A Companion to Mediterranean History by Horden Peregrine; Kinoshita Sharon; & Sharon Kinoshita

Author:Horden, Peregrine; Kinoshita, Sharon; & Sharon Kinoshita
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2014-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

Variability and change within a single setting: the case of Egypt

Dating back from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and narrating the stories of Jewish communities freely mixing with their neighbors not only in Egypt but also in Tunisia, Sicily and Palestine, the highly-diverse documents stored in the Cairo Geniza, the repository attached to a synagogue in Fustat (or Old Cairo, as it is called today), provide—according to their foremost analyst, Goitein (1978: viii)—“not only a contribution to the history of the Jewish family, but also to that of the family within Mediterranean Islam at large, and, to some extent, within the Mediterranean area in general.” Although the Jewish family, with its specific traditions and institutions, certainly was distinctive in more than one respect, he believes that

in many others, the Geniza portrays an establishment the like of which used to be found in many corners of the Mediterranean world: an extended family of strong cohesiveness, great reverence for the senior members, prominence in the house of the old lady who presides over a bevy of daughters, daughters-in-law and grandchildren, tender care of brothers for sisters and vice versa, and in general a stronger emphasis on the ties of blood than on those created by marriage. (Goitein, 1967: 73)

One cannot escape noticing that the “Mediterranean family” portrayed by Goitein is quite reminiscent of the set of domestic relations singled out by Kandiyoti (1988) as distinctive of what she has called “classic patriarchy.” This raises again, from a different angle, the issue of the typicality of the patriarchal extended family in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history. Some demographically-orientated historians have resolutely denied it in view of the severe constraints posed by mortality: “for simple biological reasons,” it has been argued (Gerber, 1989: 413–41), families could not possibly be “universally as large and extended as the conventional wisdom has it. Life expectancy was so low that families could rarely experience extension.” However, such objections have been countered especially by anthropologists, who have retorted that “even though demographic and other constraints may have curtailed the actual predominance of three-generational patrilocal households, there is little doubt that they represented a powerful cultural ideal” (Kandiyoti, 1991: 31). Anthropologists, who have been able to eye-witness the prevalence of large patriarchal households in many rural parts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, may have sometimes been guilty of projecting their findings back into a past still plagued by much higher mortality levels than at the time of their field research. On the other hand, they have had unique opportunities to capture the subtle dynamics of family life in patriarchal households (or indeed, for nomadic peoples, in patriarchal “tentholds” where kin live in close spatial proximity) and to demonstrate the great strength of ideology—no doubt also in the past—as a means of ensuring the reproduction of power relations in the domestic realm. This is perhaps nowhere better visible than in Abu-Lughod’s influential ethnographic study of the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouins of the Egyptian western desert, which effectively shows how

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