The dissection of the Byzantine Jewish economy and the examination of its dynamics do not help only to reconceptualize Byzantine-Jewish segregation and integration. This particular lens of economic history also suggests another, more specific historical consequence, at a juncture in which the Jews' experience extends beyond the limits of Byzantine and ethnic history and enters into the larger realm of the Commercial Revolution. Beginning roughly in the tenth century and increasingly in the eleventh, Western Europe met the challenge of demographic growth with ever-evolving and improving agricultural methods. The increased population demanded wider markets, and the enterprising city-states on the Italian coasts rose to the occasion. The leader of these city-states, Venice, developed trade with the Levant and exploited a series of colonies and outposts as transfer points for goods from the Muslim and Byzantine worlds. As these forces evolved, they fundamentally realigned the direction, content and volume of trade across the Mediterranean, and thereby justified the designation as a revolution of economic mentalities and activities, even though the process admittedly took place at more of an evolutionary pace than a revolutionary one.

According to the traditional view of medieval historians, this shift also marked the decline of the Jews from a position of mercantile primacy in the Mediterranean. Prior to the eleventh century, the Jews are viewed as having filled the role of middleman between the Christian West (or North) and the Muslim East (or South), as neutral parties across hostile boundaries.