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BYZANTINE JEWRY IN THE MEDITERRANEAN ECONOMY
Using primary sources, Joshua Holo uncovers the day-to-day workings of the Byzantine Jewish economy in the Middle Byzantine period. Built on a web of exchange systems both exclusive to the Jewish community and integrated in society at large, this economy forces a revision of Jewish history in the region.
Paradoxically, the two distinct economic orientations, inward and outward, simultaneously advanced both the integration of the Jews into the larger Byzantine economy and their segregation as a selfcontained economic body. Dr. Holo finds that the Jews routinely leveraged their internal, even exclusive, systems of law and culture to break into — occasionally to dominate — Byzantine markets.
Through this, they challenge our concept of Diaspora life as a balance between the two competing impulses of integration and segregation. The success of this enterprise, furthermore, qualifies the prevailing claim of Jewish economic decline during the Commercial Revolution.
JOSHUA HOLO is Associate Professor of Jewish History, Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion.
Acknowledgments
This work took shape under the tutelage of scholars and teachers who have left their permanent imprint on my scholarly life and to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude. It began as my doctoral dissertation under the direction of Norman Golb, my graduate advisor, whose vast erudition, rigor, dedication and advocacy I can only hope to emulate in my own professional life.
Also in the capacity of reader, Walter Kaegi generously lent his time, energy and knowledge to the development of this work, with invaluable insights and orientation into Byzantine history and essential criticism at every stage of writing. Joel Kraemer lent his critical eye, together with his Hebraic and Hellenic expertise, as well as his constant support and encouragement.
Nicholas de Lange, to whom the field of Byzantine-Jewish studies owes so much, provided collegial and professional orientation indispensable to the production of this volume, and Steven Bowman, also a central figure in the study of Byzantine Jewry, offered generous and punctilious criticism on which I have heavily relied.
Most of all, I wish to acknowledge my wife, Andréa Martins, who not only encouraged me through this project and the years of study that preceded it, but who has also conferred value on it by purposefully and generously lending her energies to our shared life, so that she might, in the fungible economy of the family, render my work possible.
L also owe a debt of gratitude to a number of institutions. The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture each provided generous and necessary financial support. The Graduate Theological Union encouraged me in this and other pursuits, liberally defining its sense of mission to include me and my work within it.
Subsequently, Dean Lewis Barth, with this and allied work in mind, brought me on board at the Los Angeles campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and I am privileged to pursue my work at this venerable institution of Jewish learning.
I also want to thank Michael Sharp of Cambridge University Press for his consummate professionalism, patience and expertise in ushering this manuscript to its present form. Though oft repeated, it is anything but formulaic for me to point out that, while I owe any successes of this book to these people and institutions, the responsibility for any deficiencies lies at my feet alone.
JH Los Angeles
Byzantine-Jewish economic history
When Samuel Krauss first took up the subject of Byzantine-Jewish history, he claimed to do so “as one would an orphan”; and though it has grown somewhat since the publication of his seminal Studien zur byzantinisch-jtidische Geschichte in 1914, the field still remains at the margins of both Byzantine and Jewish history.
The Jews did not play what one could fairly call a pivotal role in the fate of the Byzantine Empire, and what is more, time has left us with a relative dearth of primary sources as compared to other major Jewish communities of the Mediterranean and Europe. Furthermore, the Jews of Byzantium never figured, quantitatively, as a major part in the overall economy of the empire. Agriculture, the government and the army dominated the resources that determined wealth and its distribution, while the Jews were overwhelmingly urban and rigidly excluded from both military and civil service.
But within the smaller economic sector of trade, the Jews did indeed loom disproportionately large, and through their prodigious activity in a few but significant industries, they demonstrably helped to shape Byzantine economic history. In addition, the study of Byzantine Jewry offers a unique vantage point from which to consider larger trends in economic history. The view of the medieval Mediterranean from the perspective of Byzantine-Jewish sources reveals otherwise ignored patterns of Jewish trade and communication, and it calls into question our standard ways of viewing Jewish interaction with society at large.
The chronological scope of the present study conforms to that which is conventionally called the Middle Byzantine period, from Heraclius (r. 610-41) to the end of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In an effort to avoid relying reflexively on this standard periodization, a number of concrete metrics may be invoked to justify it. Concurrent with the rise of Islam, the beginning of the period under review represents a logical watershed in the history of the Mediterranean.
Most notably for the Jews, the demographics of the Mediterranean shifted forever thereafter, with results not only in the economic and political realms, but also in the internal development of Jewish law, languages, ritual and philosophy. Even within the relatively circumscribed experience of the Jews in the Byzantine state, the reign of Heraclius heralded a period of change at least as abrupt as that which accompanied the reign of Constantine I (sole r. 324-37). At the end-point of this period, the Fourth Crusade marks a shift of somewhat lesser moment than does the rise of Islam.
It too, however, serves as a viable turning point, particularly in the Jews’ role as subjects of the Byzantine state, which never truly recovered from the occupation of Constantinople by the Latins. Coincidentally, the richly informative documents of the Cairo Genizah span the period between the tenth and twelfth centuries, and are thus roughly coterminous with the end of the Middle Byzantine period. In deference to these considerations, the present study hews closely to the chronological limits of the Middle Byzantine
period, only occasionally venturing to refer to events immediately beyond them.
THE JEWS OF BYZANTIUM
Since the chronological considerations follow almost universal convention, the more pressing questions pertain to the assumptions governing the study of specifically Byzantine-Jewish economic history. To begin with, the composite term “Byzantine-Jewish” suggests an experience that unfolded in relation to two very different points of reference.’
In the Middle Ages, the Jewish religion was associated with the Jewish people and all its functions, and to separate them out is to distinguish where, frequently, there was no difference.* So, at the very outset, the term “Jewish economy” poses distinct problems of definition. The term assumes that a discrete group of people, typically defined by religious and ethnic criteria, also engaged in economic activity that lends itself to commensurately consistent and particular characterization. The concept of a “Jewish economy” s meaningless, then, unless that assumption is in fact warranted. Is there a “body Jewish,” and can we discern reliable patterns of economic activities within that body?
It turns out that the distinct and corporate nature of the Jews readily comes through in the primary sources. To be sure, ethnic, linguistic and ideological subdivisions abounded among the Jews, but that fact does not belie their ultimate cohesion under the umbrella term “Jewish.” In fact, the minority Jews, in all their complexity, are easily identified in distinction from the majority Byzantines, even taking into account all the ethnic, religious and linguistic heterogeneity of Byzantine society at large.
Jewish and Christian sources throughout Byzantine history uniformly recognize the Jews as a distinct group, mentioned explicitly as such — not only in religious polemics, but also in political conflicts and legal classifications. Even Christian Judaizing, which ostensibly threatened to blur the distinctions between the two religions, could not materially bridge the gap between the dominant Byzantine Orthodox society and the Jews, a distinct people with its own religion, calendar and institutions.* Moreover, the Jewish sense of corporate identity did not exist merely in contrast to the Christian one.
The Jews, Byzantine and otherwise, shared internal defining qualities that mutually strengthened one another and that collectively bound the Jews as a coherent unit. Their common religion, Judaism, reinforced their common language, Hebrew, which provided a vehicle for their common social compact, Jewish law, which in turn governed those who were born into it in almost every aspect of their lives, from conjugal relations to any number of economic pursuits. For the Jews of the Middle Ages, this ethnic-religious self-undersanding constantly reaffirmed itself and is ultimately axiomatic, be it in Byzantium or anywhere else.
To be a Jew was, therefore, to belong to an ethnic group in every possible sense, and the resultant cohesion expressed itself in economic terms throughout the Jewish world. Not surprisingly, then, one can indeed isolate a distinct set of financial relationships and economic activities concentrated in certain industries and serving particular needs. That this discrete set of relationships and activities might legitimately be called “Jewish” emerges from the fact that they either served uniquely Jewish functions, such as the redemption of Jewish captives, or that they discernibly occupied a disproportionate number of Jews who grouped themselves consciously within a given trade, such as the textile industry.
It should not surprise, therefore, that one can justifiably restrict the notion of a Jewish economy even further, by adding another qualifier, ie., “Roman” or, reflecting our modern historiographical conventions, “Byzantine.” Here again, the primary evidence provides firm grounding. Even in a world of shifting borders and heterogeneous populations, the quality of being Byzantine had concrete consequences. Juridically speaking, all the residents of the empire were subject to the tax structure and legislation of the polity, and this imperial governance guaranteed that the border was never merely imaginary. One of the most important Byzantine economic sources, the Book of the Eparch, is entirely devoted to the fiscal regulation of Constantinopolitan guilds.
It mentions the Jews in a key section on the silk trade, putting strictures on their commerce that did not apply to Jews in Fatimid Egypt, for example. Culturally speaking, the Jews’ affinity for the Greek language and the availability of longstanding relationships — both personal and business, since the two often overlapped — persisted even outside the boundaries of the state, so that one may speak of a Byzantine orientation in the direction and content of trade, evident in correspondence from the Cairo Genizah.’ In capturing this web of relationships, the sources thereby point overwhelmingly to a demonstrably Byzantine-Jewish economy, with its own conditions, strengths, weaknesses, propensities and influences.
In addition to the social, political and economic situation that distinguished Byzantine Jewry from coreligionists throughout the Mediterranean, its linguistic and cultural engagement with Byzantine Christian society betrays a surprisingly thoroughgoing identification of the Jewish and the Hellenic or Roman. Nicholas de Lange, in a number of articles, has described these inclinations of Byzantine Jewry, painting a nuanced picture of deep acculturation.
De Lange points to both ambiguity and ambivalence of identity, perhaps most eloquently expressed by sectarian Jewish leader Judah Hadassi, who charges that his mainstream Jewish adversaries, “the Rabbanites, in expressing themselves partly in the vernacular language [i.e., Greek] in their documents, behave like gentiles.”” In chastising his opponents, Hadassi reveals the underlying Hellenism in Jewish society: Greek, in addition to being the quotidian language of Byzantine Jewry, also spilled over into the presumably Hebraic spheres of legal writing.* Hadassi therefore presents us with a startling reality (corroborated in other sources as well), namely, Hebrew distinguished the Jews from the Christians, but Greek simultaneously served as a Jewish language.’ If anything, Byzantine Jewry actually favored Greek until the revival of Hebrew, which dates perhaps to the ninth century but which took hold during the period of the Genizah documents.'° Even then, however, Greek remained alive in Jewish life, and its persistence fostered a cultural bilingualism, or diglossia, that differed from the well-known bilingualism of other Jewish populations in Christendom, such as those in Spanish-, Italian- and German-speaking Europe. The difference, de Lange points out, lies in the function of Byzantine Greek. It, alone among the Christian vernaculars, was “not only the spoken language of their Christian neighbors but also the language of their church and their written literature.”"" Much more ancient than the roughly analogous Judaization of Arabic, this religious diglossia resulted in a remarkable marriage. Greek Judaism and Greek Christianity, despite the gulf between them, shared a religious language that doubled as the medium of day-to-day expression.”
Even the ambivalence, or downright inner conflict, of Jews towards their own Hellenism points to the intensity and authenticity of the connection between the two languages and the cultures. Well-worn expressions of resentment against Rome, the enforcer of Exile, routinely characterized Jewish vituperations against Greek language and culture. Esau, the eponymous ancestor of Rome according to Jewish lore, pitted himself against Israel in an apocalyptic struggle.’ Additionally, “both nations relied on religion as a guardian of their national identity,” resulting in parallel, mutually exclusive perspectives, which expanded the gap between them and which set the terms for much of their conflict.’* At the same time, however, Byzantine Jewry does not so much negotiate with Roman culture as it does intimately comprise that culture as part and parcel of its Jewishness.’ Roberto Bonfil perhaps puts it best when he describes the anonymous Byzantine author of a tenth-century, Hebrew apocalypse as one “who saw the two cultures as though organically integrated into one another.”"® In both its negative and positive aspects, therefore, the internalization of graecitas or romanitas as an expression of Byzantine Judaism illustrates how culture serves as a bridge of similarity and exchange, while it may just as easily and at the same time function as a barrier.
Unsurprisingly, a simultaneous push-and-pull characterized not only the Jewish side of the relationship, but also that of Byzantine society. To be sure, the Byzantine authorities acted on the assumption of an existential difference separating Judaism from Orthodox Christianity, and the state consistently attempted to regulate the degree of Jewish participation in society at large. It sought, in sum, to reduce the points of contact.'” For that reason, the Jews were not, in any modern sense, integrated; in Constantinople they lived in a separate quarter, they suffered legal limitations, and they underwent episodes of physical violence and forced baptism."® Religiously, the Jews furthermore functioned as a religious foil that helped formulate the Byzantine sense of self, especially insofar as that sense of self was, as Michael Angold avers, “most compellingly defined by negative means, by singling out enemies for vilification.””? In the same vein, David Jacoby has compellingly outlined Orthodoxy’s entrenched, wellarticulated ecclesiastical-doctrinal hostility towards Judaism, which remains at the disposal of those inclined to invoke it, even to this day.*° Significantly, however, the efforts to separate the Jews from the life of the empire, at times half-hearted and at times sincere, do not seem to have borne much fruit. Jacoby can only consider it “contradictory ... that there exists a local and quotidian dimension of coexistence, of socialization and economic cooperation among Jews and Christians,” even if he hastens to point out its limits.** For one thing, despite their embodying religious distinctiveness, the Jews defied easy dismissal as aliens or foreigners, insofar as they met a very high standard of cultural integration in signal matters of language and autochthony.”* In other words, in the day-to-day of urban life, points of segregation were too deeply interwoven with those of integration, and they could not be disentangled to reflect the comfortable distinctions that the Byzantine powers might have preferred. The position of the Jews in comparison to that of other ethnicities in the Byzantine Empire further strengthens this impression. Even though a majority language and religion did dominate Byzantine culture and politics, they naturally evolved in relation to an array of minorities, including Turks, Slavs, Armenians and Arabs (all of whom, notably, belonged to larger communities outside the borders of the Byzantine polity). In this mosaic the Jews, perhaps “more than any other ethnic group in the empire ... embraced Hellenic culture and the Greek language,” at least at the level of the common people.** Though it pushed the Jews to the margins, Byzantine society nevertheless allowed the possibility for the Jews also to cling, to a unique degree, to the dominant culture as an expression of their own minority identity. Nothing more pithily captures the reciprocity of this ambivalence than does the Life of Saint Nikon, set roughly in the mid-to-late tenth century.” After Nikon’s ideologically charged expulsion of the Jews from Sparta, John Aratos “asserted that the removal of the Jews outside the city was not just or reasonable.”*° Though Nikon won the day and expelled the Jews once and for all, Aratos’ attitude and its economic motivation (“some task, by which garments are accustomed to be finished”) provided a plausible defense against the all-too-full armory of anti-Jewish rantings.’” We might, in view of this less-easily characterized reality, shift the emphasis of Angold’s analysis, by making the oppositional figure of Byzantine religious identity the idea of the Jew, or perhaps that of Judaism, rather than a living Jewish neighbor or client.”* Certainly, even this more abstract understanding of Judaism could result in horrible real-life consequences, but the reality that governed the lives of the Jews and their interactions with neighbors clearly conformed to the more nuanced intermingling of difference and identification.’ Angeliki Laiou has characterized the simultaneity of the push and pull, in terms of the Jews’ legal standing, as a tension “between an integrating state on the one hand, and on the other particular groups that ... belong to a different type-set of jurisdiction.”*° Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis most recently summed up his conclusions from the cultural point of view, conceding that “if marginalization did occur — and fundamentally there is no reason to doubt it — it was nevertheless incomplete.”*
In brief, even granting the centrality of religion in Byzantine identity, the relatively facile image of medieval Jewish—Christian religious rivalry simply does not account for the more complicated interplay between integration and segregation that the Jews experienced in the Byzantine Empire.** The operative consideration, then, is not whether a given factor united or divided the Jews and Christians of Byzantium, but rather how frequently the parties met at, and how intensively they dealt across, the given points that at once united and divided them. When conceptualizing the Byzantine-Jewish quality of the economy, this complicated and rich relationship distinguishes it from other Jewish communities in the Christian world, and it colors their experience as merchants and producers of goods.
ECONOMIC HISTORY AS APPLIED TO BYZANTINE JEWRY
Historians have intuited and documented the intensity of this Byzantine— Jewish relationship, including a concept of cultural and economic engagement — or entanglement — that approximates the concept of integration.” Roberto Bonfil, echoing Nicholas de Lange, aptly captures the Byzantine experience in his discussion of the Jews of Byzantine southern Italy. Bonfil perceives “a sort of synthesis between different aspirations and orientations, [which] include all the elements in which presence and absence, acceptance and rejection, intermingled in multifaceted fashion, as a function of the various degrees of attraction or repulsion” to the majority culture.** This opinion, moreover, represents something of a consensus among scholars of Byzantine Jewry. However, though they do not fail to cite important examples from the realm of economic history, none has proposed an economic model to articulate (or, for that matter, to challenge) this consensus, such as Jacob Katz proposed in Exclusiveness and Tolerance and such as S.D. Goitein detailed in A Mediterranean Society.’ Economic history can therefore speak to the nature of Byzantine Judaism in way not yet fully plumbed. Indeed, economic history of Byzantine Jewry complements with particular clarity the acculturation and ambivalence described by de Lange and Bonfil.*° It also points to a continuity and success in Jewish economic interests, which force us to reconsider prevailing assumptions of decline beginning in the tenth century.
A remarkable picture of Byzantine-Jewish economic organization comes naturally out of the sources, according to which the system might be likened to a cell within a larger organism. An internal economy fueled Jewish communal life, while that community, in its turn, played a welldocumented and significant role in the wider commercial economies of Byzantium and the eastern Mediterranean region.’” The distinction between the inwardly and outwardly oriented economic spheres jumps out from the assembled evidence and seems to represent underlying contemporary assumptions, but at the same time the external economy of the Byzantine Jews thoroughly depended on the apparently isolated one and was thus wedded to it.3* Between these two orientations of the Jewish economy, a semi-permeable barrier at once kept them separate from, and allowed them to interact with, one another. In their inner economy, the Jews pursued vital, day-to-day, communal interests that largely defined the community as a Jewish one. Investment in Hebraic education, the production of kosher edibles and the administration of Jewish law represent some of the exclusively Jewish enterprises that accounted for their self-containment within the larger economy.*? As for the latter aspect of their economy, integrated into society at large, Jewish prominence in the textile and tanning industries brought their corporate contribution into the mainstream of economic and social life. The porosity between these two aspects of the Jewish economy emerges in the fact that both worked on a local and international level, and the success of one translated into opportunities for the other.*° The two economies, though easily distinguished, demonstrably relied on a single, shared infrastructure of law, culture, languages, personal relationships and interests."
As a result of this system, the model of competing impulses, i-e., integration versus segregation, ceases to describe their reality; rather, from the beginning, the integrationist economy of the Jews was a function of their segregationist one and vice versa.** Bluntly put, this two-tiered economic structure that kept the Jews from meaningful contact with non-Jews also promoted that contact. And in this symbiosis, the economy mirrored the two facets of Byzantine-Jewish identity, Roman and Jewish. Though distinct, these facets often coalesced and, even more than that, cross-fertilized one another.* Furthermore, the stability of this system — largely based on ties of kinship, culture and religion — continued to serve the Jews of Byzantium, even as they faced the increased competition of the Italian Maritimes, beginning in the tenth century.
The twin structure of the Jewish economy depended on the somewhat surprising degree of belonging in the Byzantine context. This economic situation had its roots in two salient historical conditions. First of all, at the most basic level, the simple fact of Roman Jewry’s antiquity — in both the western and eastern reaches of the empire — imbued the community with much more than foreign status.** In some sense, even if imperfectly, the edict of Caracalla defined the Jews as Roman citizens. Concurrently however, a second condition, namely, the Jews’ religious exceptionality, imposed practical limits on their civic participation and qualified their status. This delicate balance of Jewish particularism and participation in Roman society endured in both law and custom, punctuated by disruptions of varying magnitude in the political landscape.* Though two revolts in the first and second centuries, respectively, resulted in Jewish defeat with epochal shifts in Jewish life and governance from within, these wars did not fundamentally overturn the Roman legal principle whereby the Jews could maintain their way of life. The Jews enjoyed freedom from adherence to the state religion, as well as exemption from service on the city councils and in the military — provided they paid their taxes and remained faithful to the state.*° Already in antiquity, Roman authorities and the Jewish community had reached a functional accommodation.
With the rise of Christianity, Rome and Zion entered a stage of more reciprocal ideological rivalry. Even though the Jews managed to maintain many of their rights and privileges, the new terms of their conflict with Rome exacerbated those segregationist forces that had already existed to some degree in Roman-Jewish antiquity.*” This heightened conflict took very specific political and economic shape in the termination of the office of the Jewish Patriarch in Tiberias. Until Theodosius II (r. 408-50), the Patriarch had enjoyed legal status as the head of Roman Jewry, collecting Jewish taxes and relaying a portion of them to Rome. Connected with local Jewish leaders, known as archisynagogoi, through an official system of emissaries, the Patriarchate had provided a reliable channel for the negotiation and payment of Jewish taxes, and it had also formalized a Mediterranean Jewish network.** Beginning with the abolition of the Patriarchate, Theodosius II and successive emperors gradually diminished the privileges accorded the Jews, increasing their tax burden and sapping their civil protections. Justinian I (r. 527-65) interfered increasingly in otherwise purely Jewish affairs (such as the synagogue service), and decisively imposed the financial burdens of the city councils on the Jews.*? By the time of Heraclius, the vestiges of Jewish national status had given way to a more vulnerable status that defined Judaism first and foremost as a religion — not so vulnerable as a heretical one, but a dissenting one nonetheless and comparatively unprotected.’° Nevertheless, though now completely stripped of any traces of political independence, Byzantine Jewry persisted with an economic and religious infrastructure that still allowed for considerable functional autonomy, even as the new political landscape of the Arab conquest reshaped ties among Jews throughout and without the empire. The link between the Jews’ cultural-religious status and their economic status therefore reflected their roots in Roman antiquity, and it continued to do so well into the Roman Middle Ages.
OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES IN THE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE JEWS
To be sure, ifa full-length treatment of Byzantine-Jewish history from the economic perspective answers certain questions particularly well, it necessarily abstains from answering others. It perhaps goes without saying that Byzantine-Jewish economic history does not speak to such intriguing questions as the Jewish role in the development of Iconoclasm or the causes of the Byzantine anti-Jewish polemic.” Still, the nature of economic history nevertheless allows for considerable breadth in the range of topics that it does touch. Depending on one’s definition of economic history, even subjects that ostensibly pertain to the realm of religious or political history also figure in the economic. Here the definition owes much to the categories described by S.D. Goitein in A Mediterranean Society. From his broad perspective, economic history means the study of the exchange of resources, both material and human, and it makes explicit a claim that has frequently remained implicit among previous scholarship, namely, that the investments, professional pursuits and trade of the Byzantine Jews give discernible shape to these internal and external relationships.”
Less expectedly perhaps, Byzantine-Jewish economic history fails to address one important issue that typically falls under the purview of economic history: price.*’ The exchange of human and material resources assumes an appreciation of relative value; that is, it attributes value to one resource in terms of another. However, whereas today the most convenient measuring rod of value is currency, medieval society was only beginning to take the conceptual step of applying value to coins, at least in day-to-day transactions. Consequently, an economic history of Byzantine Jewry does not offer much in the way of determining how much something cost.”* Still, even with limited information on specific quantities and prices, the study of the Byzantine-Jewish economy exposes those realms in which the Jews invested not only their money, but also their time, youth, energy and political capital. In sum, the topic speaks very eloquently to the quality of their values, especially those which have no price. Additionally, there are specific cases, most notably marriage contracts, where currency does define value, even if these examples prove more exceptional than regular.
If the primary sources offer the comfort of a cohesive, if complicated, concept of the Byzantine-Jewish economy, they nonetheless require great care, on account of three particular problems inherent in studying them. First, the sources have survived in great variety, both of genre and precision, as relates to economic topics. Explicitly economic texts such as Benjamin of Tudela’s famous Jtinerary, the Book of the Eparch or Jewish marriage contracts are rare. In the same vein, since Judaism embraces ethnicity, law and language, in addition to religion, and since most sources deal with economic matters in passing or obliquely, one might fairly ask if many of the sources adduced here actually belong to the economic history of the Jews at all. For instance, when Evagrius Scholasticus describes the mid-sixth-century miracle of a Jewish boy who converts to Christianity, the fact that the boy’s father made a living by blowing glass simply gives life to the narrative. In addition to its marginality in the text, the account of glassblowing may or may not be altogether apocryphal, depending on how one interprets the historicity of the larger account, which is subject to the standards of polemical literature, not to those of economic history.*’ Conversely, one may overlook important, non-economic aspects of a given document that appear, superficially, to deal with economics. The most notable example is the Book of the Eparch, which contains a single clause that excludes Jews from the export of silk. The eminent medieval historian Robert S. Lopez viewed this exclusion as, first and foremost, an ideological restriction on the Jews, whereas I am inclined to see the same legislation as a purely economic posture of the state in protecting its commercial interests from the Jews and from others outside the controlled system of guilds.*° To be sure, Byzantine history justifies both views, but the question becomes something subtler: What view represents the operative, primary purpose and consequence of the text?
The question, moreover, is not merely academic, because depending on how one answers it, one then reasons backwards to posit a real-life state of affairs. For Lopez, the restriction on the Jewish silk trade reflects the continuation of an ancient religious gripe against the Jews, for which the silk industry simply served as a vehicle. For me, the same law indicates that the Jews posed a real threat to imperial interests in the silk trade, and only secondarily — if at all — does it reflect any systemic antagonism to the Jews. The divergent implications are born, not out of two diametrically opposed interpretations but more precisely out of different emphases. Many steps in the development of a coherent economic history will follow this model, in which the economic aspect of a text takes center stage, not to the exclusion of other aspects but first among them. In this regard, placing the evidence in context will allow the reader to judge its applicability independently. It is hoped that the cumulative evidence supports the overall claims brought to bear, even when decisive exempla have not survived.
Second, historical investigation requires not only hypotheses but also some degree of outright speculation, and this is no less true of ByzantineJewish history with its sometimes scanty sources. In this field of research, even the basic outline of events may require a disquieting degree of speculative conclusions. Two methodological tools temper the otherwise dangerous dependency on historical speculation. First, whenever possible, these inferences rely on defensible analogy to other places or times, as wellgrounded in primary sources as possible. Second, the act of speculation unremittingly requires transparency, allowing the readers to recognize, unambiguously, an historical inference as such. Given reasonable analogy and transparent communication of it, speculation can at least provide a set of acceptable assumptions, which might then serve as orientation for further study. Ideally, the caution inherent in this approach permits not only the establishment of a responsible historical narrative, but also the frank indication of that which is missing from it.
Third and finally, this history suffers somewhat from a dearth of sources and, much more so, from their unevenness. In the period spanning the tenth to twelfth centuries, the famous storehouse known as the Cairo Genizah served as a depository for old or worn documents and books, which piety required not be thrown out with common trash. There they sat until discovered in the nineteenth century by the Karaite scholar Abraham Firkovitch and, subsequently, by the Cambridge Talmudist Solomon Schechter. In the course of the twentieth century, the documents were mined — and continue to be mined — for information of extreme value, changing the face of medieval Mediterranean history. The Genizah’s very wealth, however, threatens to distort the picture of economic activity as relates to the periods prior and subsequent to its assemblage of documents. It is as though a magnifying glass has been applied to the timeline, making that which is under it appear more prominent than the rest. At times, the increase in sources may faithfully represent greater activity, but the question always remains: Does the Genizah represent a genuine increase in both sources and activity, or did chance simply preserve a cache of documents that actually reflect continuity, or even diminution, of activity with the period prior to it? A partial answer comes only with careful corroboration from outside sources and balanced analysis.
BYZANTINE JEWS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN ECONOMY
Taking these potential pitfalls into consideration, the picture of the Byzantine-Jewish economy develops in relation to three broad topics: demography, the two tiers of the Jews’ economy, and the perseverance of their economic interests through the twelfth century. The study of Jewish migration patterns over time illustrates the capacity of Byzantine Jews to collaborate with one another throughout the eastern Mediterranean in the Middle Byzantine period. By means of those relationships, the Jews developed a two-tiered economy in which their special, communal interests were furthered together with their interests in the larger Byzantine and regional markets. On the strength of this system, the Jews of Byzantium prospered in niche markets well into the twelfth century, as against the traditional historiography, which views the tenth to twelfth centuries as a period of Jewish economic decline.
The second chapter of this study addresses the demography of the Jews under the new order of the seventh century, and it maps the redistribution of their internal connections, which provided important opportunities for new expressions of solidarity and strength. When the Arab conquest engulfed Mesopotamia and Syria-Palestine, the contours of political jurisdiction entered a period of flux. Soon, Jewish communities throughout North Africa and the Levant also found themselves subject to the new Muslim polity (eventually a multiplicity of polities) and immersed in an entirely new cultural setting. Meanwhile the Jewry of southern Italy, Greece and Anatolia remained under the sovereignty of the Roman Empire, and they carried on in the Greek-speaking culture of previous generations. Still, the Jews bridged this new political breach across the Mediterranean Sea by means of the depth and persistence of their affinities to fellow Jews, as expressed in cultural norms, ethnic consciousness, mutually recognized legal authority, kinship and, of course, religion. Even when Hebrew began to rise to new prominence among the Byzantine Jews, filling the void left by Greek as the Jewish lingua franca, ongoing cultural and economic activity kept families, friends and colleagues in touch with each other. Ultimately, the Jewish experience changed primarily in that those channels of communication, which had previously been domestic to the Byzantine Empire, now became international.
The new scope of Jewish activity, now crossing borders of state and religion, may not have changed the foundational structure of intra-Jewish relations, but it did transform the practical manifestations of Jewish economic exchange in both the inner and integrated economies. One result of the Arab conquest was the increasing Byzantine-Jewish financial and human investment in the Talmudic academies of Iraq, in addition to their traditional commitment to the Palestinian academies. Islam now ruled over both centers of Jewish learning and leadership, Palestine and Iraq, which were previously situated in the Roman and Persian Empires, respectively. While cultural kinship endured between Palestine and the remaining Jews of Byzantium, political realities put access to Baghdad and Tiberias, in practical terms, on more equal footing. Consequently, perhaps beginning as early as the ninth century — well before significant numbers of Arabicspeaking Jews moved to Byzantium — the Iraqi academies increasingly attracted Byzantine-Jewish talent and funding.’’ In terms of the outwardoriented economy, the redrawing of the borders left far fewer Jews under Roman authority. Thus, the Arab conquest diminished the Jews’ role as a significant minority tax base in the empire, and they therefore caused less concern from the seventh century onward.® Instead of tax revenue, Jewish trade took on new import on account of its international scope. Specifically, the Jews enjoyed unique access to services and goods from coreligionists abroad, by means of which they made up for disadvantages imposed on them by the local government, such as exclusion from the guilds.
The internal aspect of the Jewish economy occupies the third chapter of this study, and merits attention for three reasons. First of all, Jewish history has largely skipped over the Byzantine experience, and the history of exchange reveals much about the direction of communication and cultural ties. In this regard, the inner economy corresponds in some respects, but not all, to the technically defined category of non-economic exchange, that is, exchange that functioned on its own terms, without reference to the open market (for example, the economy of scholarship and communal maintenance). However, within this inner Jewish economy, some aspects entered the open markets, such as the redemption of captives, which was subject to externally determined prices and which sapped Jewish resources (instead of simply recycling them).”? Equally importantly, the minority economy was simply too porous, too dependent on markets outside its control, such as grain, to attain the scale that would allow it to function as an independent microcosm. In this sense, the Jewish economy, though internally oriented and conceived for the benefit of Jews, did not approach the magnitude of other economies that had the capacity for a large non-economic component. Additionally, to the degree that the Jews of Byzantium used currency in these internal exchanges — which is almost impossible to measure — their exchanges have a built-in dependence on standards of value that existed outside of their own. Nonetheless, the point of reference of this aspect of the economy was always inward, always a force for community-building, regardless of the distance it spanned. Secondly but equally significantly, the inner economy deserves attention, because it consisted in those uniquely Jewish, mundane and practical activities that give life to, indeed justify, the very concept of a Jewish economy. And finally, as the complex of functions that governed the daily life of the Jewish minority, their inner economy defines the limits of that semi-permeable membrane that both kept them separate and allowed them to engage with society. In other words, it effectively establishes the practical terms for those aspects of Jewish life in the empire that might be called autonomous.
Detailing the integrated aspect of the Jewish economy, chapter 4 analyzes the place of the Jews in the Byzantine economy and, by extension, Byzantine society at large. This broader economy of the Jews comprised two rubrics: the payment of taxes and the production and trade in cloth and leathers. It was through their tax contribution that the Jews offered their most direct and most palpable contribution to the imperial economy. By the Middle Byzantine period, the sources on Jewish taxation diminish in clarity as compared to the imperial codes of the early period. However, despite the murkiness of the Jewish tax status, the sources allow us to characterize their payments from both the Jewish and Byzantine perspectives in terms of the Jewish standing vis-a-vis the fisc — one key indication of their standing before the law. In all, the structures of taxation seem to apply to the Jews on fundamentally, though not entirely, similar terms to those of non-Jews.
More notably in the sources, the Jews made their mark as purveyors of raw and finished textiles, and they also served in allied professions as weavers, dyers and tanners. Before delving into the details of that economy, chapter 4 outlines the mechanisms of trade that allowed the Jews to exert an economic influence beyond their small numbers. Putting their social and religious structures to work to maximize efficiency, the Jews sometimes enjoyed regional or local dominance in certain sectors of textile production. Moreover, the Jewish involvement in textiles and tanning spanned not only the geographical but also the temporal extent of the empire and beyond. Thus, from a purely Byzantine perspective, the Jewish experience partially defines this industrial sector, an important component of the nonagricultural economy of the empire.°° More than that, Jewish entrée into the markets of Byzantine towns instantiated the way in which minority coherence and focus resulted in their capacity to wield disproportionate influence in the small but significant textile markets.°* At this juncture, where a small minority might leave its imprint on a given market within a vast imperial economy, the concept of an integrated economy coincides with that of so-called “economic” exchange, from which at least one significant consequence followed. The Jews — even when they collaborated primarily with one another — ultimately expected that a direct and deep engagement with society at large, meaning the markets, would determine the value of their goods and provide their primary outlet.°* This synergy between the inwardly and outwardly oriented economies lent itself to stunning consistency in the textile markets, for over a millennium, which speaks to their permanent and indispensable participation in the urban economy.”
The success of this system, I argue in chapter 5, leads to a necessary revision of certain assumptions that have guided Mediterranean Jewish history to date. This revision applies to both the Jews’ place in Byzantine society and their economic position at large, in the tenth to twelfth centuries.°* When, by the beginning of the eleventh century, circumstances conspired to place the Byzantine Empire at the geographical crossroads of expanding mercantilism, the Jews constituted only one among any number of contemporary minority groups, but their experience was conducive to a more positive role than has previously been assigned to them. Effectively, the Jews of the Byzantine Empire leveraged, at one and the same time, both their distinctive qualities and those that reflected their historical rootedness in the Roman Empire, in order to prosper and even to compete. The first part of this argument takes as its starting point the historiographical tradition, pioneered by Alan Harvey and others, that demonstrates commercial growth beginning in this period. The Jewish experience strongly supports this claim, and even, in some respects, bridges differences among its various proponents. The Byzantine Jews’ successes in trade, their relations to the Venetians and even their struggles with better-equipped competitors illustrate how they functioned in an expanding mercantile economy.
If, thus far, this argument works from within the established claims for economic growth, its second part challenges the way we have traditionally viewed the Jews’ place in that growth. Beyond any number of underlying, infrastructural factors that paved the way for the rise of the cash economy and urban development, historians routinely point to the role of the Venetians in opening up new venues for international trade, broader and more varied markets, and new routes of communication to the eastern Mediterranean.°° Starting with Henri Pirenne, the Italian Maritimes were viewed not merely as mercantile revolutionaries but also as usurping the Jews in international trade. According to Pirenne’s now outdated view, the Jews had dominated Merovingian and Carolingian trade, because the underdeveloped economy of the European West had offered niche markets for the small-but-mobile Jewish traders who could cross between Islam and Christendom with ease. A new and widely accepted appreciation of the contribution of a variety of groups, including the Byzantines, has helped to overturn this simple construction of Jewish commercial preeminence in the Carolingian period. Still, in spite of the generalized revision of the Pirenne thesis, the aspect of it that presents the Jews as having been pushed out by the Italians still has currency. According to that argument, beginning in the tenth century, Venice, followed by Genoa and others, offered a dynamic, Christian alternative to the Jews, ultimately ousting them from their role in international trade.
The economic history of Byzantine Jewry does not contradict the view that the Venetians and other Italians were the primary vehicle of the Commercial Revolution; it does, however, demand that we reconsider the relative prominence of the Jews and their supposed decline. True, as the Italians came to prominence there was a period of competition between them and the Jews, implying some degree of conflict in mercantile interests. It is also true that the Venetians enjoyed the infrastructure of de facto statehood and the sanction of Christianity, allowing their capacity for trade to outstrip that of the Jews. Nevertheless, even if the Jews eventually ceased to compete, they nonetheless continued to contribute and, just as importantly, to prosper. By the late Byzantine period, the Byzantine Jews had folded their infrastructure into that of the Venetians and Genoese — a natural marriage, since they functioned on some similar mercantile principles. Unsurprisingly, therefore, an examination of the Byzantine-Jewish experience reveals that the Venetians did not usurp the Jews; on the contrary, Jewish trade, especially Byzantine-Jewish trade, actually followed in the wake of Venice and shared in the prosperity she generated. Significantly, the larger Byzantine economy itself followed a similar trajectory of urban growth vis-a-vis Venetian mercantilism. In this confluence of the Jewish and Byzantine fates during the Commercial Revolution, economic history further reveals itself at the center of important trends in the complex interactions between the Jewish minority and the wider Byzantine society.
The overarching picture, though limited to the middle Byzantine period, will inevitably leave holes between the various sources and conclusions, as is typical of Byzantine-Jewish history. But it is hoped that its focus will shed light on some important questions, and that it might recast some common assumptions of the Jewish experience in Byzantium and elsewhere.
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