The Business of Identity: Jews, Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt
The Business of Identity: Jews, Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt
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Abstract
This book explores Jewish commercial partnerships in medieval Egypt, and reveals Jewish merchants to have used economic cooperation as a vehicle for cultural identity formation and maintenance. Through a detailed analysis of the legal documents of the Cairo Geniza, the book shows an affinity between Jewish law and the daily life of Jewish merchants filtered through the courts, which educated merchants about the norms of Jewish commercial law without necessarily demanding that the merchants transact their business according to those norms. However, a close reading of the actual documentary evidence shows that they have done so, and even shows how merchants’ choice to do so affirmed their Jewish identity in ways that cut across a number of different cultural domains. The idea that Jewish merchants might have had distinctive business practices reflecting their Jewish identity challenges the regnant wisdom of the “Princeton School” of Geniza scholars, who have used letters from Jewish merchants as a tool for describing the practice of the broad medieval Islamic marketplace. This book examines the historical practice of the Princeton School and questions the “identity” that scholars have understood to exist between the mercantile behavior of Jews and Muslims. The book proposes an alternative to this “identity” which accounts for the evidence from the legal documents of the Geniza and proposes a more complex relationship between Jewish and Muslim commercial behavior in the medieval Islamic world.
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Front Matter
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One
Jewish, Islamic, or Mediterranean? Historiography and the Cairo Geniza
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Two
Partnership as Culture: Jewish Law and Jewish Life
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Three
Commercial Forms and Legal Norms in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt
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Four
The Geniza, Jewish Identity, and Medieval Islamic Social and Economic History
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End Matter
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