Why read Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders?

Book cover of Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders

Book description

Modern international business has its origins in the overseas trade of the Middle Ages. Of the various communities active in trade in the Islamic countries at that time, records of only the Jewish community survive. Thousands of documents were preserved in the Cairo Geniza, a lumber room attached to the…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Sanjiva Wijesinha

Author

I am recommending this book because it provided me with information that few people in the Indian subcontinent (and indeed in the world) today are aware of.

In days long gone, there were Jewish traders who lived and traded with the people of the western Indian sub-continent—trading in spices like cinnamon, rugs, arsenic, etc.

Shlomo Goitein used the documents that were serendipitously discovered in the geniza of the Cairo synagogue to piece together, from the letters written by the Jewish traders who lived in the lands around the western Indian Ocean (present-day Yemen, Oman, India, and Sri Lanka) during medieval…

From Sanjiva's list on The best books about the Silk Road.