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Chapter 12 - Economic Activities

from Part II - Social and Institutional History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2021

By
Jessica L. Goldberg  and
Phillip I. Lieberman
Edited by
Phillip I. Lieberman
Phillip I. Lieberman
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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Summary

Those studying the economic activities of Jews in the medieval Islamic world find themselves in an odd position of glut and dearth. For the vast geographic and temporal sweep of medieval Islamic history, we still know relatively little about the economy in general. A lack of survey scholarship makes it difficult to know a great deal about the economic activities of the Jewish community as a whole for most of its history under Islam, and even more, how to interpret the smattering of economic information that comes from literary sources, chronicles, travelogues, geographies, geonic responsa, legal treatises and formularies. It is hard to understand or sometimes even identify the economic activities of Jews to which these documents occasionally refer, and even harder to put them in the broader context of Islamic society.

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The Cambridge History of Judaism , pp. 412 - 449
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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