The merchants of Aden: Yemen between Egypt and India

Some hundred and fifty documents of the Cairo Genizah were written in Aden, sent to Aden, or concern Aden. The corpus was assembled by S. D. Goitein over five decades; it was published posthumously with Mordechai Friedman as India Traders of the Middle Ages and in the Hebrew Sefer Hodu series.

The principal figures. Japheth ben Bundār, late eleventh century, "chief of the congregations" and representative of the merchants at Aden. His son Maḍmūn ben Japheth (d. 1151)—nagid of Yemen and wakīl al-tujjār, that is, master of the Aden customs house: his home was the post office and warehouse of the whole Egypt–India route, he owned ships sailing to Ceylon, and he negotiated safe passage with tribal chiefs and pirate captains. Abraham Ben Yijū—a Tunisian Jew of Mahdiyya, resident at Mangalore on the Malabar coast from about 1132 to 1149, a manufacturer of bronzeware, who manumitted and married an Indian woman, Ashu; his archive is the richest single dossier in the India Book.

The arrangement was institutional, not only commercial: the rabbinical court of Aden acknowledged the jurisdiction of the Egyptian centre, and Aden with some twenty Indian ports and Ceylon formed a single rabbinic district. Maḍmūn sent questions with gifts to the head of the Palestinian yeshiva in Fustat—drawing the displeasure of the pro-Baghdad party. Aden's merchants sent money to Maimonides, and his son Rabbi Abraham answered their queries.

Hence the chief correction, worth all the others. "Yemenite Jewry was hermetically cut off from the Jewish world since the destruction of the Temple" is the most damaging of the commonplaces about Teiman, and the Genizah demolishes it. In the eleventh to thirteenth centuries Yemen sat on the hinge of the Mediterranean–Indian Ocean system, and its head corresponded with Fustat, Qayrawān, Baghdad and Malabar. Isolation is a phenomenon after 1679 and generally after the sixteenth century, not a permanent condition.

And one smaller point: the trade was not in spices. In the documents the staples are pepper, brazilwood, iron and steel, textiles and bronze vessels; aromatics are a minority of the cargo's value.