Crossing the Boundaries between Christendom and Islam, 900–1050

Abstract

The enlargement of Muslim domination to include Morocco, Spain and eventually Sicily meant that the southern half of the Mediterranean became a Muslim-ruled lake, offering splendid new opportunities for trade. Jewish merchants emerge most prominently from the records. Whether this is an accident of survival, or whether they were more successful than Coptic and Syriac Christians or Muslim townsmen of North Africa, Spain and Egypt is uncertain. There are grounds for thinking that non-Muslim merchants had a distinct advantage. Muslims were constrained by legal rulings that forbade them from living or even trading in infidel lands. Over the centuries this meant that the rulers of Muslim cities in the Mediterranean opened their doors to Christian and Jewish traders, but their Muslim inhabitants were wary of venturing to Italy, Catalonia or Provence. The reason so much is known about the Jewish traders is that hundreds of their letters and business documents have survived in the collection known as the Cairo Genizah. In the mid-seventh century, the Arab invaders of Egypt established their base at Fustat (meaning ‘the Ditch’) on the edge of modern Cairo, and only later moved their capital to the surroundings of the great citadel of New Cairo. Old Cairo, or Fustat, became the base for the city’s Jewish and Coptic population; in the eleventh century one group of Jews rebuilt the Ben Ezra synagogue, incorporating on the upper floor a storeroom, or Genizah, accessible only by ladder, into which they threw and stuffed their discarded papers and manuscripts. They wished to avoid destroying anything that carried the name of God; by extension they did not destroy anything written in Hebrew characters. It has been well said that the Genizah collection is ‘the very opposite of an archive’, because the aim was to throw away documents without destroying them, in effect burying them above ground, rather than to create an accessible room that could be used for systematic reference.