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Podcast: New Books in Medieval History
Episode: Phillip Lieberman, "The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Description: In The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West (Cambridge UP, 2022), Phillip Lieberman revisits one of the foundational narratives of medieval Jewish history--that the rise of Islam led the Jews of Babylonia, the largest Jewish community prior to the rise of Islam, to abandon a livelihood based on agriculture and move into urban crafts and long-distance trade. Here, he presents an alternative account that reveals the complexity of interfaith relations in early Islam. Using Jewish and Islamic chronicles, legal materials, and the rich documentary evidence of the Cairo Ge...