The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West by Phillip I. Lieberman (review)

Reviewed by: The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West by Phillip I. Lieberman Jonathan Berkey Phillip I. Lieberman. The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 317 pp. Authors and editors (especially the latter) like to give books expansive titles, presumably in the hope that doing so will increase sales. A reader who approaches The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East assuming that it contains a simple narrative account of the impact of the Arab conquests on the Jewish communities scattered throughout the Near East will likely be disappointed. The book is not a broad and synthetic survey of the evolution of those communities during the early centuries of Muslim rule. It presumes that its readers already have a firm grasp of the subject. Its topic is much narrower than the first half of the title might imply—which is not to say that it is unimportant. Phillip Lieberman's book is a sophisticated, complex analysis of a series of specific but interrelated issues that lie at the heart of most accounts of … well, the fate of the Jews in the early Islamic Near East. His analysis is thoughtful, nuanced, and a little bit provocative. It may be, he acknowledges toward the beginning, that his "arguments for contingency and local conditions dictating the shape of Jewish community from antiquity into the Middle Ages lack the allure of a grand narrative" (42). But if he is right, some of the basic elements of the broader story will have to be rethought. And in keeping with current trends in scholarship on the early Islamic world more broadly, his account does "have the attraction of placing the Jews in their economic, social, and political context." There are several interconnected elements of the standard narrative of the history of the Jews in the early years of the Islamic era to which Lieberman directs his attention. The first is the assumption that within two centuries or so of the Arab conquests, the Iraqi Jewish community, which had been both the demographic and cultural center of Middle Eastern Jewry in late antiquity, had abandoned rural settlements and agricultural pursuits and become an overwhelmingly urban population, taking up residence in the booming cities of the early Islamic period: Baghdad, Basra, Kufa, and others. Benefiting from relatively high levels of literacy, Jews in these cities quickly became active participants in a "commercial revolution" in the early Middle Ages that is reflected in, or was driven by, the articulation of Islamic law in the works of jurists with close ties to and sympathy for the mercantile class. By the eleventh century, and in response to the political chaos which engulfed Iraq from the late ninth century onward, a massive migration of Iraqi Jews, particularly rabbis and merchants, from Iraq to the lands along the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea had contributed to the emergence of the small but powerful Jewish community of Egypt, especially in the city of Fustat, and to the reestablishment of Jewish communities in North Africa where the End Page 219 Jewish population had, under late Roman rule, declined or even in many places, disappeared. These themes will be familiar to any student of medieval Jewish history. They are deeply embedded in the works of the most prominent historians of the era, including Eliyahu Ashtor, Norman Stillman, S. D. Goitein, A. L. Udovitch, Mark Cohen, and others. Lieberman does not exactly refute them; his contribution is a more nuanced one. The reader sometimes wishes for a little more polemical clarity, for a sharper statement of how the traditional story must be changed. But history is messy, and grand themes can obscure as much as they reveal. Lieberman is deeply respectful of these earlier scholars, and in most cases does not so much contradict them as suggest that their conclusions need to be modified to one degree or another. So, for example, he does not deny the existence of a commercial revolution, but suggests that it occurred somewhat later than is usually...