2019 Unanswered Questions about Book of Roads and Provinces

Unanswered Questions about Book of Roads and Provinces

Steven Bernard Zwickel, 2018

ProfSBZ@gmail.com

I am not a historian. I teach technical communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

One of the basic tenets of good technical writing that I drill into my students is the importance of knowing your purpose. “Don’t write,” I tell them, “until you know why you are writing. Readers should have no trouble determining the purpose of a document after reading just the first few sentences”.

I was reading some articles related to my own family history when I first learned about the Radhanites. I was excited and I immediately arranged to borrow a copy of Rabbi Rabinowitz’ 1948 treatise, Jewish Merchant Adventurers, from the library. The Rabbi’s book discusses an 1100-year old Arabic text, called The Book of Roads and Provinces, that includes fifteen sentences describing Jewish merchants and the routes they followed. Rabinowitz argues that these about this small section on “Radhanites” should be taken seriously by modern-day historians.

I was enthralled by the way Rabinowitz developed his thesis and I spent a lot of time and energy looking up some of the references to people and places that are now unknown or spelled quite differently than they were in the 1940s. The Book of Roads is mostly a series of lists of the towns and sites a traveler would encounter in the ’Abbasid Caliphate in the 800s with a few stories about local customs and myths. As one of the earliest scholars to translate the work said, it is “dry and monotonous.”

During my second reading of Jewish Merchant Adventurers I was brought up short by the realization that I could not tell why The Book of Roads and Provinces was written. Rabinowitz parsed and dissected the text with minute precision, but never explained why the author had written the book. I tried some other sources—some 60 or so historians have written about the Book of Roads—and could not find a single one that defined the purpose of the book. Moreover, none of the historians who had written about the Book of Roads had an explanation for the presence of the section on the Radhanites (the only known use of the term in the early Middle Ages). Hard to believe, but it appears no one, in 1100 years, has questioned the author’s purpose in writing the Book of Roads.

In this paper, Unanswered Questions about Book of Roads and Provinces, I set out to answer to two questions: Why was the Book of Roads written and why was the section on Radhanites included?
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Unanswered Questions about Book of Roads and Provinces