Abraham Ben Yiju was a Jew from the Mediterranean port city of al-Mahdiyya in modern Tunisia. In AD 1132 he moved to Mangalore on the Malabar Coast of southern India, where he spent the next 17 years of his life running an import-export business and a bronze-ware factory. Trade between the Mediterranean and India was by this time over 1000 years old. A well-established network of maritime emporia and mercantile communities provided a foundation for Ben Yiju's business ventures. Most of his trade was with Aden and, indirectly, with Cairo, where large and prosperous Jewish communities existed. Ben Yiju bought an Indian slave called Bama whom he relied upon to represent him in Aden, and who later moved with him to Cairo as a trusted retainer when he finally left Mangalore in 1149. Ben Yiju also bought, manumitted and married an Indian slave-girl called Ashu, who apparently bore him three children. His daughter, Sitt al-Dar, later married his nephew who had grown up in Sicily. The life and times of Abraham Ben Yiju thus constitute a remarkable case study in medieval globalisation.
This is ably explored by Elizabeth Lambourn in her new volume. She is able to do so because of the chance survival of the geniza of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. A geniza is a repository for books and documents that mention the sacred name of God, the casual disposal of which is prohibited by Jewish law. That of the Ben Ezra Synagogue contained around 300 000 documents, mostly dating between the tenth and thirteenth centuries AD. Among these are 80 documents concerning Ben Yiju, mostly letters to and from his business partners and family members, spanning the 1130s and 1140s. Lambourn's study of the possessions and provisions that Abraham carried on a voyage from India to the West builds upon the growing secondary literature of geniza studies. The foundation of these studies remain Shelomo Goitein's six-volume A Mediterranean society (Reference Goitein1967), and also his ‘India Book’ completed posthumously by Mordechai Friedman (Reference Goitein and Friedman2007). Mention should also be made of Roxani Margariti's Aden and the Indian Ocean trade (Reference Margariti2007), which uses the geniza documents to reconstruct the society and economy of the main market of Ben Yiju and other India traders. An alternative introduction to the story of Ben Yiju can be found in Amitav Ghosh's excellent In an antique land (Reference Ghosh1992). These key works provide the background to Lambourn's new book.
The first two chapters are introductory. Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical and methodological framework of the investigation, while Chapter 2 deals with the life and times of the eponymous Abraham. The general approach is heavily influenced by Arjun Appadurai's The social life of things (Reference Appadurai1986), which the subtitle of Lambourn's book references. Lambourn's research is based on the observation that “commodities have complex social biographies far beyond their lives as economic goods and undergo correspondingly frequent shifts in value and meaning” (p. 27). The core chapters explore particular components of Abraham's luggage through Appadurai's anthropological lens. Raw and processed foodstuffs are considered, alongside manmade artefacts, as material things given that the luggage inventory includes both possessions and provisions. Indeed, four of the six ensuing chapters deal with food and drink; material culture is dealt with in just two chapters. Chapter 9 constitutes a conclusion, attempting to tidy up Abraham's luggage and pack it away in the warehouses of world history.
The book is divided into two parts according to spatial context. The title of each part is a quote from Goitein's Mediterranean society, upon which this and other geniza studies rest. ‘Part I: a Mediterranean society in Malibarat’ deals with the household of Ben Yiju in Mangalore, where he spent the best part of his career as a merchant. Chapter 3 deals with shopping for household goods; Chapter 4 discusses food cultures; and Chapter 5, Jewish ritual foods. These chapters explore the extent to which Ben Yiju maintained the social and cultural norms of the Mediterranean in an Indian Ocean context. He belonged to a Mediterranean expatriate mercantile community that was active in Mangalore. Yet he also mixed intimately with the local population, as we have seen, working with an Indian slave-factor and marrying his Indian slave-girl. This may have been seen by some in Mediterranean society as a transgression of social and cultural norms, for he later had difficulties finding marriage partners for his children, and may even have undermined his business credibility, given that his final years in Cairo appear to have been lived in constrained circumstances.
‘Part II: a Mediterranean society at sea’ explores the voyages of Ben Yiju in the Western Indian Ocean. He was no stranger to the sea both because of his business ventures and his family connections. Chapters 6–8 deal with the practicalities of a sea voyage: provisions; furnishings for the cabin and medicines. The extent to which Ben Yiju consumed Indian foods such as rice, mango and coconut, as well as using furniture and cookware of Indian manufacture is striking. One could interpret this simply as a consequence of market availability. Alternatively, and perhaps more interestingly, it reveals a North African Jew acculturated to, and at home in, the social and cultural milieu of the Indian subcontinent. In this sense, Abraham Ben Yiju emerges from Lambourn's study as a curiously modern character, a prototype ‘citizen of the world’ and parent to ‘third-culture kids’. The twelfth century never seemed so close to our own age.
Abraham's luggage is a welcome addition to geniza studies. It is particularly heartening to see the broader focus of research shifting from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, which constituted the engine of the world economy prior to the rise of the Atlantic networks in the early modern period.
