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Chapter ID: CBB092022508

Migrating Words and Migrating Custom among the Geniza Merchants: Maimonides on Commercial Agency Law (2019)

Cohen, Mark R. (Author)

Brill
Pages: 13-27
Publication date: 2019
Language: English

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004416642_003

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Law--history Business and commerce Arab/Islamic world, civilization and culture Jews Diffusion of innovation; diffusion of knowledge; diffusion of technology Merchants Business history Medieval Maimonides

My paper addresses a problem in economic history and the transmission of commercial practice and law. It pertains to Jewish merchants in the medieval Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. These merchants are represented in hundreds of unique letters, accounts, and legal documents discovered in the Cairo Geniza that reflect ‘real time’ business practices. The second major source comprises legal texts from the Islamic middle ages. They consist of responsa – answers to questions of law submitted to a jurisconsult – and collections of laws, especially the huge, encompassing code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, completed around 1178 in Egypt by the great Jewish legist and philosopher, Moses Maimonides. The research question that motivates my study is the relationship between merchant practice and Jewish law during the Islamic middle ages. The Talmud, which was completed in the seventh century, before the Islamic conquests, comes from an agrarian society. Most Jews were farmers, though some engaged in handicrafts. What trade existed was mainly local or regional. The Islamic conquests created a huge empire stretching from Spain to Transoxiana, spurring urbanization and enabling a broad expansion of long-distance trade. New commercial devices, unheard of or rejected by the rabbis of the Talmud, came into the Jewish merchant’s purview. The source for these customs was the custom of Muslim merchants, and it is signaled in the commercial documents of the Geniza by ‘migrating words.’ A prime example, unknown in the Talmud, is commercial agency, represented by terms and phrases in Judeo-Arabic that mimic words and phrases in Muslim Arabic. The rabbis of the period, especially Maimonides, adapted these institutions to Jewish law so that Jewish merchants would have an alternative and comparable Jewish equivalent to the Islamic legal system.

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Book Stefania Gialdroni; Dauchy, Serge,; Cordes, Albrecht (2020) Migrating words, migrating merchants, migrating law: trading routes and the development of commercial law. unapi

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