STUDY QUESTIONS

Norman A. Stillman, "The Jew in the Medieval Islamic City" in Daniel Frank, ed., The Jews of Medieval Islam:  Community, Society, and Identity (New York, 1995): 3-13

Islam is -- and from its earliest days on the scene of world history has been -- first and foremost an urban civilization, although as the late Samuel M. Stern has pointed out, "this statement . . . is somewhat devoid of meaning; for all civilizations -- or let us be cautious and put it thus -- most civilizations are urban civilizations." (If Stern was exaggerating a bit here, it was to bring home a valid point.) Be that as it may, the Muslim Arab conquests of the seventh and early eighth centuries were followed almost immediately by a veritable wave of urbanization, the like of which the world west of India had not seen since Greco-Roman times. Western Europe would experience no such burgeoning of cities and towns for another four or five centuries.

As a result of the Islamic conquests, the majority of Jews living in the world at that time came under Arab rule. During this period of urbanization, the Jews -- particularly in their great demographic center of Babel, which now became Arab Iraq -- completed the transition that had already begun in talmudic times from an agrarian to a cosmopolitan way of life. Within the cities of the Muslim empire, Jews not only took part in creating the new and vibrant civilization that we call "medieval Islam," but also developed a flourishing Jewish culture along parallel lines. For it was during the Islamic High Middle Ages (ca. 850-1250) that the Babylonian Talmud gradually became the constitutional foundation of Diaspora Judaism, the synagogue service and the prayerbook text took on their familiar form, Jewish theology was systematized, Jewish law codified, and Hebrew language and literature enjoyed their greatest revival prior to their rebirth in modern times.

The founding of cities during the early Islamic period, or in some cases, the revitalizing of towns already in place, is amply documented in the Arabic historical and geographical literature, although the details of their development are not as clear as we would like them to be. The evolutionary process by which Middle Eastern Jewry came to play its part in so many medieval Islamic towns and cities is even hazier. The Arabic sources have relatively little to say about the internal history of the non-Muslim population at this time, while the Jews themselves wrote hardly anything on any subject (much less their own history) during the two crucial centuries of transition. As a result of their rapid military victories, the Arabs found themselves a tiny minority in a vast empire inhabited by Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians. Two fundamental problems that faced the conquerors were how to deal with this non-Muslim, non-Arab majority, and how to keep themselves from being absorbed into this mass of humanity.

The basic administrative rule seems to have been that those who surrendered, paid tribute, and conducted themselves with the demeanor and comportment befitting a subject population were left more or less alone to carry on their lives and practice their faith without fear of molestation, which in medieval times was no small concession. Eventually, the diverse rules and regulations imposed upon the conquered peoples were regularized under the so-called Pact of 'Umar which symbolized the social hierarchy of believer and non-believer in the traditional Muslim polity.

So much for the problem of dealing with the subject population. As to the problem of preserving their own identity, the Arabs solved this by not settling at first in large numbers in the native population centers. Rather, they established military garrisons (the amsar), located along their lines of communication safely inland from the Byzantine Sea (bar al-rum), as they called the Mediterranean. (This represented a major change from the situation in classical antiquity when the Mediterranean was Mare Nostrum and important towns were built either along the coast or within easy access to it by navigable river or road.) The amsar were laid out in a grid pattern. The Arab fighting men and their families settled in quadrangles reserved for their respective tribes or battle groups. These blocs eventually became urban quarters or neighborhoods, sometimes retaining the name of the original group that had settled there long after others had replaced them. Thus, for example, the al-Raya Quarter of Fustat (Old Cairo) was named for the troops that had borne the army's standard; half a millennium later, it had become a predominantly Christian neighborhood that was in the process of being bought up by Jews.

The early Caliphate was a great welfare state for the benefit of the Arab ruling caste who were paid out of the treasury from booty and tribute. Like all armies of occupation with considerable sums of money to spend, the Arabs needed goods and services and individuals to provide them. While respecting commerce (the Prophet himself was, after all, a merchant, as were many of the leading figures in the early Muslim community), they despised physical labor. As always in such situations, there was no lack of people among the conquered population willing to provide whatever the new overlords required. Newly converted natives (mawali), flocked to the garrison towns to serve the conquerors. In short order, the amsar began to grow into great urban centers, and the very word misr (sing. of amsar) came to denote "metropolis" in the Arabic of the High Middle Ages. Not only did the amsar become the nuclei for Islamic urbanization in the Middle East and North Africa, but at the same time, they became the crucible for Arabization, since here the Arabs were the majority. Those coming to serve them and to attach themselves to their umma (religious community) had to meet them on their own terms and to learn their language.

Many of the mawali were, to say the least, bitterly disaffected with the Umayyad regime (661-750) when they discovered that the Arab military caste not only was unwilling to allow them to pass from being tribute bearers to pension receivers, but treated them with thinly veiled contempt. In the end, however, the numbers of the newly converted swelled to such proportions that they would undermine the old tax base and with it Arab superiority, creating a new, more cosmopolitan social and economic order with expanded opportunities for all, including non-Muslims.

The Jews and Christians who did not convert could not at first go to the amsar except as slaves, which in Islamic as in Jewish society was an intermediate step to conversion and assimilation. For the first two generations of Arab rule, all movement in the Caliphate was severely restricted for a variety of reasons not least among them, military security. Added to this was the government's desire to ensure that taxes were not evaded. (Even in later, more liberal times, the bara'a, or receipt for taxes paid, was the traveler's basic passport.) And finally, there was the need to maintain the agricultural labor force that produced not only food, but such essential raw materials as fibers for cloth and oil for lamp fuel.

The Arabs did, however, shift groups of native non-Muslims to repopulate strategic coastal towns abandoned by their Greek inhabitants when the Byzantine troops pulled out. The Muslim historian of the Islamic conquests, al-Baladhuri, informs us that Mu`awiya, the governor of Syria and later caliph, moved a large body of Jews (from where, alas, we are not told but I would guess from the Syrian countryside) into the harbor fortification of Tripoli. The same writer mentions that people from different regions were settled together with some Arabs in reconstructed towns up and down the Levantine coast, including Acre and Tyre. Although he does not specify who these others were, we can assume that there were Jews among them, since these towns did indeed have visible Jewish communities in the years that followed.

As travel restrictions eased, Arabs began filtering into pre-existing towns, while Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians began moving into the amsar. Furthermore, despite the attempts by the Muslim authorities to staunch the flow, there was a wholesale flight of peasants from the villages to the anonymity of the cities in order to escape the crushing tax burden which weighed even more heavily upon them than upon any other element in the population.

Since early rabbinic times, there has been an invidious distinction in Jewish society between the urban scholar, or talmid hakham, and the unlettered Israelite peasant, or 'am ha-ares. In fact, in the words of one rather unkind mishnaic dictum: ein bur yere het ye-lo 'am ha-ares hasid (An uncultured person does not fear sin, and a peasant cannot be a pious man ). The Jewish scholar had preferred living in town long before the advent of Islam because it was there that he could find the ten necessities and conveniences of the pious life ennumerated in the Talmud; namely: (1) a court with full authority; (2) a charitable welfare fund; (3) a synagogue; (4) a bath house; (5) toilet facilities; (6) a physician; (7) artisans; (8) a scribe; (9) a ritual slaughterer; and (10) a teacher for children. In another talmudic passage, scholars are advised not to live in a town in which vegetables are unavailable. The great medieval French commentator Rashi explains this curious recommendation as meaning that the scholar should be able to buy this excellent foodstuff cheaply (and not have to spend time raising it), so that he can devote himself to study.

Despite the urban proclivities of the Jewish scholarly elite, landownership and agriculture were still the norm in talmudic days, although the transformation to city and commercial life had begun even then. The social and economic upheavals that took place during the century following the Islamic conquests gave this process a new impetus.

Jewish law, as it developed in the medieval Muslim urban setting, came to reflect these fundamental changes in the realities of Jewish socioeconomic life. Even though some of the Babylonian amoraim, such as Rav Assi (third century C.E.), had stated that money is like real estate (kesafim harei hen ke-qarqa`), a great many aspects of Jewish law are based upon the presumption of land ownership. During the medieval Islamic period, movable goods (mittaltelin, in halakhic usage) -- the mark of an urban commercial society -- came to be recognized as the equivalent of land. Moses b. Jacob, who was the Gaon of Sura in the first half of the ninth century, writes in a responsum that movables may be collected by a woman or a creditor instead of land because "nowadays, most people do not own real estate," and therefore the rabbis issued an ordinance (taqqanah) reforming the legal usage."

It is true that the records of certain transactions before Jewish courts that have been preserved in the Cairo Genizah include ancient legal formulas mentioning land. But as S.D. Goitein has pointed out, these formulas were merely symbolic, as, for example, those mentioning the sale of one's hypothetical share in the soil of the Holy Land and did not involve the transfer of land at all. The only real estate deals in the Genizah records have to do with urban properties: apartments, shops, and building complexes. This is not to say that no Jews remained in agriculture, or that all of them had moved to the city. Until at least the twelfth century, there were Jews in Egypt with agricultural interests. Most of these, however, were absentee landlords who lived in the cities, while others worked their land. In medieval Spain, there were Jewish farmers and orchard owners, and they could also be found in North Africa up until modern times. But these were clearly the exception that proves the rule.

By the time our historical sources begin to give us a detailed picture of Jewish life in the medieval Islamic world, that is, sometime around the tenth century,we find the Jews already transformed into an overwhelmingly urban group with a high degree of communal organization both on the local and international level. Within the medieval Islamic city, in fact, the Jews, like the Christians, constituted a semi-autonomous polity. The Islamic city was a place where people lived, not a corporation to which they belonged. This is a real, and not a sophistic distinction, and one that ought to be emphasized.

The medieval Islamic city was not a city in the Weberian sense. It may be recalled that for Weber the five distinguishing marks of a city were: (1) fortifications; (2) markets; (3) a court administering a partially autonomous law; (4) distinguishing urban forms of association; and (5) at least partial autonomy. Weber based his model principally upon European cities as they developed in the Middle Ages. That Middle Eastern cities did not fit this categorization, is, of course, not to due to Islam, although the Islamic legal and social system helped to further the difference. As Gustave von Grunebaum has pointed out, the principal difference between Muslim adab and Greek educational ideals was the absence in Islam of the political or civic element, the buergerliche Tuechtigkeit. Even the Hellenistic cities of the Near East had lost their corporate characters centuries earlier. They were population centers, conglomerations ruled by administrative representatives of centralized imperial bureaucracies whose seat of power was far away. Frequently, the officials were foreign military officers. Muslim urban administration was, on the whole, compatible with this tradition.

Even before Islam, corporate identity in the Middle East lay in religious communities. Civic life was congregational life. It so happened that the Jews and the Christians had preserved many of the Greco-Roman civic norms within their congregations. By contrast, the Zoroastrians, who had no such civic tradition at the communal level, quickly dwindled into insignificance.

The designation of the Jewish community as "holy congregation" (Heb. qahal qadosh) was, as Goitein has observed, the diaspora equivalent of the biblical "kingdom of priests and holy people" (Ex. 19:6). Most often, the Jewish sources referred to the community at large simply as "Israel," that is, the nation itself. The synagogue was the assembly of the polis, hence the name beit kenesset, which to this day remains its most common Hebrew designation. (Naturally it was also a house of prayer and study, as well as a social club.) Where there was only one congregation, it was entirely coextensive with the Jewish community. Where there was more than one, as in those towns having both a Palestinian and a Babylonian synagogue, civic life was two-tiered.

Public services were primarily the functions of the individual confessional communities, not those of the government. The Jewish community's civic organization and spirit were, therefore, all the more necessary for the administration of its own institutions of health, education, and welfare, which as we know from the Genizah records were highly organized and greatly sophisticated.

Most of the large-scale pious endowments and charitable institutions established by rulers or government officials in Islamic states were done by them as individual Muslims for the benefit of their coreligionists and, of course, for their own salvation. The directive issued by the Vizier 'All ibn 'Isa (d. 946) to his chief medical officer Sinan ibn Thabit to admit dhimmis as well as Muslims to the great Bimaristan (hospital) of Baghdad was exceptional. However, he made it clear that in the dispensaries outside the capital, where facilities were more limited, the rule was to be "humans before animals and Muslims before dhimmis."

Although Jews formed a tightly knit polity, they did not live in ghettos as such. In some cities, they did live within their own quarters. In Baghdad, which was built upon a site that had included Jewish villages, there was a section known as Qati`at al-Yahud (the Jews' fief) or Dar al-Yahud (the Domain of the Jews). Likewise, the bridge connecting the quarter with the next neighborhood across a canal was called Qantarat al-Yahud (the Jews' Bridge). In Jerusalem, too, the Jews seem to have inhabited their own quarters. And for Islamic Spain Eliyahu Ashtor has reconstructed a number of Andalusian Jewish quarters, providing some interesting demographic estimates. Goitein has concluded that in Fustat (Old Cairo), on the other hand, there were no Jewish quarters as such, only neighborhoods with highly concentrated Jewish populations. Menahem Ben-Sasson has observed a similar situation in medieval Kairouan.

The existence of Jewish neighborhoods in some cities and Jewish quarters in others is in no way surprising. Jews had, as anyone familiar with the requirements of traditional Jewish life is fully aware, to live within easy walking distance of such facilities as the synagogue and mikveh (ritual bath). Because of the stipulations of the Pact of 'Umar, it was advisable not to have the synagogue near a large concentration of Muslims. It was also preferable to have a route of access to the Jewish cemetery that did not go through a predominantly Muslim neighborhood. Indeed, dhimmi funeral processions were the object of occasional harassment, sometimes minor, sometimes serious,from medieval to modern times. In light of this potential for interconfessional friction, it is noteworthy that the Jewish neighborhoods of Old Cairo, Kairouan, and (we may assume) other important cities as well, were mixed neighborhoods with some non-Jewish residents.

It was only in later medieval times, when the Muslim world began to close in upon itself as a result of a variety of pressures from without and within, as the non-Muslims became a more marginal element in the population, were the Jews restricted to enclosed quarters such as the mellah in Morocco, the hara in Tunisia, or the qa`at al-yahud in Yemen. It must be borne in mind that this was a rather late development, that it was by no means universal in the Islamic world, and that it took place primarily in those areas where the Jews were the only remaining non-Muslims. The transfer of the Jews of the mellah of Fez, for example, took place in 1438, when the Merinid Sultan 'Abd al-Haqq b. Abi Sa`id required them to move into special quarters next to the dar al-makhzan, the government administrative center in New Fez. This was the first of the enforced settlements. As it happens, this was done to protect the Jews from the increasing hostility of the population. It never fulfilled its protective function very well, however, and later came to denote the Jews' outcaste status.

The Jews' transformation from an agrarian to a cosmopolitan people in the medieval Islamic city was followed by a socioeconomic evolution within the city itself. At first, it would seem, they formed, along with the other ax-country folk, part of the new urban proletarian mass. The ninth century writer al-Jahiz in one of his well-known essays explains that one of reasons the Muslim masses have greater respect for the Christians than the Jews is that:

among them [i.e., the Christians] are to be found government secretaries, attendants of kings, physicians of nobles, perfumers, and bankers; whereas you will find a Jew only as a dyer, a tanner, a cupper, a butcher, or a tinker.

Jews never came to dominate the financial scene in Baghdad or other medieval Islamic cities, despite the arguments to the contrary of the late Louis Massignon in a famous article, based, unfortunately, upon very scanty evidence. Most of the great bankers of the eighth through tenth centuries in the Abbasid Caliphate seem to have been Christians, and it is Christians, not Jews, who remained the stereotypical men of money in Arabic literature and lore. Even during the period of decline in the later Middle Ages, however, there were still a small number of Jews who played a significant role in the commercial and financial life of several major Islamic cities. At the close of the Middle Ages, the Jews in many Islamic urban centers began to enjoy a brief cultural and economic revival with the influx of Sephardi refugees expelled from Spain, Portugal, and Sicily. It was only in the last hundred years, however, that the Jews in the cities of the Muslim world once again underwent a tremendous social upheaval and transformation.