one Two Men in a Boat: The Braudel-Goitein “Correspondence” and the Beginning of Thalassography Peter N. Miller The concluding section of Abraham ibn Daud’s Sefer ha-Qabbalah (c. 1261 CE) tells the story of four men—rabbis—in a boat sailing from Bari. The boat is captured by Muslim pirates and three of the rabbis are distributed, or ransomed away, to the cities of Fustat (Old Cairo), Qairawan, and Cordoba. The story, plainly, is a parable of the establishment of autonomous, post-Babylonian, Jewish communities in the West, even down to the silent evocation of the medieval Jewish parody “From Bari shall go forth Torah, and the Word of the Lord from Otranto.”1 Near the beginning of their magnum opus, The Corrupting Sea, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell present the historiography of the Mediterranean upon which their work rests in terms of “four men in a boat.” Without reference to ibn Daud, or perhaps even knowing of his tale, they proceed straightforwardly to survey the contributions made by their chosen ancestors—Mikhail Rostovtzeff, Henri Pirenne, Shlomo Dov Goitein, and Fernand Braudel.2 It is with the last of these men that this essay is concerned. And though real boats play a major role in their lives, as well as work—Goitein, famously, travelled from Germany to Palestine in 1923 on the same vessel as Gershom Scholem, and Braudel, even more famously, drew close to Lucien Febvre on the long passage from Brazil back to France in 1937— it is to a metaphorical boat that I point. For though they seem very different scholars, and though no one has thus far found any reason to link them directly—Horden and Purcell, for example, make no effort to show that any of their four figures were personally connected—the fact 27 28 The Sea is that for about ten years Braudel and Goitein were “in the same boat,” as we would say: engaged upon a common project. It is this story that I wish to tell for the first time. And it is a story of no small significance. For these first thalassographers were two of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, one known to all of today’s practitioners, the other known to far too few. The one defined the study of the sea in terms of the slow-moving facts against which the lives of individuals vanished, as in the long exposure times of early photography. The other defined the study of the sea in terms of the fastchanging events and thoughts and actions of the individuals whose lives gave meaning to the inanimate world around them. Together Fernand Braudel and Shlomo Dov Goitein defined—and define still—the parameters of a possible thalassography. As scholars, Braudel and Goitein seem to represent two distinct paths in twentieth-century historiography. It is fitting, therefore, to begin this volume with a study not of their work—others have, and can, do this much better—but of their unknown relationship. For historians, even great ones, are human beings and their interactions can have a shaping impact even on their intellectual creations. On the first page of A Mediterranean Society, borrowing a Gibbonian trope, Goitein (1900–1985) writes that the “idea of this book was first conceived by me on September 17, 1954, while in Oxford, searching the treasures of the Bodleian Library for Geniza documents relating to the India trade for a book still in preparation on that subject.” In the very next sentence, Goitein explains that “On June 15, 1955, I wrote about my intention to publish a volume of this character to Clemens Heller of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (VIe section), Paris, who had done much to further the preparation of the book about the India trade.”3 Heller appears nowhere else in Goitein’s published oeuvre. He remains, surely, an unknown name to nearly every reader of A Mediterranean Society. But those with an eye for historiography and an ear for dates would note that the head of the VIe section in 1954 was none other than Fernand Braudel. This veiled reference is the only indication either ever gave of the other. For Braudel never cites Goitein in La Méditerranée, and Goitein himself explains that he did not read Braudel until after the publication of its English translation—The Mediterranean—in paperback in 1972 (he writes 1966). Of course, Braudel’s history would have been more compelling if he could have figured out how to accommodate the reality of human agency, and Goitein’s more usable if he had been able to tell a story rather than curate individual documents. Two Men in a Boat 29 On the surface, this one sentence on the first page of Goitein’s book seems to point to one of the great near-misses in the history of twentiethcentury practice. Yet it actually points to a relationship between Goitein and the VIe section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) that extended over 10 years and 124 letters to and from Heller and his friend and colleague, the head of the section, Fernand Braudel.4 This connection to the VIe section is not mentioned by Goitein anywhere, not even in the India Book, published in 2008, but initially solicited by Heller and Braudel in the fall of 1954 for the VIe section’s publication series.5 The one sentence mentioning Heller masked all of that. It also cast a retrospective sheen on the past. For Heller did not “further the preparation of the book on the India trade,” he—and through him Braudel— actually commissioned it and paid for much of the research that went into it, and into what became A Mediterranean Society.6 Goitein, in that book’s preface, explained his leaving the Indian Ocean for the Mediterranean Sea in a second sentence that also conceals more than it reveals. Goitein mentions that when, on August 18, 1958, he received a letter from G. E. von Grunebaum of the Near East Center at the University of California inviting him to publish in their new series he was “off India and on the Mediterranean.” It was in trying to satisfy Grunebaum that “there ripened the bold resolution first to make a survey of the documentary Geniza in toto.”7 But it was Braudel, in fact, who first proposed publishing this kind of book. The story of these letters provides the “backstory” to one of the great scholarly projects of the twentieth century, Goitein’s reconstruction of a medieval trading society from fragments of documents, mostly letters. It also suggests the breadth of Braudel’s vision and a sense of his priorities very different from what one might deduce from his printed scholarship alone. The whole story of the pre-history of Goitein’s Mediterranean Society cannot be told here, but his relationship with Braudel and the VIe section can. And, finally, this story outlines a historiographical orientation which, if sadly impossible fifty years ago, may now finally be coming into view, in which human mobility and connectivity provide the historian’s armature. Fernand Braudel is famous as a scholar. We evaluate his achievement, as we do all scholars, based on what he wrote. Sometimes, of course, we celebrate a scholar by the celebrity of their students. But Braudel should also be famous as an administrator. It was under his guidance of the VIe section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) that a range of 30 The Sea institutional projects were launched which culminated in the refounding of the VIe section as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in 1975 and the creation of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme on the Boulevard Raspail as its home. And, in particular, at the EPHE Braudel launched a series of publishing projects of extreme originality. When we evaluate his intellectual orientation we must include these publications, which he often solicited, encouraged, organized, and subsidized, alongside his own. In short, I am suggesting that the academic administrator or, more precisely, the administrative initiatives undertaken by an academic can and should, under certain circumstances, be understood as more or less mediated reflections of an intellectual vision. But once we broaden out our scope for the history of scholarship to include initiatives launched and managed but implemented through others, then we are also broadening out our range of actors from the professor-administrator to the administrator-academic. If we look at Braudel’s tenure at the VIe section, and then the EHESS, we see powerful administrator-academics. But one name stands out as of exceptional importance for our story, and exceptional interest over all: Clemens Heller (1917–2002). He is ignored in Lutz Raphael’s essential treatments of the Annales empire, but he does have a substantial role in F. Gemelli’s study of how Braudel created the EHESS.8 In this story, Heller and Braudel worked as a team, with Heller leading the way on international diplomacy, especially with American foundations. Born in Austria, and later a refugee in the United States, Heller went to Paris in 1949 after completing his doctorate at Harvard University (and founding the Salzburg Seminar) in order to work on account books from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. He became a confidant of Braudel’s and moved through a series of positions in the VIe section— (Chargé de conférences (1952–1956), Chargé de la mise en œuvre du programme des Aires culturelles (1955), Chargé des fonctions de sousdirecteur d’études (EPHE-VIe) (1957), Chargé du secrétariat et de la coordination de la Division des Aires culturelles (1957–1972), Directeur d’études associé (1972)—and after his official retirement in 1985 followed Braudel as Administrator of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (1986–1992). Yet the working relationship between Braudel and Heller was much closer than any title might indicate. Indeed, we might want to consider their connection as something close to that of Warburg and Saxl when they remade the KBW into more than a privatgelehrter’s library in 1920s Hamburg.9 Two Men in a Boat 31 Heller has not been studied much on his own, reflecting the general tendency of historians of scholarship to focus on the scholars who write the scholarship, rather than the administrators who make it possible for that scholarship to be written. What follows, therefore, could be as much a demonstration piece for taking seriously the academic dimension of institutional histories, as it is a piece focusing on Heller. And, I should add, because of his position and ideas, the Fonds Heller in the archive of the EHESS is a fantastic trove for anyone interested in the global shaping of historical scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century. At the center of this institution-building project was the Centre de Recherches Historiques (CRH), created by Febvre and Braudel, born with the VIe Section itself in 1949 but only really active from 1951. Lutz Raphael has written about it within his study of the Annales project and also in a separate monograph published in the Cahiers of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.10 And at the core of the CRH lies a group of publication series which reflected Braudel’s vision. Indeed, the publication series launched by the CRH in the early 1950s may represent Braudel’s postwar thinking even better than his Mediterranean which, while only published in 1949 was substantially finished by 1938 or 1939. The Braudel of the early 1950s was a different person and the second edition of The Mediterranean grew directly out of the research foci of the CRH, as represented in its monograph series.11 The two most significant collections established by the CRH were “Affaires et gens d’affaires” and “Ports-Routes-Trafics.” These series are anchored in a perception that economic activity is cultura in the strong sense, and that studying merchants is therefore central to any future cultural history. The first volume in “Affaires et gens d’affaires” was Armando Sarpori’s Le Marchand Italien au Moyen Age, with its four chapters divided into “Physionomie du marchand,” “Les marchands au travail,” “Les italiens dans le monde,” and “Les sources,” which included statutes, notarial acts, books, merchant letters—described as absolutely essential but hard to find—“manuels de commerce, mémoires et journaux, et chroniques.” Right from the start there was equal emphasis on the role of the historian as a key figure in this story, not as someone hidden behind a veil of pseudo-objectivity. As Lucien Febvre wrote in his preface to Sapori’s book, “the author of this very fine book . . . this author is a man . . . concerned with yesterday, preoccupied with tomorrow—because tomorrow and yesterday find a common link within the heart of man.”12 In his preface to an exactly contemporary publication in the parallel 32 The Sea series Ports-Routes-Trafics (Étienne Trocmé and Marcel Delafosse, Le Commerce Rochelais de la fin du XVe siècle au début du XVIIIe), Fernand Braudel made an impassioned plea to treat ostensibly economic sources as windows into lived life. It is another, and rarer thing, which would fill many of our colleagues in history with joy, not to consider economic life as a reality in itself, a closed world of numbers, but as a sector of life among others, and one that must be replaced in a set of circumstances and varied links to restore its full value. For Etienne Trocmé, his merchants are men, his city is not only streets, a harbor, some ramparts, a ‘suburb’, local foods, distant commerce—but also institutions in the richest sense of the word. La Rochelle gradually reveals itself to us in the fullness of its life, in its dignity, and in its urban force d’état.13 For Braudel and the CRH, letters were the type of source that offered the most. The key statement of purpose was made by Braudel in his preface to a volume in Affaires et gens d’affaires on the letters of a Marseille merchant family at the turn of the seventeenth century. “[Their interest,] if I am not mistaken, is to insert us into the heart of the practices and realities of merchants’ everyday lives: these realities, on their own or because of their repetition, often go beyond the merely anecdotal detail.” Then, taking a single letter as an example, he notes that it sheds light on “the city and the position of Marseille, the role of the Genoese silk buyers, the importance of exchange in Lyon, the attraction of Seville and Cadiz, the transport of ‘American’ cochineal eastwards, the price of silver reals in Marseille, the journey of ships towards Alexandria and Tripoli.”14 Braudel, whose famous book, The Mediterranean, was famously depopulated, in these prefaces emphasized the value of letters precisely because of their individualized, “granular,” view of reality. And he identified this with the aspirations of the VIe section as a whole. The VIe section of the École des Hautes-Études was even more interested in these letters as it had in the works two analogous publications [Lettres d’un marchand vénitien Andrea Berengo (1553–1556) (Affaires et gens d’affaires 10, 1957); Simon Ruiz et les ‘asientos’ de Philippe II (Affaires et gens d’affaires 6, 1953)] . . . But these letters from Marseillais merchants have their value and will acquire importance by being thus compared to similar documents and plunged back into an Two Men in a Boat 33 economic history of the XVIth century as seen day by day, explained by its actors, a history which, in general, has but distant relationships with the images presented by, when they are presented, the great books of synthesis.15 One of Braudel’s younger followers, J. Gentil da Silva, who published his edition of merchant letters as Affaires et gens d’affaires 9 in 1956, described the way letters had to be read. On the face of it, they often might appear of little value. “For their correspondence does not say all about their activities or their calculations. The hardest, and we are going to try in a moment, is to understand their language, to follow their procedures, their tactics, their art of diagnosing and taking action.”16 In short, in the early 1950s, there was no place in the world in which merchant letters were as central, as valued, and as “theorized,” as the Centre de Recherches Historiques in Paris.17 Our thalassographic close encounter begins on October 10, 1954, when Heller, at the heart of this project, wrote a letter out of the blue to Goitein, sparked by the appearance in Speculum of Goitein’s essay, “From the Mediterranean to India: documents on the trade to India, South Arabia and East Africa from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.”18 Heller had read it, and was impressed. Right off the bat, Heller puts the collaborative project on the table, linking the Centre’s interests to those of Goitein (or, so interpreting them as to link): “I have just read with great interest your article in SPECULUM. For me the article has been one of the most exciting and rewarding ones I have seen in a long time, especially since the Geniza papers promise to be of great value for the studies on commercial credit in antiquity & the middle ages, which I am now undertaking.” Heller then went on to write: But I should like to write you today not so much on my own behalf, but as a member of the 6th Section of the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne and its Centre de Recherches Historiques. Under the leadership of Prof. Fernand Braudel of the College de France we are just developing a programme for a comparative study of Asiatic & Occidental economic & social history & of economic & social movements which involve as well Asia as the Occident. It is intended to build up several research projects, & to invite international cooperation for them, to expand the publications of 34 The Sea the 6th Section in the direction of these investigation [sic], and to start, beginning in October 1955, a new Journal (in French & English) devoted to the study of the problems of comparative economic history. Obviously Jewish Commerce will have to constitute a major problem of investigation, and you can well see how the Geniza papers, and the programme you outline for the future, are of immense interest to us. I should therefore like to ask you, whether it would be possible for you, not only to keep the Centre abreast of your studies, but to cooperate in its efforts and perhaps to you use our journal for other articles by yourself or by colleagues of yours which deal with the economic and legal implications of the Geniza papers. Heller put this into very concrete terms, opening the door to what would be a nearly sixty-year-long project. I note that you speak only of a “possible” publication of the Geniza documents. I take it that the publication is by no means assured, but if this should not be the case, it might be possible for the Centre to assume responsibility for the publication, unless costs turn out to be entirely prohibitive. In conclusion, invoking Braudel’s personal research project again, Heller concludes: Prof. Braudel has asked me to inquire whether the Geniza papers contain important material on the Indian and on Mediterranean trade in the 15th & 16th century, and whether you think it worthwhile to set some young scholars in Paris to work on these papers.19 Goitein immediately replied, writing on October 27 from England, “I am enthusiastic about the prospect of cooperating with you.” But then he quickly qualified, identifying himself almost reflexively, and defensively, against what he might have perceived as too-high expectations. This is a passage of extraordinary value for its autobiographical hue. I am a philologist and historian of Mediaeval Islam and Judaism, but will never write economic history. I regard it my duty to edit, to translate and explain as exactly and completely as possible those texts of the Cairo Geniza. The conclusions to be drawn from them for the Two Men in a Boat 35 history of economy will be made by the scholars specializing in this field. In my article “The Cairo Geniza as a source for the History of Muslim Civilization” in the forthcoming issue of Islamic Studies (Paris) you will find a number of important conclusions drawn from my collection of papers dealing with the trade to India. But these are summaries of facts rather than abstractions made by a specialist. Nevertheless, at this stage he presented the gap between his own philologist’s approach and that of the historian, perhaps with Braudel as the model, as fruitful. “Thus, I believe that cooperation with the Centre de Recherches Historiques will be very useful.” Heller marked this in orange pencil in the margin. Turning to details, Goitein explained that he was “delighted that you consider the possibility of publishing my book on the trade in the Indian Ocean.” Heller underscored this passage. “So far,” Goitein continued, “only very informal talks have been made with other scientific bodies.” Then Goitein turned to an issue that would run through his Parisian correspondence, and perhaps be of decisive importance. “Of course the book has to appear in English (Heller’s emphasis). For although French is not unknown to me, I could not take upon myself the responsibility to translate these difficult texts into a language which I never use actively.” The shadow of Braudel looms always over this correspondence. In concluding this first letter, Goitein turns directly to Heller’s transmitted question about the possible presence in the Geniza of material bearing on the later, early modern, history of the Mediterranean. “Please inform Professor Braudel,” Goitein writes, “that the Geniza contains a lot of material from later times, especially, I believe, from the 18. century, from the 16. too, while—if I am not mistaken—there is little from the 15.” Braudel had raised the possibility of setting a young person on to this material, a very forward-thinking proposal. Goitein agreed, but with an illuminating caveat. “I think, it is an excellent idea to set a young scholar to work on this material, but only one, for the very secret of the study of these fragments is that one person has to concentrate on a whole field.”20 This insistence on one person reflects his own view that the Geniza could only be understood if one had a view of it as a whole, and therefore the need for a person to have mastered everything in order to say anything. Whether this is in fact true—could it not be said of any documentary trove? And yet it is not standard practice in other fields—or not, there is no doubt that this premise had more than anything to do with the rate at which Goitein produced his own books on the Geniza. 36 The Sea This first exchange of letters flags many of the main themes that will recur in the later correspondence of these two men. From a letter written on December 1, 1954, from Jerusalem, Goitein noted that Heller’s letter reached him on November 8 in Cambridge, just before he left England. He had been out of the country for sixteen months and was drowning in old business. It makes no reference to his earlier letter, however.21 He thought his book on India would nicely complement that of a Mr. Kirpas on the India trade in the sixteenth century.22 Goitein explained his time frame, and his dependence on foundation financial support. What he really hoped, eventually was “in collaboration with my colleagues and graduates, to cover the whole field of the documentary Geniza.”23 Based on Goitein’s one letter, Heller offered him a subsidy, which Goitein later acknowledged as 60,000 francs per month. One can only marvel at the remarkable sure-footedness and speed with which Heller— and behind him, of course, Braudel—worked.24 Goitein again brought up the language question, asking if he could publish in English. He was already thinking in terms of a complex project. “This volume I would be exclusively in French, containing a very detailed Introduction and the Translations of the texts, while a second, smaller, volume would bring the texts (of course in Hebrew letters) with a philological Introduction and detailed Arabic (in Latin or/and Arabic letters)—French Indices. Do you think this is feasible?”25 Heller must have tried to paint a picture of Braudel’s project by sending him some of the volumes produced in the CRH’s series, for in his letter of February 6, 1955, Goitein thanked Heller for the two packets of publications of “your institute.” By this date, the CRH would have published at least fifteen titles. “I believe now,” Goitein replies, that my Indiabook fits better into the series ‘Affaires et Gens d’Affaires.’” This was, as we have noted, the flagship series in which Braudel promoted his argument about the centrality of merchants in the making of the modern world through the writings of merchants themselves. “In English,” Goitein concludes, “I would call it ‘The Jewish India merchants of the Middle Ages’. In German, there exists even a word corresponding exactly to the Arabic ‘Musafirun al-Hind,’ namely ‘Indienfahrer’; I doubt, however, whether there exists such a word in French.” Goitein offered that the texts were already typed and ready for translation, and that only time in a major library was needed for him to complete the introduction.26 Goitein’s formal request for funding was made to the CRH in a second letter of February 6, 1955. This was addressed to Two Men in a Boat 37 Heller but Goitein explains, as if to a committee, that he had collected “about 160 items referring to the trade between the Mediterranean and the countries of the Indian Ocean” and wanted to remain in Europe to complete the study. He wrote that he believed the Centre would recognize the value of this work because it has done so much for “research in the history of economy.”27 Goitein’s first letter to Braudel was written on February 20 in order to thank him personally for the grant which he received of the 60,000 francs. “Dr. Clemens Heller informs me that you most kindly consented to grant me a scholarship of 60.000 francs per month for a period of two months, in order to enable me to work on my book on the India merchants of the Middle Ages. I was indeed deeply moved by this generous allocation, and in particular by the spirit in which it was granted. The connections between the Centre de Recherches Historiques and myself were brought about entirely by the initiative of the Centre. This I call a real policy in planning and executing of scientific research. The stupendous literary output of the Centre shows that this farsighted policy is bearing fruit. But in the midst of this very important letter Goitein’s seeming insecurity about his lacking command of the French language surfaced. “I have to apologize for writing to you in English instead of French. I am a great admirer of France and in particular of her literature and science. However, as I have to use constantly four different languages for my work of research, teaching and writing, I found it was not conducive to the health of the soul to try using French as a means of expression.”28 In his letter to Heller of February 20, which accompanied that to Braudel, Goitein explained that “After having looked through the publications of the Centre, I think we better shelve the idea of printing the Judaeo-Arabic originals. This is a big Orientalist undertaking and is better left to a project of bringing out the Geniza in toto” (Heller’s underscore). “Thus,” he concludes, “the book will be in French from the beginning to the end.” This distinction between the India Book and the Geniza in toto, or “documentary Geniza,” is fundamental, for in it lies the seed of the ultimate bifurcation of Goitein’s project.29 Heller’s response of March 30, 1955, stressed the capabilities of the Imprimerie Nationale in the area of oriental-language printing. He also explained that the CRH had made a series of appointments in “Oriental problems.”30 Turning to the question of Goitein’s team, Heller asked 38 The Sea about Eliyahu Ashtor and Murad Mikh’ail and their readiness to publish, and emphasized the value the CRH put on collaboration. A broader collaboration was for a broader project. It was Braudel himself to whom he assigned the vision for this. And this brings me to a very large question with [which?] M. Braudel and I have discussed without coming to any definite conclusions: that is whether we should propose to cooperate with you in bringing out the Geniza in toto if you do not find another institution to support such publication. But this may well be beyond our possibilities and economic means. I wonder if you would care to make any comments?31 Goitein’s response directly took up Braudel’s challenge. You are perfectly right in the assumption that the India book should be planned within the frame of the whole Geniza projects; and it is a testimony to the broadness of your and Braudel’s conceptions of History that you consider to bring out the Geniza as a whole. No doubt, this treasure house of information on social and economic history should be made accessible, if not in a total edition, at least in the form of Regesta. This was the kernel of A Mediterranean Society. Goitein was also willing to collaborate with the CRH, but he suggested broadening it out to include also the Hebrew University and “some American organisation or University.” In Goitein’s view “this would solve also the question of the language. As Hebrew and German, the languages with which we are familiar, are ruled out for a publication of the character of the Geniza project, we should use English, the language in which our publications appear, as far as they are not destined for the Hebrew reading public.” Again, we see that language was an ongoing issue for Goitein. He explained that his notes were all in English and that translating from it—which was already translated from the medieval Hebrew or Arabic—into a fourth language, French, “would be a source of many mistakes or inaccuracies.” Therefore, he concluded, “I thought to bring out the India book solely in French and to leave the philological aspects to a later publication, which should be a part of the Geniza project as a whole.” And this, presumably, would have been in English. In conclusion, Goitein invited Heller to Jerusalem to meet the pos- Two Men in a Boat 39 sible participants in the big Geniza project. He specifically mentioned Ephraim Urbach, F. Baer and H. H. Ben Sasson. One of the fascinating what-ifs of our story is the possibility, had Heller gone to Jerusalem, and had this collaboration blossomed, of a very different Jerusalem School arising in the 1950s, one linked much more closely to Braudel, the CRH, and the Annales.32 Writing back immediately (six days after Goitein put pen to paper), Heller reported that a discussion of the Geniza papers had been held, but that more information about scope was needed. He had, however, been able to secure Braudel’s agreement to Goitein’s proposed institutional collaboration. “In principle, an arrangement could be considered, in which the University of Jerusalem would assume responsibility for the scholarly preparation of the volumes, in which we would take care of the printing by the Imprimerie Nationale, and an American institution would assume responsibility for additional expenses.”33 Again, turning the correspondence around quickly, Goitein wrote back from Jerusalem on the 25th. “My final decision is that I offer the Centre my India book for publication and suggest that you put the costs for translation and printing into your budget of 1956.” Goitein planned to be in Europe in the summer writing the book’s Introduction and would know the “exact extent” of the book by October. He proposed meeting Heller in Paris at the end of October or early November and going over the details. He also suggests auditioning Paul Klein, once of Paris and the Bibliothèque Nationale and now of Jerusalem, to see how well he translated three or four extensive documents.34 Since Goitein’s definitive-sounding pronouncement had made no mention of language of publication, or of the relationship of the India Book to the wider Geniza project, Heller queried precisely this in his next letter, written after a lapse of four weeks. “Please do let me know whether the idea of joined publication of the Geniza papers is dead or not, what should be done about the translation of your book and whether it is going to include the original text or not.”35 Heller also put his money where his mouth was, offering Goitein 120,000 francs for the summer.36 In exchange, Goitein made clear his relationship to the CRH. “I offer to the Centre,” he wrote to Heller, “the publication of my book ‘The Geniza Archives of the Jewish India Merchants.’ You will have to put into your budget for 1956 . . . the cost of translation from Hebrew, as well as the printing [of] the French text and of the originals, which will be in Hebrew characters with some additional dots (denoting the Arabic). . . . As to the Geniza project as a whole, you 40 The Sea need not worry about it now, as no other volume will be ready, before the end of . . . .”37 Heller, going back to the U.S. for the summer, slightly lamented Goitein’s failure to rise to the bait about the Geniza project in toto. “With more information about the great Geniza project, I might have had an occasion to discuss it over there.” He left the Rockefeller Foundation as his forwarding address.38 This caught Goitein’s attention. Five days later he sent Heller a plan for what a published Geniza might look like. “Our provisional plans for the Geniza: 8 volumes to be brought out in about twelve years. 1. The Archives of the India merchants. To be ready in 1956 (Goitein). [In the margin, Heller penciled “To be ready in 1956.”] 2. The Archive of Nahrai ben Nissim: letters from Egypt, North Africa, Sicily, Syria, and Palestine. To be ready in 1957 (Murad Mikha’el). 3. Letters from other archives related to the Mediterranean . . . 4. A general volume illustrating social life. I am collecting material for this volume all the time. [In the margin, Heller noted “Goitein ed.”] 5. Letters from the Egyptian country side or inner Egyptian correspondence. 6. Marriage, Divorce and other documents related to family life. 7. Other legal deeds. These seven volumes will contain material in the main from eleventh thru [sic] the thirteenth centuries. 8. A selection from later documents (16 to 18 centuries). Goitein concluded: “I personally intend to undertake, beside the volume on the trade to India, only volume 4. I see, however, suitable candidates for the other volumes, although some of them will have to grow.” Heller commented in the margin: “Edition of Geniza Papers relating to Social & Economic History. Edition S.D. GOITEIN.”39 This is the letter Goitein referred to on the opening page of Mediterranean Society. It clearly is written as a response to Heller’s challenge to produce something for him to show the Rockefeller Foundation. Heller’s response to the big plan was immediate and welcoming. But he also perceived a certain ambiguity, if not downright ambivalence, in Goitein’s reply. Was it one volume they were discussing, or several? And were they all the same, and if not, how different? Nevertheless, Heller’s— Two Men in a Boat 41 and the CRH’s—position was clear: “I do not know whether such a permanent relationship with Paris would be of interest to you, but we would certainly welcome it.”40 Heller, in turn, in his next letter, asked if Goitein, who was then in England, could come to Paris by the end of October in order to meet Braudel.41 Goitein was “awfully sorry,” but deferred the invitation. Instead, he enclosed “a table showing the final arrangements of the texts in the India volume (which has again a new name). I should very much appreciate if Prof. Braudel had time to have a look on it, for then he would get a more detailed idea about the content of the book.”42 This “table” seems not to have survived. A long letter from Heller that may have crossed with Goitein’s shows how deeply Goitein’s project had gotten bound up with those of the CRH. Heller explained that “M. Braudel would like to bring out the 1st Volume of the Geniza Papers in an exemplary fashion, and therefore, considerations of money should not bother you in deciding whether or not to publish documents in full.” This was a pretty extraordinary extension of carte blanche. Heller went on. “I presume you are in agreement that we should publish all the eight vol. together; naturally, we could add related volumes, which you may care to suggest.” He asked what Goitein had done about translation because budget decisions needed to be made before Braudel’s departure. Heller also noted that the VIe section was undertaking a major expansion in its Asian and Islamic studies. He asked for Goitein’s feeling about the “Geniza Papers” being published in a series containing volumes on India, China, and the world of Islam. Heller ended by asking for a quick reply “so that I can still discuss it with M. Braudel.”43 In his reply, dashed off only two days later, and just after the post arrived at 8:30 a.m.—“when one is burning to run off to the Library”— Goitein rejected the Islamic series as a home for his India Book. He suggests instead “Intermediate civilization or something similar.” He also noted that while the “The India volume—as well, I hope that about social life—is my literary property, [but] the Geniza project as a whole is an affair of the Hebrew University & we have to await its decision. It will certainly be decided before the India volume is ready for print.”44 This is somewhat puzzling as the Geniza documents were themselves scattered around the world; the claim that the Hebrew University had a right to the project could only stem from the fact of his being salaried by the University. But why Goitein thought that his curatorial or interpretative work and that of his students somehow belonged to the University in a way 42 The Sea that differed from the India Book is not self-evident. In the light of what came later, we cannot rule out the possibility that this was a stalling tactic. In a letter written on that very same day (September 23) Heller proposed splitting the India Book into two parts. “In talking over the publication of the Indian book”—presumably with Braudel, but perhaps with others as well—“the suggestion was made to publish your introduction, the translation of the texts, perhaps in French and English, (and, if you think it valuable, the transcriptions) and the indexes, etc., in one volume, and to publish a complete set of the original documents, in the form of microfilm or microcards, available for general distribution.”45 Goitein’s trip to Paris brought him in on the 13th and took him out on the 20th.46 A month later, after thanking Heller for hospitality during his visit, Goitein announced that under separate cover he was sending the French translation of the preface to the India Book, made by Klein. He apologizes for the matter of fact style, and says the book itself “will be more colourful in general,”47 The preface was sent the following day, accompanied by the question “When will Professor Braudel be back from USA?”48 Intriguingly, although Goitein seems to have been in no hurry to accommodate his schedule to Braudel’s, he did seem acutely attentive to his comments. Goitein’s next letter to Heller, on December 12, begins where the previous one had ended: “I wonder whether Prof. Braudel has already come back from his visit to the States.” He had spoken to Prof. Mazar, President of the Hebrew University, who was enthusiastic about the project. He and Goitein had agreed that 1) The publication of the Judaeo-Arabic Geniza documents will be a joint undertaking of the HU and the CRH. 2) the HU will provide the scholars and graduates doing the collection, deciphering, translation and preparation for printing, while the CRH will put at the disposal of the undertaking its wide experience in scientific planning, especially in the fields of economic and social history. Likewise, the Centre will bear the financial burden of the undertaking. In the margin, Heller scrawled “!!” The first volume in this series was to be Goitein’s essay, “From Spain to India,” and it was to appear in French. Goitein, in a marginal note, waived the idea of an English summary. He also looked to a formal collaboration between the Hebrew University and the CRH which included Two Men in a Boat 43 the opportunity for “HU scholars and graduates to work in Paris, while visits of relevant French scholars will be welcome in Jerusalem.”49 The next letter from Heller, sent by his secretary, Alice Vidal, on his behalf, was dated January 16, 1956. It apologized for the delay but explained that “Mr Braudel was absent for some time.” And since the remainder of the letter discusses the “joint edition of the Geniza papers,” the explanation seems to imply that on the Centre’s part it was Braudel who developed the publication strategy presented now in this letter. “You say,” it begins, that “the Centre will bear the financial burden of the undertaking. This needs more precisions to avoid later misunderstanding. Offhand, we are ready to pay for all costs of publication, including translation, and I presume that is what you mean.” Offhand or not, this is no small offer on Heller’s part. But he said that the volumes ought to appear in French, and that no English edition should appear until at least two years had passed after the French edition’s publication. This, again, seems very open minded on the part of Heller and Braudel. And, Braudel agreed that Goitein’s choice of translator, Mr. Catane, né Klein, could be entrusted with the India Book. Heller asks if Goitein wanted a formal letter “written by Mr. Febvre or Mr. Braudel to the President of the Hebrew University, proposing in a formal manner this joint undertaking?”50 On January 22, Goitein replied, correcting the trivia—how “Catane” should be spelled—and aiming at the truly important—“Is Professor Braudel satisfied with M. Catane’s French style?” His approval was necessary in order for the translator to be he hired. Summarily, Goitein reiterated his approval to points a, b, and c of Heller’s letter of January 16 and proposed that no official communication was necessary above and beyond his letter of December 12, 1955—the one in which Goitein approved doing the India book in French. Goitein was also now in a position to inform Heller that the India book would not be completed in the fall of 1955. No comment about the delay, and certainly no apology for the delay, is offered up by Goitein. Instead, turning to the offer made by Heller “that a young man who had worked on the Geniza, should come out to Paris, to study under Braudel and thus form a kind of link between the Centre and the Geniza project,” Goitein offered up his current assistant, Joseph Eliash.51 Having a Geniza person in Paris, Goitein added, would help a great deal with proofreading “and if Prof. Braudel too would be satisfied with him, we could confide to him, later on, on his own account, e.g. the volume on 44 The Sea the Mediterranean trade, as represented in the Geniza papers.” Here, we see Goitein thinking in terms of Braudel’s project as first articulated to him by Heller a year earlier.52 As for the question of Goitein’s man in Paris, Heller thought that he might be able to use Rockefeller Foundation money to cover the costs if his time was split between medieval and modern research matters. “But, I shall try in any case,” Heller concluded, “to use French funds for him so that he could concentrate on the Geniza.”53 Goitein, having proposed Eliash and interested Heller, now reported in his next letter that he wanted to put off the visit until 1957. Having proposed Catane and gotten Heller’s approval, Goitein now backed away, saying that before he submitted a formal proposal to translate the India Book “I would like to make sure that Prof. Braudel is really satisfied with his French style.” Amidst Goitein’s puzzling but now increasingly typical hesitation, one detects the ghostly presence of Braudel in their epistolary exchange.54 Heller immediately picked up on this. Catane’s French was fine, he wrote back. Just “go ahead and get him to do the work,” he concluded.55 The India Book seemed almost within grasp in late March 1956— but then slipped away. “I hope to be able to send a typewritten copy of the volume of the Texts (about 400 pages) in about three weeks time,” Goitein wrote. The book as a whole, he thought, could not be printed until the French part was ready. “I do not believe to be able to finish it in 1956.”56 Heller procured funds to begin the translation.57 Yet by May, the India book, which only a few months earlier was three weeks away from completion, was now slipping out to sea. “This India-book will be a magnificent collection of documents, like one of those big publications which were the pride of the nineteenth century. However, although I am working on it daily, it will take quite a time, before the whole will be ready for print.”58 In this clearest presentation of the content, Goitein was gesturing at grand collections of documents, such as the Monumenta Germaniae Historicae, rather than at a connected monograph. Does that mean that Goitein had always envisioned it taking this form, or that he no longer felt able to reduce the material to a single narrative line? We do not know. A substantial gap in the correspondence ensues. Where the record picks up again in January 1957, it is Heller complaining that he received no answer to a letter he wrote in early autumn.59 In reply, puzzled, Goitein writes that this letter of January 16 was the first he had received since Heller and Vidal’s of April 20.60 The remainder of 1957 is very poorly at- Two Men in a Boat 45 tested in the archive. Yet we do know that Heller offered Goitein 350,000 francs for the summer months of 1957.61 These were months of crisis. In the fall of 1957, the long silence of the archive was broken by a letter from the great French orientalist Claude Cahen to the medievalist Maurice Lombard. It sheds a wholly different light on the correspondence. Not planning to come to Paris for a fortnight, and fearing that Braudel was away, Cahen wrote to Lombard rather than to Heller whom he did not know. That summer, at the Orientalists Congress in Munich he had met Goitein and we spoke of his plans about the Geniza. He said he had intended to publish a book under the auspices of the Centre de Recherches Historiques and in accordance to the offer that Braudel made to him, on the documents of the Geniza in relation to commerce in the Indian Ocean. But later, because of language questions, and especially because the letters he had written to the Center remained without a response, or with late or insufficient responses, he changed his mind and because he will spend some time at the University of Philadelphia, he would figure out how to publish it there.62 Thus we see that Heller’s silence from the second half of 1956 through the end of 1957 seemed to have soured Goitein on the project. There is the question, of course, as to whether this only served as a more publically acceptable pretense than the language issue, which Cahen mentioned and which clearly did bother Goitein. Cahen did not know Goitein but had tremendous respect for him as a scholar and for his work. Though having himself no connection with the CRH, he thought it would be a black eye for France if a project of importance promised to the Centre wound up being published overseas. “I am not able to judge if Goitein has any particular susceptibilities; what I know is that he is a great scholar, that his book will be major, and, although I have no relationship with the Centre, that it will be an unfortunate affair that a book promised to a French collection ends up being published abroad.”63 And while unable to speak in the name of the Centre, Cahen nevertheless expressed what he believed was Braudel’s commitment to the project. However, he did not believe that he had succeeded in persuading Goitein. “In Munich I could not naturally speak in the name of the Centre; however I believed I could affirm to him that Braudel, whom I recently heard say that which yourself, when we talked in the spring, had 46 The Sea confirmed. And I tried to plead the case of the Centre, without much apparent success.”64 The latest turn in the story, Cahen related, was that he had heard from Goitein, who had come to treat him as something of an official French representative, that he had met Heller in New York and that they had smoothed things over, “recovering” the project for the CRH. Goitein promised an article for Annales and Heller promised to arrange the translation. Cahen made a point, again, of how uncomfortable Goitein was with a language over which he had no command, which apparently extended even to checking another’s translation (this is implied, not stated). “Now Goitein, who seems to treat me as an agent for France, writes to me that he met Clemens Heller in New York who seems to have been able to arrange things, to recover the project for the Centre, and also to obtain the promise from Goitein of an article for the Annales; the book could be translated in English instead of French, which would suit Goitein better since he doesn’t feel capable of writing good French and distrusts translations that he is not able to review closely enough.”65 In conclusion, Cahen reported that Goitein remained suspicious (“sur le qui-vive et méfiant”) and that some official communication from Braudel was now needed to assuage him. Heller’s lack of accessibility was scored for pouring fuel on the fire. Goitein remained wary, so much so that he even said that if he did not hear from the Centre within six weeks of his sending his article to the Annales, he would pull it. It is nevertheless obvious that he remains on-guard and suspicious; he probably wishes a detailed and official letter or a contract in due form to clarify and guarantee the conversation. However, he told me that since the interview with Heller, ‘with the exception of a very flimsy short letter, I have not heard from them since then.’ As for the Annales article, which he ought to have sent a week after the letter he sent me, this is what he writes: ‘In case I shall not hear from the Centre for, say, six weeks after having sent the article there, I shall offer it somewhere else.’66 Therefore, Cahen concluded, someone at the Centre—Braudel if he were there, but certainly Heller—should immediately write to Goitein “so that there be no new rupture, which this time would be irremediable.” While some in Paris might be inclined to think him “especially difficult,” he was convinced that publishing this material was worth bearing these sorts of “little inconveniences.”67 Two Men in a Boat 47 Lombard immediately passed along Cahen’s letter to Heller. He asked after the state of things and offered to write to Goitein himself in the absence of Braudel if Heller thought it useful.68 Lombard set off alarm bells on the rue Varenne. The very next day, Heller drafted a long letter to Goitein. He began, knowing his correspondent, with money matters. Travel monies were being put into the 1958 budget for Goitein. The Agence Friedland, which the CRH used in Paris, would send a bon d’échange to Globe Travel Service in Philadelphia. Moreover, dangling the opportunity to see new Geniza materials before Goitein’s eyes, Heller allowed that the cost of a trip from Paris to Russia could be paid for by the CRH. Heller then turned to the publication schedule. If I understood our conversation in New York correctly you proposed that in 1958 the first four volumes of the Geniza Papers should be ready for publication: -Vol. I: Goitein and Baneth, Introduction to the Geniza Papers; -Vol. II to IV: Indian Merchants. Several other volumes were discussed for later date, especially those by Mr Murat Michaely and Mr Golb. We also discussed the possibility of two articles for the Annales, a shorter one which you would send before the end of the year and another one which you would send later next year. I presume it would be best if you would be kind enough to draw up a detailed program as you envisaged it so that there would be a formal document serving as a base for all future action. Turning back to money, Heller demonstrated the depth of the Centre’s commitment to Goitein. As far as financial agreements are concerned I understand that the Centre de Recherches Historiques will cover the cost of your trip to Europe next year (plane tourist class or the equivalent on a boat) and will cover your frais de séjour up to 100,000 francs a month during the months June, July and August. Please let me know whether any additional financial requirements exist and I shall let you know whether or not they can be assumed by the Centre. Naturally we are completely responsible for the cost of the publication of the books.69 48 The Sea And the day after that, it was Braudel himself who wrote to Goitein. This was the formal action that Cahen had thought necessary. Mr. Heller told me about the conversation you had with him during his stay in New York. In principle, I agree with everything you discussed and in particular that which Mr. Heller suggested to you in his letter of November 7th, 1957. In other words, I agree with the printing of the ‘Documents de la Genisa’ and agree to your trip to Europe in 1958. I must unfortunately leave Paris once again for a month and hope that Mr. Heller can resolve all the details with you. However, if I must sign official documents upon my return, I will do what is necessary as soon as possible.70 Amidst the official-sounding language, Braudel added a concluding paragraph making clear how important Goitein was for him, as well as for the VIe section. “I am taking this opportunity to reiterate that the École Pratique des Hautes Études is proud to be of use to you in the publication of your work and I look forward to the articles that you kindly put forward to the Annales.”71 Goitein wrote back immediately, still a bit on edge, accompanying the submission of an article on “The Socio-Economic Background of the Muslim Friday Worship.” In case it was “too Islamistic,” he wrote, “you need not worry; I shall have no difficulty publishing the article in an orientalistic journal. Please inform me of the decision of the editor of the Annales and, in case it is negative, I shall advise to which journal in Paris to send it.”72 Still feeling Cahen’s prod, Heller wrote back three days later—which is to say, immediately after the letter arrived—thanking Goitein for submitting the article and informing him that a formal letter from Braudel as editor accepting the article would come soon.73 Undated, in the dossier, is a note from Braudel to Heller saying that he was going to write to Goitein telling him that he had accepted the article.74 It is at this point that one realizes that there had been no direct communication between Braudel and Goitein between February 1955 and November 1957. All Goitein’s queries about Braudel’s involvement might in fact be read as a desire for direct contact. And yet there was none. Braudel’s letter seems, at least on the surface, to have assuaged Goitein’s doubts. In any event it elicited from him a response, dated November 21, 1957, reflecting on the history of their relationship. Two Men in a Boat 49 Please accept my sincere thanks for your kind letter of November 8. I feel it is a great honor for me that my proposed publication of the Geniza papers has been included in the magnificent program of your Centre. I appreciated in particular that it was the initiative of your section which created the connection between your school and my work on the Geniza, and I hope that the publication will live up to the high standard set by the École Pratique des Hautes Études.75 On the same day, November 21, Goitein addressed a longer letter to Heller, responding to the plans laid out in Heller’s letter of November 7, which itself resumed, or purported to resume, the conclusions reached during their conversations in New York. The main point Goitein wished to clarify was delivery date. Heller had said all four volumes would be ready in 1958. This was incorrect. “Concerning the publications discussed by us in New York, I would like to make the following qualifications to your letter: The material for volume I, ‘An Introduction to the Study of the Documentary Geniza,’ is ready.” It would be organized into a book during his visit to Europe in summer of 1958. But as for the India book, Goitein wrote, “I told you that the last volume, which contains the texts (Arabic and Hebrew letters), is more or less ready for print. Concerning volume I (the general introduction) and volume II (summaries, translations, commentaries), I can only say that they will certainly not be ready next summer, for, as you remember, I wrote the whole thing first in Hebrew and in extenso.”There is some confusion here, because volume I refers to what elsewhere is called volume II, and volume II to what elsewhere is called volume III.“However, we have decided, at our meeting in New York, as you remember, to bring out this book in English for the benefit of many scholars in India and elsewhere who are not fluent in French . . . In addition, only a selection of texts will be translated in full, while many others will be given in summaries. All this implies a complete re-shuffle of all I have done . . . I do not [sic] hope to complete a considerable part of it until next May.” Finally, Goitein promised to send to Annales an article dealing with some aspect of the India project. “In connection with my work on the India book, I shall send a comprehensive article on one of its aspects to the Annales.” This never happened.76 From then on, things fell apart. The correspondence focuses on the details of printing, and by the middle of 1958, Goitein had already become an author for the University of 50 The Sea California Press. Heller carried on his correspondence, trying to keep some contact for the CRH, but it was clear by then that Goitein’s heart was not any longer in this relationship.77 So, what are the stakes in this story? At one immediate level, it gives some concreteness to the mystery of the India Book, one of the great historical mirages of the twentieth century. It is said by Goitein to have been ready in 1955, 1956, 1958, 1959, and 1963, and yet it was never ready, not even in 1985 when Goitein died. Why Goitein was unable to pronounce it as finished probably offers us a very fine insight into his function as a scholar, and his vision of the Geniza. Goitein viewed perfect scholarship as complete compilation. We might long have abandoned this, but working with a defined corpus, even one of astounding difficulty, gave Goitein the illusion that this was possible. And thus, the ever-receding perfection, and ever-receding publication target, was an inevitable function of this illusion. Without the India Book, scholars in cognate fields have of course suffered. Even an incomplete India Book would have been better for scholarship than none. But Goitein, the philologist, obviously did not think this way. He wanted it perfect, and trusted only himself to deliver that perfection to posterity. The bitter irony of the outcome is inevitable: the work was not finished under his supervision, appeared half a century later, under the care of another, in a form different from how Goitein might have done it, and with editorial and technical decisions that were another’s. And yet, the first, introductory volume has been followed by three others, yielding the four volumes that Goitein had imagined, though configured somewhat differently.78 And still to be published but already in some state are three additional works—a biography of Halfon ha-Levi, an edition of the documents related to Halfon ha-Levi, and a Judeo-Arabic lexicon compiled from the Geniza documents.79 Without the India Book we have looked with only one of Goitein’s eyes. The full impact of Goitein therefore, will only now be dawning. The very recent work of Avner Greif, Roxani Margariti, Marina Rustow, Jessica Goldberg, Philip Lieberman, and others demonstrates that the usefulness of what Goitein assembled is finally now being harvested by those interested in the dynamics of social and economic life in the Middle Ages.80 And wider still, scholars with interests as diverse as Chris Wickham and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have incorporated Goitein’s work into their own and others, such as David Hancock, Francesca Trivellato, and Sebouh David Aslanian are carrying Goitein’s approach, knowingly or un- Two Men in a Boat 51 knowingly, to domains far from his own.81 In a way, then, only now is the promise held out by the CRH, of putting Goitein into the Affaires et gens d’affaires, finally being realized: a vision of economic history as cultural history, with individual experiences at the center, but so densely documented as to endow the whole with more than anecdotal significance. More profoundly, however, the absence of the India book has obscured the greatness of Goitein’s vision. Long before there was transnational or global history, long before transmission, translation, networks, communication, correspondence, or exchange were the Schlagwörte of the day, Goitein saw a historical project driven by and exemplifying all of these. Had he sent the India Book off into the world at half the size of its 1964 state, and then finished the five volumes of Mediterranean Society, Goitein’s would justly have already been hailed as one of the greatest feats of historical scholarship of the twentieth century, and even of modern historical research tout court. It is very difficult to assess the impact on Goitein of his decade-long association with the CRH. On the surface, there was obviously very little: no references to the kind of projects sponsored by the CRH filtered into Goitein’s published oeuvre, and no real sense of conversation with work being done at, or sponsored by, the Centre. Nor was there any acknowledgement for the years of subsidy and encouragement provided from the highest levels. And yet, perhaps the “miss” was not complete. For we have the epilogue Goitein prepared for the concluding volume of A Mediterranean Society. In it, he offered as an autobiographical account the description of his method as “interpretative historical sociography.” This category he supports through a reading of Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Geertz, whom he would have met during his retirement to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, might have resonated so powerfully with Goitein because of his own experience as an ethnographer. For we know that Goitein worked for many years on and with Yemenite Jews. This led him to read anthropological theory and, on his visits to England, to consult with Evans-Pritchard and Fortes about the Yemenites. From his fieldwork, and for the benefit of future fieldworkers, Goitein put together a “questionnaire for the study of the Jews of Yemen, especially those from villages and small towns.” This is published.82 Sociography, then, might gesture at the encounter between Goitein the philologist and Goitein the ethnographer.83 And yet, readers of A Mediterranean Society’s epilogue recognize in its tone not merely the valedictory, but also the desire to situate his work in 52 The Sea a social scientific context. And if it was not that of his Parisian patrons, that still does not mean he was not in some more mediated way shaped by the encounter with them. We know that he referred to his “Geniza Lab,” just as the CRH was often, especially in its early years, referred to as a Laboratoire de recherches historiques.84 And this brings us to Braudel, who always is included in lists of the greatest historians. The Heller-Goitein correspondence sheds further light on the administrator whose vision drove the CRH, some of which can be deduced from prefatory materials to the volumes in Affaires et Gens d’Affaires and Port-Routes-Trafics. Braudel the head of the VIe section and the CRH was much more open to human-centered history than Braudel the historian of The Mediterranean. The Braudel who valued Goitein was the Braudel who wrote “For to challenge the enormous role that has sometimes been assigned to certain outstanding men in the genesis of history is by no means to deny the stature of the individual as individual and the fascination that there is for one man in poring over the fate of another.”85 And yet, as great an administrator as Braudel was, one wonders whether in every case he maintained at arm’s length a relationship with those he was trying to woo. While delegation to Heller might have made sense from an administrative point of view, when dealing with someone like Goitein it clearly would have helped had the great man himself taken more of a role in this pursuit. Some share of the blame for the collapse of this collaboration must then be laid at his door. For whatever reason, it is the failed meeting of Braudel and Goitein that pains. For had they met, had Goitein published with the CRH, had he, as might be expected, have gone and lectured as Braudel’s guest at the École and, conversely, had Heller or even Braudel come to Jerusalem, one could envision a very different shape to both the Jerusalem School and to the Annales School. The impersonal social science history of the 1950s and 1960s would have had a hard time digesting Goitein’s human-scaled project. But the force of his vision could have helped hasten the age of microhistory, mentalités, merchants, and the Mediterranean and commerce might have featured then, as they do now. But one could go even further. Goitein’s project was about letters, and had Affaires et gens d’affaires become a dominant historical vision, as well it might have, the possibility of joining economic to cultural history, a vision that went back to Karl Lamprecht at the end of the nineteenth century, might well have come to pass. A cultural history cognizant of material reality could have emerged in the 1950s—it is only happening now. And who knows how this in turn might Two Men in a Boat 53 have helped sharpen up our vision of other republics of letters, both in and around the Mediterranean. In the possible collaboration between Braudel and Goitein, as in its failure, we can discern historical seascapes of past and future.86 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented to the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, the Maison Méditeranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in Aix, the Mediterranean Seminar at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and at the Scholion Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I wish to thank especially Youval Rotman, Brigit Marin, Wolfgang Kaiser, Claudia Moatti, Bernard Vincent, and Daniel Schwartz for these invitations. I am extremely grateful to Brigitte Mazon at the Archive of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales for facilitating my work in the Fonds Heller and for permission to quote from its contents. I am indebted to the brilliant essay by Gerson D. Cohen, “The Story of the Four Captives,” in Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures (Philadelphia and New York: The Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 157–208. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 31–39. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society 6 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965–1985), vol. I, vii. There are sixty-nine letters from Goitein to Heller; forty-two letters from Heller to Goitein; six letters from Goitein to others (two to Braudel, one to the University of California Press, one to Mouton & Co.); three letters from Heller to others (one to the University of California Press, one to Paul Lemerle of CNRS, one to a travel agent); two from Braudel (one to Goitein, one to Heller); one from Cahen to Lombard; one from Lombard to Heller; 1 from Lemerle to Heller. In addition to these letters, the Goitein dossier in the Fonds Heller in the EHESS in Paris contains the annual research reports Goitein drafted for Heller in exchange for funding for the years 1958, 1959, 1960, 1964, as well as a preface to the India book and a list of its documents drawn up for Heller in 1955. S. D. Goitein and Mordechai Friedman, India traders of the Middle Ages: documents from the Cairo Geniza, the ‘India Book,’ Études sur le Judaïsme Médiéval 31 (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2008). Publication of the India Book does seem to have turned attention to Goitein’s contribution, as in a recent forum in the Jewish Quarterly Review that devotes two articles to Goitein and twentieth-century historiography, though without reference to the contents of either the Heller or Goitein archives: Elliott Horowitz, “Scholars of the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean of Scholars,” and Fred Astren, “Goitein, Medieval Jews, and the ‘New Mediterranean Studies’,” Jewish Quarterly Review 102 (2012): 477–90 and 513–31. S. D. Goitein, “Preface,” in A Mediterranean Society, vol. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), vii. Goitein, “Preface,” in A Mediterranean Society, viii. 54 The Sea 8. Giuliana Gemelli, Fernand Braudel, e l’Europa universale (Venezia: Marsilio, 1990). No biography of Heller exists yet. Basic facts can be found in Paul Lewis, “Clemens Heller, 85, Founder of Postwar Salzburg Seminar,” New York Times, September 6, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/06/world/clemensheller-85-founder-of-postwar-salzburg-seminar.html?scp=1&sq=clemens%20 heller&st=cse. He is currently the subject of the Habilitationsprojekt of Anne Kwaschik, Von Harvard nach Paris, Clemens Heller, und die Internationsalisierung der europäischen Sozialwissenschaften nach 1945, http://www .geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/frankreichzentrum/forschung/kwas chik.html. 9. This association between the CRH and Warburg Institute is not adventitious. See A. Tenenti, “Quindici anni di attività del Centre de recherches historiques di Parigi,” Studi storici, (1967): 203–11, esp. pages 204, 211. “Il Centre ha assolto a più riprese la funzione di laboratorio e di campo d’esperienza: . . . ora il Centre, come in certo qual modo anche il Warburg Institute ad esempio, ha voluto imboccare una strada ben diversa : e ci sembra che sia riuscito sufficientemente a dimostrare—non solo con la rapidità esteriore del suo sviluppo—quale diversa capacità di accelerazione acquistava la ricerca una volta impostata su di un piano collettivo o di équipe.” 10. Lutz Raphael, Die Erben von Bloch und Febvre. ‘Annales’-Geschichtsschreibung und ‘nouvelle histoire’ in Frankreich 1945–1980 (Stuttgart, Germany: KlettCotta, 1994), 169–99; idem, “Le Centre de recherches historiques de 1949 à 1975,” Les Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques 10 (1993), http://ccrh .revues.org/index2783.html. Gemelli emphasizes 1951 because that was when Frederic Lane arrived with the Rockefeller Foundation’s money, and the Centre’s activities could accelerate (Fernand Braudel e l’Europa universale, 256). 11. Gemelli, Fernand Braudel, 256–57, citing an observation by David S. Landes. 12. “l’auteur de ce très beau livre . . . cet auteur est un homme. . . . Soucieux d’hier, préoccupé de demain—parce que demain et hier trouvent dans le coeur de l’homme un lien commun.” Armado Sapori, Le Marchand Italien au Moyen Age. Conférences et bibliographie. Afffaires et Gens d’Affaires I, Introduction de Lucien Febvre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1952), vii. 13. “C’en est un autre, et des plus rares, qui remplira d’aise beaucoup de nos collègues en histoire, que de ne pas considérer la vie économique comme une réalité en soi, un monde fermé de chiffres, mais bien comme un secteur de la vie entre quelques autres, et qu’il faut remplacer dans un ensemble de circonstances et de liaisons diverses pour lui rendre sa pleine valeur. Pour Etienne Trocmé, ses marchands sont des hommes, sa ville non seulement des rues, un havre, des remparts, une ‘banlieu’, des nourritures proches, des commerces lointains—mais aussi des institutions au sens le plus riche du mot. La Rochelle peu à peu se révèle à nous dans la plénitude de sa vie, dans sa dignité et sa force d’état urbain.” Fernand Braudel, “Avant-propos,” Étienne Trocmé et Marcel Delafosse. Le Commerce Rochelais de la fin du XVe siècle au début du XVIIIe. Ports-Routes-Trafics V (Paris: Armand Colin, 1952), i. 14. “Leur intérêt, si je ne me trompe, est de nous introduire au coeur des pratiques et réalités de la vie quotidienne des marchands: ces réalités, par elles- Two Men in a Boat 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 55 mêmes ou du fait de leur répétition, dépassement souvent le détail simplement anecdotique.” Then, taking a single letter as an example, he notes that it sheds light on “la ville et la place de Marseille, le role des Génois acheteurs de soie, l’importance des changes de Lyon, l’attraction de Seville et de Cadix, les transpsorts de cochenille ‘américane’ vers le levant, le cours de réaux d’argent à Marseille, les voyages de navires vers Alexandrie et Tripoli.” Fernand Braudel, “Avant propos,” Lettres de négociants marseillais: Les Frères Hermite (1570–1612). Affaires et gens d’affaires 3, ed. Micheline Baulant, (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953), v. “La VIe Section de l’École des Hautes-Études s’est d’autant plus intéressée à ces lettres qu’elle avait en chantier deux publications analogues [Lettres d’un marchand vénitien Andrea Berengo (1553–1556) (Affaires et gens d’affaires 10, 1957); Simon Ruiz et les ‘asientos’ de Philippe II (Affaires et gens d’affaires 6, 1953)] . . . Mais ces lettres de marchands marseillais ont leur valeur et gagneront en importance à être ainsi rapprochées de documents analogues et replongées dans une histoire économique du XVIe siècle vue au jour le jour, expliquée par ses acteurs, histoire qui, en général, n’a que de lointains rapports avec les images qu’en offrent, quand ils les offrent, les grands livres de synthèse.” Lettres de négociants marseillais, v. “Car leur correspondance ne dit pas tout de leurs activitiés ou de leurs calculs. Le plus difficile, et nous allons nous y essayer dans un instant, c’est encore de bien comprendre leur langage, de suivre leurs procédés, leur tactique, leur art de diagnostiquer et d’agir.” José Gentil da Silva, Stratégie des Affaires à Lisbonne entre 1595 et 1607. Lettres marchandes des Rodrigues d’Evora et Veiga, Affaires et gens d’affaires IX (Paris: Armand Colin, 1956), 9. The best known demonstration of this practice was, however, not produced in Paris (nor, even, by an academic). Iris Origo’s The Merchant of Prato (1957) made use of Francesco Maria Datini’s personal correspondence; Federigo Melis, who had begun publishing on Datini in 1954 and in May 1955 opened an international exhibition on him, strictly separated the business history from the personal. Melis, for all his later inclination to Braudel and Paris (he made Braudel President of the newly founded Istituto Datini in 1967) seems to have resented Origo’s non-quantitative approach (Giampiero Nigro, “Introduction,” in Francesco di Marco Datini. The Man, the Merchant, ed. Nigro (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2010), xiii–xiv). The generally favorable review of Origo’s book in Annales—by none other than Gentil da Silva—acknowledged that it was au courant with the latest work being done in and around the CRH, but was critical of its narrowly biographical focus (José Gentil da Silva, “Un capitaliste toscan du XIVe siècle,” Annales. ESC 13 (1958): 398–402. Speculum 29 (1954): 181–97. Heller to Goitein, 10 October 1954, Archives de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Fonds Heller, Dossier “Israël”, unpaginated [all subsequent references are to this archive and will include only the date of correspondence]. Goitein to Heller, 27 October 1954. Goitein to Heller, 1 December 1954. This seems like a direct answer to part of Heller’s first letter, but Goitein’s next letter, written from Jerusalem, makes no mention of having answered earlier—unless there is a letter 56 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. The Sea that is missing which might make sense, since the letter of December 1, below, does not directly respond to Heller’s first, but as if to a different, more advanced, round of questions. I have been unable thus far to identify this work. Goitein to Heller, 1 December 1954. Goitein to Heller, 18 December 1954. From its beginnings the CRH subsidized research done by scholars elsewhere. These included the research of P. Jeannin on the traffic of Rouen (1955–1956) and M. Mollat in the archives of Lille (also 1955–1956). “Le démarrage improvisé : 1949–1956,” Les Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques, 10 (1993), http://ccrh.revues. org/index2788.html. Goitein to Heller, 18 December 1954. Goitein to Heller, 6 February 1955. Goitein to Heller et al., 6 February 1955. Goitein to Braudel, 20 February 1955. Goitein to Heller, 20 February 1955. “As you know, your book will be printed by the Imprimerie Nationale and they have a very good department for oriental characters (better than Brill). Technically, there should be no difficulty and economically, I think we could support the cost of including the printing of the originals. Besides, the Centre de Recherches Historiques has undergone some important transformations since I wrote you first and [the] character of its publications will expand considerably towards Oriental problems. This week, four sinologists have been appointed to the Faculty, at the VIème Section, one indologist and one specialist on Northern Africa. This is only the beginning of further developments in a programme of social and economic studies regarding Asia, the Islamic world and Russia. A young French rabbin, Mr. Schwarzfuchs, has already joined our effort and I am enclosing an outline of the programme he set himself.” Heller to Goitein, 30 March 1955. Heller to Goitein, 30 March 1955. Goitein to Heller, 14 April 1955. Goitein allowed himself a bit of humor here: “On that occasion, we could discuss the Geniza business. I shall be glad to put you up. Like most Israelis, during weekdays we are mostly ichtyophagists, but you will not starve.” On the Jerusalem School, see David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Heller also politely declined Goitein’s invitation to Jerusalem, saying that there was no money available for this. Heller to Goitein, April 20, 1955. Goitein to Heller, 25 April 1955. Heller to Goitein, 25 May 1955. Goitein to Heller, 28 May 1955, referring to Heller to Goitein of May 3. Goitein to Heller, 31 May 1955. Heller to Goitein, 10 June 1955. Goitein to Heller, 15 June 1955. Heller to Goitein, 29 June 1955. Heller to Goitein, 14 September 1955. Goitein to Heller, 16 September 1955. Heller to Goitein, 21 September 1955. Two Men in a Boat 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 57 Goitein to Heller, 23 September 1955. Heller to Goitein, 23 September 1955. Goitein to Heller, 11 October 1955. Goitein to Heller, 20 November 1955. Goitein to Heller, 21 November 1955. Goitein to Heller, 12 December 1955. Vidal (for Heller) to Goitein, 16 January 1956. “His curriculum vitae is interesting and makes him an ideal candidate for the position offered. His name: Joseph Eliash. He is 24, of German Jewish origin, but educated in Baghdad, where he first visited a French school (St Joseph of the Peres Carmes), then a Jewish higher Secondary school with Arabic and English as languages of instruction, he made the London matric Honours, then came here and studied at the Hebrew University “Middle East in modern Times” and Economics (B.A., 1954) and is going to get his M.A. in Arabic language and Literature and Islamic studies this summer. He is married to a girl from Rumania, who knows French well.” “Mr. Eliash has worked on the Geniza since January 1955 and I am able now to state that I am very satisfied with his work. Besides Arabic and Hebrew, he speaks French, English and German. He has a very amiable personality and it is pleasant to work with him.” Goitein to Heller, 22 January 1956. Goitein to Heller, 22 January 1956. Heller to Goitein, 30 January 1956. Goitein to Heller, 15 February 1956. Heller to Goitein, 20 February 1956. Goitein to Heller, 25 March 1956. Heller to Goitein, 10 April 1956. Goitein to Heller, 18 May 1956 Heller to Goitein, 16 January 1957. Goitein to Heller, 24 January 1957. Goitein to Heller, 9 October 1957. This is Goitein’s first letter on University of Pennsylvania stationery. “et nous nous sommes entretenus de ses projets sur la Geniza. Il m’a dit qu’il avait eu l’intention de publier sous les auspices du Centre de Recherches Historiques un ouvrage sur les documents de la Geniza relatifs au commerce dans l’Océan Indien, conformément à l’offre que Braudel lui en avait faite. Mais ultérieurement, un peu pour des questions de langue, mais surtout parce que les lettres qu’il avait écrites au Centre étaient restées sans réponses, ou avec des réponses tardives et insuffisantes, il y avait renoncé, et, puisqu’il va passer quelque temps à l’Université de Philadelphia, il allait voir comment le publier là-bas.” Cahen to Lombard, 4 November 1957. “Je ne suis pas en état de juger si Goitein a des susceptibilités particulières; ce que je sais est que c’est un grand savant, que son ouvrage sera capital, et, bien que je n’aie aucun rapport avec le Centre, qu’il serait de facheux exemple qu’un ouvrage promis à une collection française finisse par paraitre à l’étranger.” Cahen to Lombard, 4 November 1957. “Je ne pouvais naturellement pas à Munich parler au nom du Centre; toutefois j’ai cru pouvoir lui affirmer que Braudel, auquel je l’avais récemment 58 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. The Sea entendu dire, ce que toi-même, lors de notre entretien printanier, m’avais confirmé. Et j’ai essayé de plaider la cause du Centre, sans succès apparent.” Cahen to Lombard, 4 November 1957. “Maintenant Goitein, qui parait me traiter en fondé de pouvoir pour la France, m’écrit qu’il a rencontré a New-York Clemens Heller, et celui-ci parait avoir réussi à arranger les choses, à recouvrer le projet pour le Centre, et aussi à obtenir de Goitein la promesse d’un article pour les Annales; le livre pourrait etre traduit en anglais au lieu de français ce qui arrangerait mieux Goitein, qui ne s’estime pas capable de rédiger en bon français et se méfie des traductions qu’il ne peut revoir d’assez près.” Cahen to Lombard, 4 November 1957. “Néanmoins il est évident qu’il reste sur le qui-vive et méfiant; il souhaite certainement qu’une lettre officielle et circonstanciée ou un contrat en bonne et dûe forme vienne préciser et garantir la conversation. Or, me ditil, depuis l’entrevue avec Heller, ‘with the exception of a very flimsy short letter, I have not heard from them since then.’ Et, pour ce qui est de l’article pour les Annales, qu’il devait envoyer une semaine après l’envoi de la lettre qu’il m’écrit, voici ce qu’il m’écrit: ‘In case I shall not hear from the Centre for, say, six weeks after having sent the article there, I shall offer it somewhere else.’” Cahen to Lombard, 4 November 1957. “J’ai cru bon de te mettre au courant pour que tu puisses tout de suite, avec Braudel s’il est là, et avec Heller en tous cas, aviser à ce qu’il n’y ait pas une nouvelle rupture, qui serait cette fois irrémédiable. Peut-etre seront-ils enclins à le trouver bien difficile; mais il me semble que la chose vaut la peine de passer sur de petits inconvénients comme ceux-là.” Cahen to Lombard, 4 November 1957. “Où en est exactement la question de la publication des documents de Geniza que Goitein doit faire dans la collection du Centre et celle de la parution de son article pour les Annales ? Et serait-il bon—en l’absence de Fernand Braudel—que j’entre en contact avec Goitein pour arranger les choses et calmer ses appréhensions? Ou bien vous chargez-vous de lui écrire vous-meme, vous qui le connaissez bien?” Lombard to Heller, 6 November 1957. Heller to Goitein, 7 November 1957. “Baneth,” sometimes spelled here “Paneth” is David H. Baneth, a specialist of Maimonides, Judah Halevi, etc. See Studia Orientalia: Memoriae D.H. Baneth Dedicata, ed. J. Blau et al. (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1979), which includes an essay by Goitein. I thank Sanjay Subrahmanyam for bringing this to my attention. “Monsieur Heller m’a mis au courant de l’entretien que vous aves eu avec lui pendant son séjour à New York. Je suis en principe d’accord pour tout ce dont vous avez discuté et en particulier pour ce que Monseiur Heller vous a proposé dans sa lettre du 7 novembre 1957. Autrement dit, je suis d’accord pour l’impression des ‘Documents de la Genisa’ et pour votre voyage en Europe en 1958. Je dois malheureusement m’absenter encore une fois de Paris pour un mois et j’espère que Monseiur Heller pourra régler tous les détails avec vous. Toutefois si je dois signer des documents officiels après mon retour, je ferai le nécessaire aussi vite que possible.” Braudel to Goitein, 8 November 1957. “Je profite de cette occasion pour vous redire combien l’École Pratique des Two Men in a Boat 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 59 Hautes Études est fière de pouvoir vous être utile dans la publication de vos travaux et j’attends avec impatience les articles que vous avez bien voulu proposer pour les Annales.” Braudel to Goitein, 8 November 1957. Goitein to Heller, 12 November 1957. Heller to Goitein, 15 November 1957. Braudel to Heller, undated, (after November 1957). Goitein to Braudel, 21 November 1957. Goitein to Heller, 21 November 1957. I plan to discuss Goitein and this latter part of the story in a separate publication. The Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem published in 2009–2010 Mordechai Friedman’s three volumes of Goitein’s work on Joseph Lebedi, Madmun Nagid of Yemen, and Abraham ben Yiju. All these, as well, will be edited by Friedman. Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006); Jessica Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and Their Business World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Roxani Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Phillip Lieberman-Ackerman, “A Partnership Culture: Jewish Economic and Social Life Viewed through the Legal Documents of the Cairo Geniza” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2007). Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Notes on Circulation and Asymmetry in Two Mediterraneans, c.1400–1800,” in From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes, eds. Glaude Guillot, Denys Lombard, and Roderich Ptak (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998), 32; David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Organization of the Atlantic Market, 1640–1815 (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2009); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2010); Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2005), 718n48. Goitein, The Yemenites: History, Communal Organization, Spiritual Life (Jerusalem, 1983), 345–55. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. V, 496–502. Raphael, Die Erben von Bloch und Febvre, 162n22. I owe the reference to Goitein’s habitual use of the term Geniza Lab to Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole. See their discussion of Goitein in Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (New York: Schocken Books, 2011), ch.10. Fernand Braudel, “The Situation of History in 1950,” in On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 20. The second part of this study is published in the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes 55 (2013). two Atlantic and Caribbean Perspectives: Analyzing a Hybrid and Entangled World Wim Klooster How has a thalassographic prism enabled new approaches in the historiography of the Atlantic world? In order to answer this question, I delve into the writing of Atlantic history since its coming of age in the last two decades. I distinguish five different ways to write Atlantic history: one school stresses agency, another adaptation, a third privileges comparisons, a fourth entanglement, and a fifth studies networks. But, for the sake of clarity, let me start with the question: What is Atlantic history? The most convenient definition is that of Sir John Elliott: Atlantic historians study “the creation, destruction, and re-creation of communities as a result of the movement, across and around the Atlantic basin, of people, commodities, cultural practices, and values.”1 This definition is perhaps erring a little on the cultural side, but it will do for now. What should be clear from the outset is that Atlantic historians do not gravitate to the microecological approach that Purcell and Horden favor for the Mediterranean.2 The Atlantic Ocean was obviously far too variegated for that. In his book, La Mediterrannée, Fernand Braudel noted the contrast between the “exhausting process of colonizing the New World carried out by the Iberians,” and “the facility with which the Mediterranean dweller traveled from port to port.” Mediterranean migration, he added, was not true transplantation, but merely removal, and the new occupant would feel quite at home in his new habitat.”3 In the French Atlantic alone, one historian writes, “the range in climate and topography must have been daunting to any eighteenth-century administrator, ranging from ice floes to equatorial rain forests, from rocky islets to humid swamps and tundra, 60