Shlomo Dov [S. D.] Goitein (1900–1985) was a historian of Muslim-Jewish relations and a Jewish ethnographer, renowned for his expositions of Jewish life in the High Middle Ages (c. 950–1250 CE), based on the careful analysis of thousands of Geniza documents, an accumulation of almost two hundred thousand Jewish manuscripts that were found in the “geniza,” or storeroom depository of the Ben Ezra synagogue (built 882) of Fostat, Egypt (now Old Cairo), the Basatin cemetery east of Old Cairo, and a number of old documents that were brought to Cairo in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Goitein’s seminal research findings were widely published, most notably in the monumental five-volume work A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (1967–1993).
Recognized for his meticulous and measured scholarship on Muslim-Jewish relations, in a seminal 1963 essay (which was partly a mea culpa as well), examined the practical impact of the jizya. Goitein’s objective scholarly analysis highlighted the limitation of studying the potential economic and other adverse social consequences of the jizya, some catastrophic, without reference to non-Muslim sources:
“There is no subject of Islamic social history on which the present writer had to modify his views so radically while passing from literary to documentary sources, i.e., from the study of Muslim books to that of the records of the Cairo Geniza as the jizya…or the poll tax to be paid by non-Muslims. It was, of course, evident that the tax represented a discrimination and was intended, according to the Koran’s own words, to emphasize the inferior status of the non-believers. It seemed, however, that from the economic point of view, it did not constitute and heavy imposition, since it was on a sliding scale approximately, one, two, and four dinars, and thus adjusted to the financial capacity of the taxpayer. This impression proved to be entirely fallacious, for it did not take into consideration the immense extent of poverty and privation experienced by the masses, and in particular, their persistent lack of cash, which turned the ‘season of the tax’ into one of horror, dread, and misery. The provisions of ancient Islamic law which exempted the indigent, the invalids, and the old, were no longer observed in the Geniza period [primarily,~ 950-1250 C.E]) and had been discarded by the Shafi’i School of Law, which prevailed in Egypt, also in theory. It is precisely persons of such descriptions about whose plight we read so much in our records. The payment of the poll tax constituted item number one in the budget of families with modest income, such as teachers or laborers. For a man could clothe inexpensively, he could eat at starvation level, as perhaps a very large section of the population did. But he could not escape the tax gatherer—at least not for long. If he was caught, he was beaten and suffered otherwise corporal punishment, ‘nquba,’ and was thrown into prison, where, because of starvation and maltreatment, he faced death…A very considerable section of the non-Muslim population must have been unable to pay it and often suffered humiliation and privation on its account. While, in the higher circles, the prospects of appointment to leading government posts acted as an inducement for embracing Islam, the mass conversions in the lower classes might well have been caused in part by the intolerable burden of the poll tax.”
The full 1963 essay, S.D. Goitein. “Evidence on the Muslim Poll Tax from Non-Muslim Sources,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, 1963, Volume 6, pp. 278-95, can be read here: S_D_Goitein_Evidence_on_the_Muslim_Poll-compressed
Andrew Bostom
Andrew G. Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad (Prometheus, 2005) and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism " (Prometheus, November, 2008) You can contact Dr. Bostom at @andrewbostom.net
