Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life

Coming from industrial Manchester in the cold, rainy north of England, I have loved the Mediterranean all my life. The wondrous diversity of landscapes, cultures and histories, and the peoples around its shores – all are an inexhaustible delight.

Recently, I’ve gone back to an old favourite book, A Mediterranean Society by Shelomo Dov Goitein. Published from 1967, it’s never included in those ‘great historians’ debates, but it is a masterpiece. A portrait of medieval merchant communities in the eastern Mediterranean, its canvas is huge, stretching across Europe to India, and from Morocco to Crimea. It centres on one of the world’s most amazing historical archives: the Cairo Geniza (‘storeroom’ in Hebrew) of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo – a stone’s throw from the Nile.

A windowless box of a room on the second floor, reachable only via a rickety wooden ladder, by the 19th century it was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of documents. A photo from 1898 shows some of them: heaped, crumbling, wrapped in cloth, crammed in wooden tea chests. These were the business documents – and so much else – of medieval Jewish merchant communities, and are especially rich for the period 950–1250. There were 400,000 of them – the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts anywhere in the world.

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The Geniza was one of hundreds that once existed in the hyper-literate society of the medieval Levant. They survived because Jewish tradition dictated that Hebrew script was sacred and should not be thrown away but stored or buried reverently in a cemetery.

Removed from Egypt in 1897, this incredible treasure trove is now divided between many libraries, with the majority of the documents in Cambridge. After the Second World War, Goitein – already a great scholar in the languages of the Near East – decided to dedicate the rest of his life’s work to the archive. The result was his portrait of the Geniza in five volumes, the last of which went to the publisher on the day he died in 1985. There were many other offshoots, too, including a fantastic book of medieval letters from the India trade annotated and translated by Goitein and a colleague.

The documents in the Geniza include a vast range of texts. As well as business records there are materials with philosophical, legal, scientific, mystical and linguistic contents, school exercises, merchants’ account books and communal records. Especially fascinating is the huge correspondence comprising thousands of documents dating from the ninth to the 13th centuries.

There are letters from Jewish traders en route from Egypt and Tunisia to Yemen and ultimately to India. Their business ties went to Seville and Samarkand, even to Kyiv and Rouen; their ports included Marseille, Genoa and Venice. We read in Viking-age sources from western Europe about Jewish merchants who spoke Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, Latin and Greek – and here they are, motors of a new world driven not by violence and conquest but by trade, exchange, contacts, profit and loss.

The Geniza contained riches beyond measure. Goitein’s database features more than 35,000 people, notably 200 main families whose stories could be traced over centuries. We can join them in Fustat, sheltering from the fierce heat in the street outside, or sitting in a reception room where you drank tea while sorting out your insurance for boats to Morocco or down the Red Sea to India.

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These documents reveal details of daily life from late antiquity until around 1200. In them you can discover, as Goitein did, “900-year-old attitudes toward messianism, remarriage, homosexuality, foreign travel and pigeon-racing”. Ancient correspondence and business accounts “reveal clues about excommunication, social drinking, the price of flax, the Judeo-Arabic terminology for so-called sweating sickness, the total absence in this older Middle Eastern world of the Bar Mitzva ritual, and the prevalence in the same context of good, hot take-out food”.

Globalism has brought many good things, but it is fast ironing out the fabulous texture and diversity of the old world. Within the walls of the Geniza, those stories still live. And isn’t that why we all love history so much? Literally, all human life is there.

This column was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine