Awards

• Commended for National Jewish Book Award (Sephardic Culture) 2014

Overview

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.

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9780804785471

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Reviews

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. This is a landmark book, challenging prevalent misconceptions about Jewish history and offering remarkably original insights into the formation of minority cultures. --Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College

Author Information

Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Law, and Affiliated Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and History at Vanderbilt University.

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