The Fatimid Iqrār Genre: A Case of Multi-Layered Co-production from the Cairo Geniza

Historians studying Jewish-Muslim relations in the medieval Fatimid empire long assumed that each religious community lived in isolation, engaging with each other only out of necessity. A different picture emerges from the study of sources for social history, particularly those from the Cairo Geniza. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traders, neighbors, and family members interacted with each other in many contexts and even engaged with each other’s religious institutions. Muslim and Jewish communities borrowed religious and legal norms from each other in the construction of their own documents and practices, though religious elites in both communities rarely acknowledged these borrowings.