This study explores a cluster of six letters preserved in the Cairo Geniza written by a Jewish father from Alexandria in the first half of the thirteenth century. The writer’s son ran away from home, abandoned the family shop and overall behaved in a way unbecoming for a young middle-class Jewish man. This study uses this little-studied cluster of documents to examine the ties that bound a young Jewish man to his family and community, including exchange of letters, economic considerations, familial bonds and religious expectations. The father’s letters offer a case study for approaching social ties and cultural expectations as dynamic and ongoing work performed by specific agents. The letters are useful for recovering an urban middle-class conception of masculinity prevalent in the medieval Islamic world that emphasized belonging to social networks and required men to uphold their responsibilities to those dependent upon them.

Chapter 6 provides three case studies of how Huizhou merchant organizations used their lineage and commercial resources to explain how Huizhou merchant lineages might succeed and fall in the world of Ming business. It explores the development of different types and sizes of commercial organization in response to the organizational needs and business opportunities these “house firms,” while also examining the impact of kinship organizations and relationships on their operation as “house firms.” With a greater emphasis on lineage branches and even segments rather than just lineages per se, it shows how a small lineage could launch itself successfully into the commercial world with the aid of kinship organizations larger than the simple nuclear household. Descent-line ties mattered greatly but manipulation of these ties for commercial goals was not at all unusual, even leading to attempts to create extensive non-lineage alliances with purported kinsmen bearing just same surname and fictive descent lies.