Back Home: Revisiting Goitein’s Account of Daily Life in the Middle Eastern Home

Since the publication in 1983 of volume IV of S. D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society, dedicated to “daily life,” scholars have sought to better understand how this textual life of things relates to the actual surviving material culture of everyday Middle Easterners, Jews and non-Jews alike. Be it Margariti’s work on shipwrecks (2015) or Frenkel and Lester’s study of the utensils listed in one household inventory (2015), the confrontation of textual and material evidence is always complex, often contradictory. This paper takes the opportunity to reflect on Goitein's contribution in the light of new archaeological research and, above all, in the light of evolving theories within the discipline of material culture study. It also addresses the pressing issue of how the newly published “India Book” documents relating to Jewish trade between the Middle East and South Asia (Goitein and Friedman, 2008 and later volumes) might now join this discussion more fully. This paper proposes that the material culture of Jewish communities beyond the main communities of the Middle East may in fact offer important lessons for the study of Jewish domesticity in the Middle East.