Shelomo Dov Goitein

Shelomo Dov Goitein (April 3, 1900 – February 6, 1985) was a German-Jewish ethnographer, historian and Arabist known for his research on Jewish life in the Islamic Middle Ages, and particularly on the Cairo Geniza.

Shelomo Dov (Fritz) Goitein was born in the town of Burgkunstadt in Upper Franconia, Germany.

His father, Dr. Eduard Goitein, was born in Hungary to a long line of rabbis.

The name Goitein may be derived from Kojetín (in Moravia) as the city of origin of the family.

He was brought up with both secular and Talmudic education.

In Jerusalem, he married Theresa Gottlieb (1900–1987), a eurhythmics teacher who composed songs and plays for children.

They had three children, Ayala Gordon, Ofra, and Elon.

In 1914, his father died and the family moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he finished high school and university.

During 1918–23, he studied Arabic and Islam at the University of Frankfurt under the guidance of the famous scholar Josef Horovitz while continuing his Talmudic study with a private teacher.

He left the university with a dissertation on prayer in Islam.

From 1918 to 1923, Goitein attended the Universities of Frankfurt and Berlin and studied Islamic history under Josef Horovitz.

His Ph.D. thesis was on prayer in Islam.

He also pursued Jewish studies, and was a leader in the Zionist youth movement.

In the year 1923, Goitein fulfilled his lifelong dream and, together with Gershom Scholem, immigrated to Palestine, where he stayed for thirty-four years.

He lived in Haifa for four years before being invited to lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which had been inaugurated two years earlier.

In 1923, he immigrated to Palestine, where he taught Bible and Hebrew language at the Reali School in Haifa.

In 1927, he wrote a play called Pulcellina about the blood libel killings in Blois in 1171.

In 1928, he was appointed professor of Islamic History and Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He was founder of the School of Asian and African studies and of the Israel Oriental Society.

In 1928, he began his research of the language, culture, and history of the Jews of Yemen.

In 1938-1948, he served as a senior education officer in Mandatory Palestine—responsible for Jewish and Arab schools—and published books on methods of teaching the Bible and Hebrew.

Goitein dedicated his version of Genealogies of the Nobles by 9th century Muslim historian Al-Baladhuri, published in 1938, to fellow Hebrew University Arabist Levi Billig, who had been murdered a year earlier by an Arab assassin during the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine.

From 1948, Goitein began his life's work on the Cairo Geniza documents.

In 1949, he did research in Aden as Yemenite Jews gathered for their evacuation to the nascent Jewish State.

Most of the letters are from the mid-1950s onwards, after Goitein left Israel, a move of which Agnon was highly critical.

Goitein was awarded honorary degrees from many universities.

After deciphering the documents, and during his time as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1955-71), Goitein vividly reconstructed many aspects of Jewish life in the Middle Ages, publishing them in a six-volume monumental series, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (1967–1993).

Although the documents were written by Jews, they reflect the surrounding Muslim and Christian environments not only in countries bordering the Mediterranean but all the way to India.

This has thrown new light on the whole study of the Middle Ages.

Goitein consulted extensively the Haskell Isaacs's catalogue of the Wellcome Collection and the Cairo Geniza material, of which he was considered the preeminent scholar.

In 1957, he moved to the United States.

He received research awards from Guggenheim (1965), Harvey (1980), and the MacArthur lifetime fellowship (1983).

He settled in Philadelphia and became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania ("Penn). He remained on the Penn faculty, in the Department of Oriental Studies, from 1957 to 1971. After retiring, he later worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where, in 1983, he won a MacArthur Fellowship; he the oldest recipient of the fellowship at the time. He died on February 6, 1985—day his last volume of the series A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (vol. 5) was sent to the publisher. The first delivery of The Individual: Portrayt of a Mediterranean Personality of the High Middle Ages as Reflected in the Cairo Geniza had been sent to the University of California Press on December 26, 1984.

Goitein's lengthy correspondence with the Nobel Prize-winning author S.Y. Agnon was published by his daughter, Ayala Gordon, in 2008.

Agnon's wife, Esther, had studied Arabic privately with Goitein while she was a student at the University of Frankfurt.

When Goitein moved to Jerusalem, he and Agnon became close friends.

An especially rich geniza with a large volume of correspondence was discovered in Old Cairo containing thousands of documents dating from the 9th to the 13th centuries.

As many Jews began letters and documents with the words "With the help of God," the papers reflected all aspects of everyday life in the countries of North Africa and bordering the Mediterranean.

The documents included many letters from Jewish traders en route from Tunisia and Egypt to Yemen and ultimately to India.

The papers were mostly written in Judeo-Arabic characters.