. But at least he gives me a lot to work with--between the footnotes, the many excerpts, and the appendices of selected documents translated in their entirety, this is quite a valuable resource.… (more)
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justchris | 1 other review | Apr 25, 2009 |
justchris | 1 other review | Apr 25, 2009 | Awards
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