From Tuscany to Alexandria: Arabic and Hebrew mercantile letters in the Prize Paper Collections.

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The Prize Paper Collections in The National Archives in London contain a considerable quantity of business letters in Arabic and Hebrew script, which were seized in 1759 by British privateers as part of the loot on a Tuscan ship bound for Alexandria. Virtually untouched since that time - most of the letters were still unopened when we first viewed them - they remain in the pristine condition in which they were archived in the 18th century. They thus present a most exciting and probably unique opportunity to investigate the interaction between Jewish, Muslim and Christian merchants across borders in the 18th-century Mediterranean. The letters, numbering in the dozens, are particularly valuable as very little comparative material in Arabic script from that period is known and virtually nothing has been edited and published on the topic. Prize Paper materials published so far have mainly focused on those letters written in Dutch, but efforts are currently underway to establish a consortium of scholars from different disciplines working on the Collection. An edition and historical and linguistic analysis of the Arabic and Hebrew Prize Papers, composed by Christian, Jewish and Muslim traders dealing in a variety of commodities, will substantially contribute to this wider project and thus to research in a variety of fields. The immediate focus of our proposed work will be on linguistic issues, but through the envisaged editions this will also enhance understanding of the transnational economic and cultural history of the 18th century, in particular with regard to the research on inter-religious mercantile relations between Europe and the Middle East. The aim of this research project is to transcribe and translate all Arabic and Hebrew documents of the Prize Papers Collections. All sources will be subjected to linguistic analyses concerning their orthography/phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. One of the most important objectives of the present proposal is to investigate the differences and commonalities in the language used by merchants of different faith communities, both among themselves and in inter-communal correspondence. First results have indicated that inter-communal correspondence, for example between Jews and Muslims, Christians and Muslims, and Jews and Christians, is written in a higher linguistic register than for example those letters sent exclusively within a Christian or Jewish business network. Another important subject of the investigation will be the codeswitching between languages and dialectal forms versus standard Arabic. What prompts merchants to switch into the familiar colloquial register? When do they use formal, classical Arabic forms? Further foci of the proposed project will be the dichotomy between orality and written language, palaeographical and codicological concerns (did the merchants use scribes or did they write the letters with their own hand), and Arabic dialectology.