The world was well-connected long before the modern period, and the Indian Ocean was at the center of its trade networks. People who lived along the Indian Ocean rim produced, acquired and moved commodities and finished goods in all directions: to and from East and Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, East Africa and the Mediterranean. Experienced sailors developed new sailing technologies and made regular open-water voyages by harnessing the seasonal monsoon winds (the word monsoon comes from Arabic mawsim, “season”). The goods they moved became essential to the diet, dress and luxury consumption of people well beyond the Indian Ocean world, and especially in the Mediterranean basin.

By the late eleventh century, some of the Jewish traders who eventually deposited their papers in the Cairo Geniza had turned away from Mediterranean trade and embarked southward, up the Nile and down the Red Sea to Aden, the Malabar and Konkan coasts of India and to Sumatra. They thus succeeded in getting to the source of Indian Ocean goods and increasing their profit margins. Those traders left hundreds of letters, business accounts and legal deeds in the geniza dating to between c. 1060 and 1260. The documents provide the real-time commentary of traders in the thick of commerce, sourcing, packing, buying, selling and shipping goods, organizing business partners both local and long-distance, paying customs or avoiding doing so, extracting the labor of enslaved persons, artisans, and local workers, and leaving family behind, usually for periods of two years or more.

In 2022, the Princeton Geniza Lab team began a long-term project to resume editing and translating these documents, which were written mainly in Judaeo-Arabic and Arabic. Our project is the latest phase of a multigenerational, collaborative effort to publish the corpus of 668 geniza documents (and counting) from the medieval Indian Ocean trade. 

A multigenerational project 

Starting in the 1950s, S. D. Goitein (1900–85) identified 492 Indian Ocean trade–related geniza documents and divided them into seven chapters of a work that he called the “India Book.” Each chapter was eventually substantial enough to become a freestanding volume. But Goitein published very few of the documents. Instead, he turned to the more abundant geniza documents from the Mediterranean basin, which then fueled his magnum opus, A Mediterranean Society (1967–93). The “India Book” remained unpublished when Goitein died in 1985. 

Until 2017, Goitein’s student M. A. Friedman continued Goitein's work on the “India Book,” exhaustively reviewing Goitein’s draft editions and translations, supplying new readings and solving innumerable problems of translation. With the assistance of Amir Ashur, Friedman published four of Goitein’s planned seven volumes, adding copious notes and improvements, as well as Hebrew translations, and English translations of the first three volumes. Friedman and Ashur also published a dictionary of the corpus. Friedman and Ashur also added dozens of new, unpublished documents to the corpus. After 2017, so did the PGL’s senior researcher Alan Elbaum.

After Friedman retired from the project, Ashur continued working on volumes 5–7 and brought in Elizabeth Lambourn as a collaborator and advisor. Alan Elbaum and Marina Rustow joined the project in 2021, and Pratima Gopalakrishnan in 2023. The team then sought funding to continue the project. 

We have now secured substantial funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant, 2024–27), Princeton University’s Office of the Dean for Research (New Ideas in the Humanities, 2024–25) and Princeton’s Judaic Studies Program. By 2028, we plan to prepare the remaining 209 documents from Goitein's original corpus (volumes 5, 6 and 7) in scholarly editions and English translations to be published as open-access print volumes and online in the PGP database. We then hope to turn to the additional 176 documents that our team has identified beyond Goitein’s original corpus, and to translate volume 4 to English. The project is also fortunate to have a stellar group of international advisors with whom we meet regularly.

Team members

Core team

Amir Ashur: Lead researcher

Alan Elbaum: Senior researcher

Pratima Gopalakrishnan: Project Coordinator and Senior Researcher

Elizabeth Lambourn: Senior researcher 

Marina Rustow: Project director 

Advisory committee

Ranabir Chakravarti (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

Rebecca Darley (University of Leeds)

Anwesha Das (Emory University)

Miriam Frenkel (Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ben Zvi Institute)

Mekhola S. Gomes (Amherst College)

Manabu Kameya (Hirosaki University)

Geoffrey Khan (University of Cambridge)

Roxani Margariti (Emory University)

Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (École Pratique des Hautes Études and University of Oxford)

Craig Perry (Emory University)

Kristina Richardson (University of Virginia)

Daniel Sheffield (Princeton University)

Hideharu Shimada (Rikkyo University)

Chris Wickham (University of Oxford)