The Business of Identity Jews, Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt [Hardcover]

The Cairo Geniza is the largest and richest store of documentary evidence for the medieval Islamic world. This book seeks to revolutionize the way scholars use that treasure trove. Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman draws on legal documents from the Geniza to reconceive of life in the medieval Islamic marketplace. In place of the shared practices broadly understood by scholars to have transcended confessional boundaries, he reveals how Jewish merchants in Egypt employed distinctive trading practices. Highly influenced by Jewish law, these commercial practices served to manifest their Jewish identity in the medieval Islamic context. In light of this distinctiveness, Ackerman-Lieberman proposes an alternative model for using the Geniza documents as a tool for understanding daily life in the medieval Islamic world as a whole.

Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Law, and Affiliated Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and History at Vanderbilt University.This book seeks to revolutionize the way scholars use the treasure trove of the Cairo Geniza, the largest and richest store of documentary evidence for the medieval Islamic world. Ackerman-Lieberman's principle innovation is to look closely at legal documents as evidence for the legal principles by which merchants organized their partnerships . . . [This] book offers an important historiographical intervention in Geniza studies and medieval economic history. For legal historians, his approach is most useful as an interrogation into the models that often implicitly shape our understanding of the relationship among different legal orders and legal practices that coexisted in legally pluralist environments. In this deeply learned study of medieval Egypt, Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman details the ways in which Jews immersed themselves in Muslim culture and institutions, not to create a symbiosis of Judaism and Islam, but to forge a particular and nuanced minority identity as Jews. ThilS„