Abstract: 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-jüdische 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.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-11-12
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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