The Shifting Fate of World Jewry from Iraq to North Africa in the Early Islamic Period

FAIN: FT-264915-19

Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman
Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN 37203-2416)

This project revisits long-held assumptions about the dynamics of Jewish life in the medieval Islamic world. In my book project, tentatively titled From the Rising of the Sun...To Where It Sets, I intend to challenge the received wisdom that the mostly-agrarian Jewish community urbanized under early Islamic regimes, and subsequently migrated to the communities of the southern Mediterranean in the wake of Islamic conquest. In its place, I propose an alternative narrative of historical contingency, suggesting a Jewish population in the East which atrophies amidst local unrest and the decay of irrigational infrastructure and a corresponding flowering of the autochthonous Jewish population as opportunities for long-distance trade came on the rise as the southern Mediterranean fell under a single (Islamic) legal regime.