Marina Rustow, the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, professor of Near Eastern Studies and History, and Director of the Princeton Geniza Lab has been awarded a 2024 NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grant for the “Indian Ocean Documents from the Cairo Geniza" project.

The project aims to edit and translate documents belonging to Jewish traders who embarked on commercial ventures in the Indian Ocean rim between c. 1060 and 1260 CE. Their documents, which were eventually deposited in the Cairo Geniza, provide the real-time commentary of traders in the thick of commerce, organizing business partners, paying customs or avoiding doing so, extracting the labor of enslaved persons and local workers, and leaving family behind, usually for periods of two years or more. The goods moved by these traders became essential to the diet, dress and luxury consumption of people well beyond the Indian Ocean world, and especially in the Mediterranean basin.

The project is the continuation of a multi-generational, collaborative effort to publish the corpus of Geniza documents identified by S.D. Goitein (1900–85) as pertaining to Indian Ocean trade. Goitein’s planned “India Book” remained unrealized at the time of his death, but his student Mordechai A. Friedman continued work with the assistance of Amir Ashur, and published four of the planned seven volumes, the first three of them also in English. The project picks up now with the remaining three volumes of documents, which the teams aim to publish in open-access print volumes and online through the PGP database. The team will then turn to an additional 176 documents that they have identified beyond Goitein’s original corpus. 

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