Revisiting Jewish Occupational Choice and Urbanization in Iraq Under the Early Abbasids

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Jewish History ISSN 0334-701X Jew HistoryDOI 10.1007/s10835-015-9235-4

Revisiting Jewish Occupational Choiceand Urbanization in Iraq under the EarlyAbbasids

Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman

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Jewish History © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015DOI 10.1007/s10835-015-9235-4

Revisiting Jewish Occupational Choice and Urbanization in Iraqunder the Early Abbasids

PHILLIP I. ACKERMAN-LIEBERMANVanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USAE-mail: [email protected]

Abstract Scholarly consensus currently holds that with the rise of Islam and particularlywith the establishment of Abbasid rule, the Jews of Babylonia overwhelmingly shifted fromagricultural pursuits to crafts and trade, and that this occupational shift was accompanied bya move to urban environments, particularly to Baghdad. In this article, I challenge this un-derstanding by reviewing and reinterpreting the geonic evidence on which this conjecture isbased. I support my view with additional detail both from the geonim themselves and fromcurrent research concerning the Abbasid environment in general. I conclude that Jews con-tinued to be involved in agricultural pursuits in rural Iraq well into the Abbasid period. Thisconclusion may also have implications for those who believe that Jewish urbanization in theseventh and eighth centuries led to a subsequent westward migration from Iraq to the IslamicMediterranean.

Keywords Urbanization · Babylonia · Migration · Iraq · Geonim

Introduction

The responsa of the Babylonian geonim—the scholars who directed the cen-ters of Jewish learning following the completion of the Talmud around themiddle of the sixth century CE—help fill in historical information about a pe-riod for which there are few documentary sources. Invariably, historians havestrung together a handful of incidental details found in these responsa into acoherent narrative. The paucity of actual documentary evidence concerningJewish life in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages has long led scholarsto hang their narratives on one or another hook in the literary or documen-tary sources. Yet these narratives can often be dismantled when the primarysources that support the narrative are revisited. Working in this vein, MichaelToch has recently challenged much of the received wisdom concerning Jew-ish economic history in the period largely by revisiting and reinterpreting thefew sources on which the conventional understanding has relied.1

In this article, I will show how two isolated sources from geonic author-ities in the late eighth and ninth centuries have cast a long shadow among

1Michael Toch, The Economic History of European Jews: Late Antiquity and Early MiddleAges (Leiden, 2012).

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historians and economists exploring Jewish settlement and occupational pat-terns in Iraq at the beginning of the Abbasid period (750–1258). These schol-ars have used these data to support the idea popularized in a recent bookby the economists Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein that “from the mid-eighth century, the Jews in Mesopotamia and Persia left the rural villages andmoved to the newly established towns and urban centers. This movement wasso overwhelming that by the late ninth century, the Jewish population in theMiddle East was almost entirely urban. The migration to the cities coincidedwith the fact that agriculture was no longer the main occupation and sourceof income of the Jews in the Middle East.”2 In the pages that follow, I willreread the geonic material used by these historians and economists in order tosupport an alternate narrative that points to Jewish persistence in agriculturalpursuits in the hinterlands of Iraq. While the Abbasid establishment of Bagh-dad in 762 as a caliphal city would certainly have provided an incentive forJews seeking access to the corridors of caliphal power to migrate there, I willargue that the rise of urban centers under the newly formed Abbasid rule didnot in fact provide the impetus for broad-based urbanization of Jews whohad formerly been involved in agriculture. Specifically, I argue that a geonictaqqanah (decree) in the second half of the eighth century and a subsequentninth-century responsum, which these historians and economists have takenas harbingers of urbanization, actually point to changes in land-holding pat-terns per se rather than changes in occupational and settlement patterns.

Jewish Settlement and Urbanization in the Early Centuries of Islam

In his discussion of Babylonian Jewry, Isaiah Gafni concedes that “any at-tempt to estimate the Jewish population is an exercise in futility,” but henotes that “various ‘educated guesses’ have usually hovered at the one mil-lion mark, which if correct, renders the Babylonian Jewish community of thethird to seventh centuries as the largest concentration of Jews in the Dias-pora.”3 Iraq was therefore both a demographic and a spiritual center of worldJewry at the time of the rise of Islam. However, scholars have noted a declinein this community (in numbers, if not in spiritual hegemony) relative to theJewish communities of the Mediterranean shortly thereafter. Thus, the earlycenturies of Islam may be seen as a critical period in the development andtransformation of the world Jewish population. Historians of the period have

2Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish His-tory, 70–1492 (Princeton, NJ, 2012), 33.3Isaiah Gafni, “The Political, Social, and Economic History of Babylonian Jewry, 224–638CE,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, ed. Steven T. Katz (Cambridge, 2006), 4:805.


URBANIZATION IN IRAQ UNDER THE EARLY ABBASIDS

explained the Jews’ westward movement as taking place in two stages: first,a broad-based urbanization associated with a shift from agriculture (the pri-mary pursuit of Jews in the Sasanian period, which itself extended from themiddle of the third century to the middle of the seventh) into crafts and trade;4

and, second, a migration from Babylonia westward to the Mediterranean.Scholars have long understood that shortly after its establishment in 762,

Baghdad became a center of Jewish population. Indeed, Jacob Mann con-jectured in 1917 that the Exilarch had his residence in Baghdad from thevery accession of the Abbasids and that the city quickly came to include animportant Jewish settlement.5 Mann clearly saw the attraction of Baghdadas extending beyond the Jewish political and economic elite who may havewished to live in close proximity to the Muslim authorities; he explained thatmany Jews were attracted to Baghdad due to its rapid development as a com-mercial center. Supporting this narrative, he turned to a geonic taqqanah fromthe year 787 abrogating a Talmudic precedent prohibiting orphans from col-lecting debts on movable property.6 Mann argued that the changed economicconditions of Jews in Iraq, as they shifted from agriculture to urban craftsand trade, led the geonim of Babylonia to act in concert with the Exilarchto implement this substantive legal change. The view that this taqqanah wasprompted by economic changes in the mid-eighth century has had substan-tial traction among scholars. Writing more than eight decades after Mann,Robert Brody explains that “the shift from an agrarian to an urbanized, com-mercial society led to a situation in which few Jews owned real estate, andmany creditors (and widows) would have been unable to collect the moniesdue them.”7 Although the occupational transformation and urbanization en-visioned by Mann and Brody could have led the Jews to population centersother than Baghdad, Mann writes that “the town of Baghdad, . . . foundedby al-Mans.ur in 762, but not finished till some years later, soon became the

4Pace Louis Jacobs, who argues that this transformation took place before the rise of Islamwhen he writes concerning the Talmudic era, spanning the period from the close of the Mishnain around 220 until the close of the Talmud around 550, that “it was in Babylon, the secondgreat centre of Jewish life, that the transition took place which transformed the Jewish peoplefrom an agricultural to a commercial people.” Louis Jacobs, “The Economic Conditions of theJews in Babylon in Talmudic Times Compared with Palestine,” Journal of Semitic Studies 2,no. 4 (1957): 359.5Jacob Mann, “The Responsa of the Babylonian Geonim as a Source of Jewish History,” pt. 1,Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 7, no. 4 (1917): 465–66.6For a discussion of the sources for dating the taqqanah, see Robert Brody, “Kelum hayu ha-ge»onim meh. oqeqim?” [Were the geonim legislators?], Shenaton ha-mishpat. ha-–ivri 11–12(1984–86): 304–5.7Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (NewHaven, CT, 1998), 63.



principal centre for the Jews of Irak.”8 Brody mentions the relocation of theacademic institutions of Sura and Pumbedita to Baghdad but seems to makeno claims concerning the migration of the bulk of the Jewish population toBaghdad as opposed to the other urban centers.

The rise of Baghdad, and perhaps the establishment of Abbasid garrisoncities in general, is understood to have had far-reaching effects on the Jewishcommunity of Babylonia. The shift in population from the agricultural settle-ments abutting the Euphrates and the Tigris to urban settlements in Baghdadand the shift from owning land to owning movable property has been takento point to a corresponding shift out of farming and into skilled occupations.Botticini and Eckstein rely on this occupational shift to conclude that “Jewshad a comparative advantage in the skilled occupations demanded in the newurban centers (such as Baghdad) developed in Iraq by the Muslim rulers inthe eighth century.”9 In their view, this “comparative advantage” had its rootsin distinctive Jewish educational practices (specifically, widespread trainingin literacy) that facilitated a shift among the Jews from agriculture to craftsand trade that was not experienced to the same extent by the non-Jewish ruralpopulation. Botticini and Eckstein argue that it was this advantage that en-abled Jews to urbanize at a rate far higher than their Muslim counterparts.10

The geonic taqqanah seems to support this narrative: the widespreadagreement among Babylonian Jewish authorities suggests what Brody calls

8Mann, “Responsa of the Babylonian Geonim,” pt. 1, 465.9Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, “Jewish Occupational Selection: Education, Restric-tions, or Minorities?,” Journal of Economic History 65, no. 4 (2005): 923.10Botticini and Eckstein, The Chosen Few, 139–42. It is worth mentioning at this point thatliteracy would likely not have provided a significant comparative advantage in urban craftsand trade, since the process of training for most urban crafts in the premodern world generallywould not have required or benefited from reading and writing at all. In some cases, Botticiniand Eckstein may be right—urban centers certainly would have benefited from scribes, andbanking (such as it was in the eighth-century Islamic orbit) would clearly be well served byindividuals who were literate. However, many of the urban roles ascribed to Jews in the eighthcentury (which I will discuss below), such as dyers, tanners, cuppers, butchers, and cobblers,would not have benefited in any way from literacy. One might argue, then, that the Jews’comparative advantage lay not in literacy per se, but rather in an aptitude for analytical thinkingenhanced by the study of the Talmud; but this argument fails as well, since successful pursuitof agriculture requires the careful mobilization of time and tools no less than does butcheringor cupping. In this regard, the extensive Talmudic literature on borrowing and lending moneyto facilitate agriculture comes to mind. Thus, Botticini and Eckstein’s argument fails primafacie on economic grounds, although it is my goal in this article to engage their argumenton historical grounds as well. Finally, even Eliyahu Ashtor admits that the vast majority ofmerchants who (in his estimation) participated in the massive westward move were illiterate.Eliyahu Ashtor, “Un mouvement migratoire au haut Moyen Age: Migration de l’Irak vers lespays méditerranéens,” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 27, no. 1 (1972): 197.



“a radical shift in reality.”11 Brody does point out that the scholars of thePumbeditan yeshivah only gradually accepted this taqqanah, and the Suranauthorities even had to impose a penalty on judges who failed to implementit.12 A rabbinic responsum dating roughly a half century later (attributed tothe ninth-century notable Moses b. Jacob Gaon of the Suran yeshivah) ap-pears to bolster Brody’s understanding of this radical shift, as it clearly al-ludes to the economic forces motivating the taqqanah:

The rabbis decreed collection of a woman’s ketubbah and alender’s [loan] even from movable property, since here most ofthe world [ruba de-–alma] has no land [leit lahon meqarqa–ei]. Thelater rabbis effected the decree [taqqanah] in order not to close thedoor to borrowers and [to allow] a woman to rely on her ketubbah.They learned [about making such enactments] from the earlier de-crees that the sages made in every generation. . . . However, inother places, where most people [ruba de-inshei] own land, if theydo not specify “chattel during my lifetime and after my death,” awoman’s ketubbah and a lender’s [loan] are only to be collectedfrom real property.13

The explanation that most Jews (ruba de-–alma) did not own land fits wellwith the received narrative of the migration of Jewish elites to Baghdad inorder to gain access to the corridors of Abbasid power.14 Brody points outthat Moses b. Jacob Gaon’s statement does not say that Jews did not own landanywhere; rather, it indicates that urbanization and the shift to commercial asopposed to agricultural pursuits had generally taken hold in Iraq—certainlyby the end of the first half of the ninth century.

Seen in this light, Moses b. Jacob’s responsum may be read (and, indeed,seems to have been read) to indicate a mass urbanization, a broad-based mi-gration to the urban areas of Iraq and particularly to Baghdad, simultaneouswith or slightly after the move by the Exilarch to the caliphal center. Themigration to the cities and the occupational shift that scholars infer from theresponsum depicts the Jews as part of a broader trend (if, as Botticini andEckstein would have it, a disproportionately concentrated part of that trend)shifting away from agriculture and into urban crafts and trade. Indeed, this

11Brody, “Kelum hayu ha-ge»onim meh. oqeqim?,” 312.12Ibid., 304–14, esp. 306–7.13Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. For the original text, see BenjaminManasseh Lewin, ed., Os. ar ha-ge»onim (Jerusalem, 1939), 7:210 n. 531. Moses Gaon led theSuran yeshivah from 829 to 839.14This explanation is in accord with the narrative regardless of whether it comes from the firsthalf of the ninth century, to which the geonic responsum in which it appears may be attributed,or the second half of the eighth century, to which the taqqanah itself is attributed.



may have been a phenomenon affecting all of Iraq: the rise of what S. D.Goitein calls the “Middle Eastern bourgeoisie” has its roots in the periodcovered by these geonic materials, if not before. (In Goitein’s view, mer-chants greatly rose in prominence—and, presumably, in number—from themiddle of the ninth century onward.)15 Of course, Jewish financiers fromthis period are well known,16 but Goitein sees the rise of the “Middle Easternbourgeoisie” as directly affecting rank-and-file Jews as well: “The ‘bourgeoisrevolution’ of the Middle East during the early centuries of Islam had manyrepercussions on world history. To mention just one: through it the Jews, whohad up to that time had been engaged mainly in agriculture and other manualoccupations, were converted into a predominantly commercial people.”17

As scholars read the taqqanah, then, the geonic authorities were sim-ply responding to the Jews’ transformation into a predominantly commercialpeople amidst broader commercializing and urbanizing trends in the period.Goitein’s description of a broad-based Islamic “bourgeois revolution” sup-ports and underpins Botticini and Eckstein’s narrative: they understood thecomparative economic advantage of Jews as being due to their superior levelsof literacy, which resulted in their disproportionate commercialization and ur-banization amidst a broader such trend in eighth- and ninth-century AbbasidIraq.

Economic Alternatives to Urbanization

The received scholarly wisdom that connects the rise of the Baghdadi centerwith the geonic taqqanah in order to suggest a broad-based Jewish migrationfrom rural to urban areas and a corresponding occupational shift has clearlyhad great influence on historians and economists alike. This connection is en-couraged by the testimony that the geonic taqqanah was promulgated aroundthe year 787, shortly after the Abbasid caliph al-Mans.ur founded Baghdad.The city’s rapid expansion is well documented;18 this expansion would cer-

15S. D. Goitein, “The Rise of the Middle-Eastern Bourgeoisie in Early Islamic Times,” inStudies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden, 1966).16See Walter Joseph Fischel, Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Mediaeval Islam(New York, 1969), for a discussion of a number of these individuals.17Goitein, “Rise of the Middle-Eastern Bourgeoisie,” 241. Likewise, Goitein writes that “theJewish people, too, so to say, died as an agricultural people during the seventh and eighthcenturies, but, unlike other populations, returned to life as a nation of merchants and artisans.”S. D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs: A Concise History of Their Social and Cultural Relations, 3rdrev. ed. (repr., Mineola, NY, 2005), 7.18See, e.g., Jacob Lassner, The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages (Detroit,1970), 155–77.



tainly have stimulated a plethora of economic opportunities, and the erst-while agrarian Jewish populace may well have accompanied the Jewish in-tellectual, political, and economic elite to Baghdad. Yet, as Hugh Kennedyhas recently pointed out, those economic opportunities trickled down to theagrarian populace dwelling outside the cities as well.19 Burgeoning irriga-tional infrastructure and the expansion of river transport led to intensifiedrural settlement akin to that seen in the urban areas (although not, perhaps,to the same degree). These findings suggest that the bulk of rural-dwellingJews would have had little economic incentive to follow their leadership fromtheir widespread agricultural settlements along the Tigris and Euphrates tothe Baghdadi center. Over the course of this article, I will present evidencefrom both geonic sources and medieval Islamic chronicles to support the ideaof continued Jewish settlement in agricultural settlements outside Baghdad.

I will also argue that the language of Moses b. Jacob’s responsum statingthat “here most of the world [the majority of Jews] has no land” need notindicate that Jews had absented themselves from agricultural pursuits.20 Theresponsum and the geonic taqqanah concerning the collection of debts mayhave been driven by a Jewish shift out of landownership, but Jews may havecontinued to take advantage of the expanding agricultural opportunities in theIraqi hinterlands even without being landowners per se, functioning insteadas métayers (tenant farmers). Indeed, rabbinic literature both earlier and laterthan the period under discussion indicates that landownership and partici-pation in agriculture were not identical. For example, in a twelfth-centuryTalmudic commentary, Samuel b. Meir of Troyes explains that “it seems tome that at this time, when [we] do not have so much land, we rule in accor-dance with the taqqanah of the geonim concerning collection of a woman’sbridal payment and we collect debts from chattel that fathers have bequeathedtheir children, despite the fact that [the Talmud] establishes that the move-able property of heirs is not credited to creditors.”21 Although, as HaymSoloveitchik points out, the twelfth century saw the Jews of France “beingforced out of landholding,”22 a fact that seems to be recognized by Samuel’sstatement, these Jews nonetheless persisted in wine growing. If they were

19Hugh Kennedy, “Feeding the Five Hundred Thousand: Cities and Agriculture in Early Is-lamic Mesopotamia,” Iraq 73 (2011): 177–200.20Indeed, it is worth pointing out that those who held sufficient land to allow for compulsorysale to pay debts probably had the wherewithal to choose to live in urban areas if they so de-sired, leaving their property to be worked as latifundia. At the same time, subsistence farmersand métayers would have lived on their land or close to it. That is to say, there is no necessarycorrelation between landownership and place of residence.21Samuel b. Meir of Troyes [“Rashbam,” ca. 1085–ca. 1158], commentary on BabylonianTalmud Bava Batra 174a.22Haym Soloveitchik, “Can Halakhic Texts Talk History?,” AJS Review 3 (1978): 187.



able to continue their agricultural pursuits despite losing their landowner sta-tus, there seems to be no reason why Jews in Babylonia could not have doneso as well.23 Let us consider, then, a narrow reading of Moses’s responsumthat focuses strictly on his own testimony concerning landownership. Evenif by the first half of the ninth century Jews no longer owned land, this factdoes not preclude their having persisted in agrarian pursuits simply by meansof métayage.

In fact, a similar transformation from small-scale farming to large-scalelandownership served by métayage is known to have begun in the first cen-tury and to have intensified in the early amoraic period (ca. 220–400).24

Zeev Safrai explains that in the wake of the first- and second-century re-volts in Palestine, Roman authorities confiscated large tracts of land that theysubsequently distributed to their loyalists. This led to the decline in owner-ship of small farms, though not to the decline of small-scale agriculture perse. Indeed, the Colonatus Law, imposed in 380, explicitly prohibited tenantfarmers from abandoning their fields.25 Daniel Sperber notes the economicadvantage and reduction in risk associated with diversification across multi-ple plots that was afforded the large-scale landowner by this system.26 Thus,while peasant farmers may no longer have owned their land, they hardly gaveup agricultural pursuits. Sperber explains that one benefit from consolidatinglandholdings would have been that landowners would have been powerfulenough to negotiate their own arrangements with tax farmers. In the wakeof these economic transformations, amoraic literature accounts for the de-parture from landowning and the corresponding expansion of métayage onthe part of Jews. While this literature might not have favored the emerg-ing class of large landowners, these landlords “could afford to protect theirclients or dependents, the villager and the small peasant farmer, from theeven greater iniquity and injustice of the government.”27 This transforma-

23Cf. Teshuvot of Nat.ronai, Orah. H. ayyim, no. 164. Mann argues that “wine-growing wasrare in that country [Iraq],” and Patrick E. McGovern notes that “Southern Mesopotamia of-fered poor prospects for producing wine because of its hot climate”—pace Julius Newman,who contends that viniculture was indeed known in Babylonia in the Talmudic period. JacobMann, “The Responsa of the Babylonian Geonim as a Source of Jewish History,” pt. 2, Jew-ish Quarterly Review, n.s., 10, no. 2 (1919–20): 314; Patrick E. McGovern, Ancient Wine:The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 163; Julius Newman, TheAgricultural Life of the Jews in Babylonia (Oxford, 1932), 93–97.24Zeev Safrai, “Agriculture and Farming,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life inRoman Palestine, ed. Catherine Heszer (Oxford, 2010), 250–51.25Ibid., 251.26Sperber writes that a large landowner “was less likely to lose all his crops or his stock,and moreover had reserves of cash to tide him over.” Daniel Sperber, “Patronage in AmoraicPalestine (c. 220–400): Causes and Effects,” Journal of the Economic and Social History ofthe Orient 14, no. 3 (1971): 227.27Ibid., 234.



tion led to the emergence of legal and narrative materials concerning largelandowners (ba–alei zeroa–), as well as the expansion of materials pertainingto métayage (arisut). Therefore, a shift from small-scale land tenancy to mé-tayage among Jews in Babylonia (whether in the eighth and ninth centuriesor earlier in the amoraic period) would not have necessitated the develop-ment of law in these areas, since such legal institutions had already come tomaturity several hundred years before in Palestine.28 Whether or not the land-holding patterns described by Safrai and Sperber held through the Byzantineperiod, the Palestinian legal sources known to the Babylonian geonim wouldhave understood agriculture managed through landholding as being comple-mented by métayage. The development of the legal institution of métayagein Palestine (in, say, the fourth century) could then have been absorbed by aBabylonian community that underwent changes in landholding patterns butnot necessarily in occupational patterns several hundred years later. Indeed,the Babylonian Talmud assimilates the institution of arisut as well as otherforms of tenant farming from tannaitic sources (which date as late as theearly third century); Julius Newman even notes that “the system by whichJews held land for cultivation in Babylonia did not essentially differ from theone prevailing in Palestine.”29

Some problems with the scholarly understanding that landholding and oc-cupational patterns were indeed linked can be illuminated through a carefulreading of Moses’s responsum. It is worthwhile pointing out that Moses doesnot intend the phrase ruba de-–alma in his responsum to refer to the Jew-ish population throughout the world, but only to those Jews living in areaswhere most Jews (or, perhaps, most people) do not own land. Therefore hecontrasts such places, where he would apply the eighth-century taqqanah,with those where “most people” (ruba de-inshei) did indeed own land. WhileMann and Brody limit the scope of Moses’s statement to Babylonia, thereis nothing in his responsum to indicate that he has only Babylonia in mind.Moses may even have intended his responsum to apply both to Babylonia(where landholdings might have been consolidated in the eighth and ninthcenturies) and to Palestine (where this might have happened centuries be-fore). An exploration of landholding patterns prior to and directly after therise of Abbasid rule may help determine whether Moses’s statement points toa Jewish economic particularism or whether the shift out of small-scale land-holding betokened by Moses’ statement was typical of the Iraqi environmentas a whole in the second half of the eighth and first half of the ninth century.

28Julius Newman points out the similarity in economic conditions between Babylonia andPalestine and also situates the changes in Jewish landownership in Babylonia somewhat ear-lier, in the late fifth century, due to economic crises in the Sasanian Empire. Newman, Agri-cultural Life, 36.29Ibid., 49.



Changing Landholding Patterns in Iraq

Scholars believe the Jewish population of Babylonia to have been “a repre-sentative cross-section of the Aramaean population in the Sasanian period.”30

While the Jews generally would have been involved in agriculture in the Sasa-nian and early Islamic periods (from, say, 250 to 750), landholding wouldhardly have been universal even among farmers. Furthermore, Michael Mo-rony explains that Jews in Babylonia experienced the same sort of trans-formation in landholding patterns ascribed by Safrai to Roman Palestine:“Beginning in about the fourth century, conditions seem to have become evenmore intolerable for Jewish laborers and peasants. Wealthy Jewish landlordstook advantage of the problems of small farmers whose property was sold fordebts to increase their own estates. In the late Sasanian period, independentsmall farmers in the Sawad were replaced by estates with villages of tenantfarmers or slaves. By the fourth century, investment in commerce broughta better return than agriculture for Jews of moderate means.”31 By the ar-rival of Islam in the first half of the seventh century, then, tenant farmingseems to have been the primary mode of agricultural production for the Jew-ish population rather than small-scale landownership. Further, while Moronysuggests that mercantile pursuits would have become more profitable thanagriculture, both those of less than “moderate means” and those with greatermeans would have had reason to remain on the land—the impoverished ma-jority, because they lacked financial capital; the wealthy, because they couldexpand their holdings and take advantage of economies of scale.

As Abbasid rulers established their military center at Baghdad, the op-portunities to profit from large-scale agriculture proliferated. Burgeoningdemand for foodstuffs combined with regularized legal frameworks for land-holding to motivate “continuing demand for private property from rich andpowerful men in the early Islamic state.”32 Taking full advantage of theseagricultural opportunities demanded the digging of canals, some of whichwas undertaken by local governors in the hope of generating increased taxrevenues. Expanding irrigational infrastructure would presumably raise taxrevenue in two ways: first, by engendering improved agricultural produc-tivity and thereby deepening the tax base, and second, by changing the legalstatus of the land, which would correspondingly change the tax rate. As noted

30Michael G. Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, Princeton Studies on the Near East(Princeton, NJ, 1984), 310. Note that Morony’s explanation of these changing landholdingpatterns accords with Newman’s characterization from Talmudic sources a half century earlier.Newman, Agricultural Life, 49–61.31Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 311.32Kennedy, “Feeding the Five Hundred Thousand,” 181.



by the eighth-century authority Abu Yusuf in his treatise on taxation Kitabal-Kharaj, the –ushr (tithe) tax was collected only on lands that still requiredinvestment in infrastructure to become productive; land that did not requiresuch investment, or land that was “irrigated from rivers flowing in kharajlands,” would be considered kharaj land and therefore subject to tax at twicethis rate.33 Investment in irrigational infrastructure would also have servedthe purpose of expanding food supplies to the swelling military populationsin the cities of Basra and—from 762—Baghdad.

Abbasid tax policy seems to have had a significant effect on landholdingpatterns in general, suggesting a general shift from small-scale landholdingto métayage for which the Jewish case would have been typical. Where Ab-basid administrators’ implementation of kharaj and other taxes was onerous,landowners were able to escape this burden or to lighten it by nominallytransferring ownership of the land to patrons. While this provided protection(in Arabic, h. imaya) from the extortion of unscrupulous tax collectors andabsolved erstwhile owners from onerous tax debts,34 it had deleterious con-sequences over time for the original owners of the land. With their namesremoved from the tax rolls, these individuals could no longer establish theiractual ownership of the land. In his analysis of Iraqi agriculture during theAbbasid period, Husam El-Samarraie writes that “the practice of the h. imayasometimes resulted in a shared property, but as time passed, the protector of-ten became the virtual owner, because it was usually impossible for the orig-inal owner to prove his claim against the assertion of a superior who referredto the tax register for confirmation of the claim. Under these conditions manyof the original landowners were reduced to the status of mere share-croppersor métayer.”35 Thus, there were not only fundamental economic reasons forthe denizens of Iraq to shift from small-scale landownership to métayage—namely, the economies of scale involved in the development of irrigationalinfrastructure—but also specific political conditions related to tax collectionthat further encouraged this process. The sort of transformation in landhold-ing patterns envisioned by Moses b. Jacob’s responsum were, it seems, indeeddescriptive of ruba de-–alma in Iraq—that is to say, the agrarian populace as awhole (Jewish and otherwise) seems to have shifted out of small-scale land-holding and into métayage.

33Abu Yusuf’s Kitab al-Kharaj, vol. 3 of Taxation in Islam, ed. and trans. A. Ben Shemesh(Leiden, 1969), 73. Kharaj lands are lands understood to have been taken by early Muslimconquerors; they were subject to a punitive 20 percent tax rate when farmed by non-Muslims.34For a description of this phenomenon, see Claude Cahen, “H. imaya,” in Encyclopaedia ofIslam, ed. P. J. Bearman et al. (Leiden, 2013).35H. usam Qaqam El-Sammaraie, Agriculture in Iraq during the 3rd Century A.H. (Beirut,1972), 131.



It is worth pointing out that while this shift would have divested Iraqifarmers of their capital wealth, the shift into métayage did not necessarilymean that they were driven into abject poverty. The annual income fromagricultural land that had shifted hands would not have changed substan-tially with the change in the name on the tax rolls. Indeed, the net income ofthese farmers might have increased as their tax burden decreased, encourag-ing them to come under the h. imaya of patrons.36 Creditors would not havebeen able to collect debts from real property, but chattel and the income fromthe estates of their debtors would have become fair game.

Abbasid land policy also favored the consolidation of landholdings in amanner that affected the Iraqi populace as a whole. As Kennedy points out,early Islamic legal authorities developed the legal institution of the qat. ı

–a(fiefdom) as a form of landholding, which incentivized investment in agricul-tural infrastructure.37 The qat. ı

–a allocated permanent ownership of erstwhileunproductive (“dead”) land to those individuals who invested in improving it,usually by irrigation but also by drainage or the clearing of brush. Yet thosein the middle of the economic spectrum, not to mention the peasantry, wouldhave lacked the investment capital necessary to implement these expensiveimprovements, since canal building relies on economies of scale. Hence thebenefits from recapturing “dead” land would have favored the consolidationof estates even in the Umayyad period (661–750). Indeed, even after suchinvestments, entrepreneurs were not capable of maintaining the productivityof the Basran hinterlands; Kennedy writes that “in the medium term, . . . thenew system was unsustainable. Lack of adequate draining led inevitably tosalinization of the soil and attempts to keep the salts at bay were doomedto failure.”38 At the same time, Basran demand for agricultural productionwaned as the city was sacked by the Zanj rebels in the ninth century and theQaramita rebels in the following century. By taxing land production ratherthan the land itself, the Abbasids would have subtly shifted the distribution ofeconomic surpluses from the state to the rising class of notables; as MicheleCampopiano notes, “the use of a tax based on a share of the crops thereforeseems mainly based on the reasoning that rationalizing surplus distributionbetween landlord and state prevented conflicts between them.”39 Abbasid im-plementation of the muqasama tax, which was collected as a share of agricul-tural produce, replaced the extant –ala al-misah. a system of assessing a fixed

36For some specific examples of this practice, including one dated to the second Abbasidcaliph al-Mans.ur (r. 754–75), see ibid., 130 n. 7.37Kennedy, “Feeding the Five Hundred Thousand,” 181–97.38Ibid., 189.39Michele Campopiano, “Land Tax –ala l-misah. a and muqasama: Legal Theory and the Bal-ance of Social Forces in Early Medieval Iraq (6th–8th Centuries C.E.),” Journal of the Eco-nomic and Social History of the Orient 54 (2011): 262.



amount of cash or crops on a piece of land, effectively reducing peasants’uncertainty in years of bad crops or low prices.40 This helped peasants toremain on their plots, which the rising class of Muslim landlords preferred.41

The situation in Baghdad was different. Rather than leading to an expan-sion of the immediate hinterlands, whose cultivated area actually decreased inthe early Islamic period,42 the establishment of the Abbasid capital led to thedigging of new canals in the Euphrates valley. The flourishing of Baghdadled to the intensification of its commercial contacts with Raqqa in Syria.43

When the capital was moved to Samarra in 836, however, much of this trafficdried up, leading to the atrophy of the two major canal systems in the up-per Euphrates valley and the reduction of commerce to a trickle by the tenthcentury.44

Moses b. Jacob’s responsum seems to fit the general trajectory of land-holding patterns in the region, Jewish and otherwise, from the seventh to theninth centuries. The need for canals and the rise of the qat. ı

–a concentratedownership in the hands of the wealthy no less than the semifictitious trans-fer of lands on the tax rolls to powerful Abbasid figures who could provideh. imaya. Rising urban demand for provisions would have insured continuedagricultural opportunities for peasants, continuing a trend with its roots in theSasanian period.45 Yet what of individuals of moderate means, with neitherenough to invest in irrigation nor so little as to pursue métayage? For theseindividuals, canals would have provided opportunities for trade and transportas adjuncts to agricultural production. Kennedy points out that “the canalcould become the centre of a more urban development: when Bilal b. Burdadug the canal which bore his name, he set up shops (h. awanıt) on both sidesof it.”46 The middle class therefore could have availed itself of its own sliceof the economic pie even without moving toward the new garrison cities.While middle-class individuals may have shifted away from tilling the landthemselves, their economic functions would have been an adjunct to agricul-ture: processing, marketing, and transporting provisions en route to Bagh-dad. Geonic responsa concerning the suftaja (an order of payment not unlike

40Michele Campopiano, “State, Land Tax, and Agriculture in Iraq from the Arab Conquestto the Crisis of the Abbasid Caliphate (Seventh-Tenth Centuries),” Studia Islamica, n.s., 3(2012): 33–41. The muqasama tax was implemented beginning under the reign of al-Mahdı(775–85).41Campopiano, “Land Tax –ala l-misah. a,” 261.42Kennedy, “Feeding the Five Hundred Thousand,” 189.43Ibid., 195.44Sections of one of these two canal systems, the Nahr Sa–ıd system, were rebuilt in theeleventh century and remained in use until the early fourteenth century. Ibid.45Morony writes that “by the sixth century, Jewish peasants in the Sawad were the tenants ofnon-Jewish landlords.” Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 312.46Kennedy, “Feeding the Five Hundred Thousand,” 184.



a contemporary personal check) suggest that there may have been a tran-sit trade from Basra to Baghdad;47 other pipelines from smaller settlementsin Baghdad’s orbit surely existed. Moses’s responsum might indeed indicatea shift into activities often associated with urban areas, particularly amongthe narrow swath of the community that comprised individuals of moderatemeans, but it need not suggest the “shift from an agrarian to an urbanized,commercial society.”48 That is to say, even if an occupational shift did takeplace, urbanization was not its necessary concomitant.

It is undoubtedly the case that Moses’s statement does point to changesin landholding patterns over the first century of Abbasid rule, which schol-ars have used as indicating Jewish urbanization. Yet in an economy with awell-developed model of métayage, landholding per se and involvement inagricultural activity need not be conflated. As long as the garrison cities con-tinued to rely on the hinterlands for their sustenance, economic opportuni-ties in agriculture would have persisted, and much of the Jewish communitywould have had little incentive to migrate to urban areas. Therefore, changesin landholding patterns need not point to Jewish withdrawal from agriculturalactivity in favor of crafts and trade. Moses’s statement can be understoodas reflecting the consolidation of landownership among wealthy individualswho also invested in expanding local irrigational infrastructure to match therising demand for food in the Abbasid cities, particularly Baghdad.

Later, over the course of the tenth century, agriculture did indeed wane inIraq, as much of the canal system that had been developed over the precedingtwo centuries ran dry. Many villages were deserted wholesale, and Jewishurbanization may have proceeded apace in this later period. However, urbanstrife in the tenth century would also have made Baghdad a somewhat unde-sirable destination. A glimpse into the makeup of the population of Baghdadand the trajectory of its development will bring us closer to challenging theaccepted interpretation concerning the urbanizing trend seen by historiansand economists alike.

The Population of Baghdad

As pointed out by Robert McCormick Adams in his detailed studies of landsettlement and land use in Babylonia from antiquity to the twentieth cen-tury, the early Islamic period saw a substantial decline in settled areas in the

47See, e.g., Albert Harkavy, Teshuvot ha-ge»onim (New York, 1959), no. 548. A number ofother geonic responsa also concern the community in Basra (ibid., nos. 221, 222, 422); thissuggests that the Basra too maintained a Jewish population in the Abbasid period.48Brody, Geonim of Babylonia, 63.



central floodplain of the Euphrates.49 One might imagine that the local ruralpopulation simply shifted to the emerging urban centers—particularly Basraand Baghdad. Yet Adams identifies the source of most of the population shiftas former urban centers in the region. That is to say, larger Sasanian urbansettlements disappeared in the early Islamic period, or at least declined at amuch higher rate than did rural settlements. In light of this, he explains that“much of the rural population seems to have remained in place, and it ap-pears that the propensity of the urbanites to drift toward the new Islamic fociof prosperity and power was roughly proportional to the size of the urbansettlements with which they were already familiar.”50 Adams’s conjectureimplies that any shift (or, at least, the majority of any shift) from agriculturalto mercantile pursuits would have occurred in the Sasanian period, not inthe early Islamic period—that is to say, well before the promulgation of thegeonic taqqanah in the late eighth century. Furthermore, while the number ofrural settlements certainly did shrink in the early Islamic period, larger settle-ments (where a higher percentage of the populace might have been involvedin commerce rather than in farming per se) disappeared at a much higher ratethan smaller villages. Indeed, those who moved to the cities may have doneso in order to continue the work they had performed in the larger rural settle-ments. Therefore, while a population shift may indeed have taken place fromthe Euphrates valley to the developing Muslim garrison cities, this popula-tion shift did not necessarily point to a large-scale shift in economic pursuitsamong the denizens of Iraq.

This revised understanding of the population shift challenges in at leasttwo ways the received depiction of Jewish urbanization in the wake of Is-lamic conquest, particularly as a response to the rise of Abbasid rule and theincrease in economic opportunities in the new garrison cities. First, Adams’swork suggests that urbanizing shifts took place earlier than the rise of the Ab-basids, if they took place at all; second, it suggests that the exploding demandfor agriculture insured the persistence of rich economic opportunities in thecultivation, processing, and transport industries. Both ends of the economicspectrum—the wealthy and the peasantry—would have been able to take ad-vantage of these opportunities. Some individuals whose resources put themabove the subsistence level, yet below the level required to help finance thebuilding and extension of canals—that is to say, in Morony’s words, “thoseof modest means”—might indeed have sought economic opportunities in thenew cities. Yet processing and transportation would also have offered op-portunities for capital investment without demanding that these individuals

49Robert McCormick Adams, Land behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the DiyalaPlains (Chicago, 1965), and Heartland of Cities (Chicago, 1981).50Adams, Heartland of Cities, 184.



actually migrate to the cities. While we have some explicit evidence fromgeonic literature as to when the leaders of the yeshivot moved to Baghdad,51

that literature does not seem to contain much specific information describingmigration for the bulk of the rank-and-file of the Jewish population presumedto have moved to the cities along with them. Although Morony is interestedin the population at large and not the Jewish population specifically, he pointsout that “there is no direct evidence for the migration of the agrarian popula-tion of Iraq to the new cities founded by Muslims in the seventh and eighthcenturies.”52 Yet indirect evidence for migration might be found in Islamicchronicles, if those chronicles were to reveal substantial Jewish populationsin the garrison cities. It is to these sources that we now turn.

In his study Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Mediaeval Is-lam, Walter Fischel focused particularly on the rule of the Abbasid caliphal-Muqtadir (908–32). He found that the caliph had “promulgate[d] an edictadmitting Jews and Christians to two state functions only; those, namely,of physician and of banker.”53 Attempting to confirm a broad-based Jew-ish involvement in banking, Fischel cites the late tenth-century geographeral-Muqaddası—though the line Fischel cites from al-Muqaddası actually de-scribes the situation in Egypt and Syria rather than in Iraq.54 The source uponwhich Fischel relies, the Radd –ala al-nas. ara (Refutation of the Christians) ofal-Jah. iz. (776–868), is close in time to al-Muqtadir and specifically describesthe Jews of Babylonia.55 In this source, al-Jah. iz. actually points to Jews as“dyers, tanners, cuppers, butchers, and cobblers.”56 Although Fischel doesidentify a number of Jewish individuals who were involved in banking, theArabic sources he cites certainly do not indicate the sort of substantial pen-etration of Jews into skilled crafts and trade imagined by the economists.Furthermore, even if al-Jah. iz.’s statement points to the presence of Jews inBaghdad, it provides no evidence that Jews actually migrated there in the sec-ond half of the eighth century or during the ninth century. Fischel explainshis source as indicating an intermediate step in Jewish urbanization, and withthis in mind he argues in general that Jewish life may have proceeded from

51See Brody, Geonim of Babylonia, 36.52Michael G. Morony, “Land Use and Settlement Patterns in Late Sasanian and Early IslamicIraq,” in The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, vol. 2, Land Use and Settlement Patterns,ed. G. R. D. King and Averil Cameron (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 226.53Fischel, Jews in Economic and Political Life, 7. Significantly, Fischel notes that writerscontemporary with al-Muqtadir such as al-T. abarı do not mention such an edict; his sole sourceis the fifteenth-century Egyptian writer al-Taghrıbirdı.54Ibid.55For a translation of Al-Jah. iz. , Radd –ala al-nas. ara, see Joshua Finkel, “A Risala of Al-Jah. iz. ,”Journal of the American Oriental Society 47 (1927): 322–34.56Ibid., 328.



agricultural activities in rural areas to unskilled occupations (such as dyersor tanners) in cities before shifting into skilled occupations such as banking:“In the course of the tenth century a considerable change must have takenplace in the professional composition of the Jewish population. Probably theappearance of Jewish bankers or government treasury officials in Baghdadwas connected with the extraordinary financial needs of the state, which hadto make use of the Jews in order to meet them.”57 Although al-Jah. iz. ’s work isfundamentally polemical, Moshe Gil points out that the Jews of Isfahan wereinvolved in these very same pursuits, at least in the eleventh century.58

Gil’s survey of Jewish occupations across the geonic period turns not onlyto al-Jah. iz. and al-Muqaddası but also (among others) to the Karaite leaderBenjamin al-Nahawandı and the eleventh-century biographer Abu Nu–aymal-Is.fahanı.59 However, the latter two writers come from Persia, and theirattestations of Jewish involvement in pursuits that could have been centeredin urban areas should not necessarily be understood to apply equally to citiesin Iraq. Furthermore, Gil’s survey subsumes in a single analysis communitiesfar afield from one another in time as well as space: his use of the documentsof the Cairo Geniza should be understood as applying to the tenth throughtwelfth centuries and not to the eighth and ninth.60 Yet even Gil mentions thecontinued involvement of the Jewish community in agriculture, explainingthat the documentary evidence concerning such pursuits is poor not becauseJews were not involved in agriculture but because what survives in the Genizais mercantile letters rather than agricultural correspondence. Similarly, therelative infrequency of legal questions concerning agriculture or commercein preserved legal sources from the geonim does not necessarily suggest thatfew Jews continued those pursuits outside the garrison cities: since muchagricultural and commercial law was long settled, legal questions asked ofthe geonim on these subjects may have been few.

Indeed, geonic sources suggest that Jews continued to live in rural areas.Perhaps the most significant of these is a responsum of Hai Gaon (939–1038)attesting to the continued use of Aramaic and Syriac in towns throughoutBabylonia and pointing out that some of the residents of these towns were

57Fischel, Jews in Economic and Political Life, 7–8 n. 3.58Moshe Gil, Be-malkhut yishma–el bi-tequfat ha-ge»onim, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1997), sec. 336.59For this survey, see ibid., secs. 335–36.60The Cairo Geniza is a substantial treasure trove of documents discovered in Old Cairo (Fu-stat); the majority of its holdings date from the period of the eleventh to the thirteenth century,though documents therein date both earlier and later. For a discussion of the Geniza, its dis-covery and its contents, see Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman, Sacred Trash: The Lost and FoundWorld of the Cairo Geniza (New York, 2011).



Jews.61 This suggests the persistence of Jewish settlement in the villages out-side the cities of Iraq. Mann even mentions responsa from Iraq dating as lateas the first half of the tenth century that indicate Jewish ownership of realproperty.62 Morony points out a number of Jewish settlements that persistinto the tenth century—including one at Sura, erstwhile home of the pre-dominant Babylonian yeshivah—suggesting that many of the students maynot have moved to Baghdad even if their institution of learning had.63 Addi-tionally, the yearly schedule of the Babylonian yeshivot continued in a man-ner that facilitated the pursuit of agriculture. The persistence of the kallahmonths of Adar and Elul as times of concentrated learning in the yeshivotactually would have presented challenges for merchants—particularly thoseinvolved in long-distance trade, since Adar (in the spring) and Elul (in the latesummer) would have been peak trading seasons—yet students of the yeshivotwho persisted in agriculture would have been able to continue to gather at theyeshivot during the kallah months.64

Arabic literary sources also attest to continued Jewish settlement ofsome note outside the garrison cities of Iraq. Although Fischel points to al-Muqaddası to describe a vigorous Jewish population in urban Baghdad, al-Muqaddası’s work equally attests to the persistent presence of Jews outsidethe cities, even in the mid-tenth century. He noted that many Jews were liv-ing in Qas.r (Ibn) Hubayra, a town midway between Baghdad and Kufa.65 Itwould even seem that the Exilarch maintained his primary residence there:while al-Muqaddası’s contemporary Nathan the Babylonian does note thatthe Exilarch also maintained access to the corridors of Abbasid power inBaghdad by means of his residence in that city, the latter would have beenhis secondary residence.66 That Qas.r (Ibn) Hubayra was not far from Surapoints to the possibility that even in the middle of the tenth century a sub-stantial Jewish population persisted outside the major cities.67 Indeed, the

61Hai Gaon’s responsum was published in Albert Harkavy’s collection of geonic sources en-titled H. adashim gam yeshanim (Jerusalem, 1970), 426.62Mann, “Responsa of the Babylonian Geonim,” pt. 2, 314 n. 229.63Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 309.64The kallah months were periods of concentrated study in the Babylonian yeshivot in thespring and fall seasons; see Brody, Geonim of Babylonia, 43. On the trading season, see S. D.Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayedin the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley, 1967), 1:195, 207.65Moshe Gil, “The Exilarchate,” in The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society, andIdentity, ed. Daniel Frank (Leiden, 1995), 37–38.66Ibid., 37. For Nathan’s discussion, see Adolf Neubauer, ed., Mediaeval Jewish Chronicles,2 vols. (Oxford, 1895), 2:86.67On the location of Qas.r (Ibn) Hubayra near Sura, see Gil, “Exilarchate,” 38 n. 12—paceMann, who says that this town was actually a suburb of Baghdad. Mann, “Responsa of theBabylonian Geonim,” pt. 1, 466.



persistence of a Jewish settlement near Sura might even suggest that beyondthe upper echelons of Jewish society—in this case, the Exilarch himself—movement to the cities was limited.68

Yet it cannot be gainsaid that by the time of Nathan the Babylonian therewas a Jewish population in Baghdad located in the suq al-–atıqa (old market),which was also called suq baghdad.69 Indeed, Moshe Gil even found a le-gal document in the Cairo Geniza dated October 997 that emanated from thecourt of Sherira Gaon (d. 1006), said to be located in shoqa –atiqa de-baghdad(the ancient market of Baghdad).70 The Exilarch’s Baghdad residence wasapparently located in this neighborhood as well, which seems to have beensituated in the commercial suburb of al-Karkh, discussed briefly below.71

The presence of both the Exilarch and the Pumbeditan gaon (or, more prop-erly, his court) in the same vicinity points to a local concentration of Jewishnotables—yet it need not mean that the neighborhood was home to manyJews beyond the elite. Furthermore, even if the Jewish population of suq al-–atıqa did draw its inhabitants from the full economic spectrum, the presenceof this population does not necessarily support an eighth- or ninth-centuryJewish migration to Baghdad; Jacob Obermeyer actually attributes settlementof the suq al-–atıqa to the Talmudic period.72 Al-Muqaddası noted that theregion of Iraq was home to many dhimmıs, both Christians and Jews,73 butsuch a statement does not necessarily indicate either substantial Jewish pop-ulations in the cities or that such populations (if they existed) had migratedthere from the Babylonian hinterlands. An eighteenth-century allusion to asubstantial Karaite population in Baghdad moving to Jerusalem in the eighthcentury, including not only the proto-Karaite leader –Anan b. David but also“his sons, disciples, associates, and all his friends and acquaintances,”74 neednot be taken at face value as indicating the presence of such a population inBaghdad at that time; as Jacob Rader Marcus notes, “the Rabbanites have norecord that Anan settled in Jerusalem,” perhaps casting doubt on the narrative

68Note that al-Muqaddası describes Qas.r Hubayra as a “large town with excellent markets,”although this designation seems not to mean anything specific in terms of its size. Muh. ammadb. Ah. mad al-Muqaddası, The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, trans. Basil Collins(Reading, 2001), 101.69Lassner, Topography of Baghdad, 323.70Gil, Be-malkhut yishma–el, 2:94–95, no. 29, lines 8–9.71Jacob Lassner, The Shaping of –Abbasid Rule (Princeton, NJ, 1980), 292 n. 26.72Jacob Obermeyer, Die Landschaft Babylonien (Frankfurt, 1929), 150.73Al-Muqaddası, Best Divisions, 126.74Simh. a Isaac b. Moses Luzki, Orah. S. addiqim (Vienna, 1830), 19, quoted in Jacob RaderMarcus, ed., The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791 (Cincinnati, 1999),266. For another error in Luzki’s work related to geographic location, see Leon Nemoy, ed.,Karaite Anthology (New Haven, CT, 1952), 196 n. 1.



as a whole.75 While the fifteenth-century Karaite chronicler Ibn al-Hıtı doesdescribe –Anan as “head of the whole house of captive Israel in Baghdad,”76

much could be said to assail the historicity of this piece written some sevencenturies after –Anan.77

We know from Arabic sources that Jews appear to have been living insome of the new cities shortly after they were founded; these included Kufaand Basra, which were tent cities hastily set up after the Muslim conquest.78

Unfortunately, we have no such evidence for the round city of Baghdad,which was built to serve as the administrative capital and military center ofthe Abbasid Empire. Yet while we do not have much specific detail concern-ing early Jewish settlement there, a tantalizing piece of information may helpus. We do know that in later times there was a strong Jewish presence inthe Baghdad suburb of al-Karkh, including a residence of the Exilarch. In hisHistory of Baghdad, the eleventh-century historian al-Khat.ıb al-Baghdadı re-lates that the Caliph al-Mans.ur (r. 754–75) moved the markets from the roundcity to al-Karkh. It is distinctly possible that Jews were among the relocatedmerchants and artisans, but unfortunately al-Khat.ıb provides no further infor-mation.79 To the extent that there was a general move from the hinterlandsto the cities, this move was brought about from above—that is, by Abbasidleaders themselves—rather than opportunistically from below.80 The crafts-men and artisans who built the new city may even have come from othercities, while the burgeoning population insured continued economic oppor-tunities in the hinterlands as the demand for agricultural production remainedrobust.

Indeed, as Morony points out, “the single most important ethnographicchange in seventh-century Iraq was the arrival of large numbers of MuslimArabs from the Arabian peninsula and the foundation of new urban centers as

75Marcus, Jew in the Medieval World, 266.76G. Margoliouth, “Ibn Al-Hıtı’s Arabic Chronicle of Karaite Doctors,” Jewish Quarterly Re-view 9, no. 3 (1897): 432, 436.77Pace Nemoy’s claim that Ibn al-Hıtı had access to early sources. Nemoy, Karaite Anthology,230.78Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 309.79Saleh El-Ali, “The Foundation of Baghdad,” in The Islamic City, ed. Albert Habib Houraniand S. M. Stern (Oxford, 1970), 94. A fraction of al-Khat.ıb’s massive work is translated inLassner, Topography of Baghdad, 45–118.80Cf. Jacob Lassner’s explanation that Baghdad was built by imported labor, suggesting “notprimarily a movement from village to city but the colonization of non-indigenous elementsoriginally consisting of artisans, laborers, military personnel, and the like who with their fam-ilies soon became a permanent feature of the urban scene.” Lassner, Topography of Baghdad,165.



garrison cities where they settled.”81 Morony explains that the Islamic con-quest also led to the redistribution of the Persian population from areas east ofthe Tigris to lower Iraq, where these Persians were joined both by newly cap-tured Persians from the Iranian plateau and by captives returning to Iraq fromthe Hijaz.82 The migration of Christian tribesmen from the Arabian Penin-sula to Kufa in the mid-seventh century should be seen as part and parcel ofa broader tribal flow in that direction.83 Likewise, both Basra and Baghdadwere founded to accommodate armies whose troops came from lands wellbeyond Iraq—in the case of Basra, from the Arabian Peninsula; in the caseof Baghdad, from Khurasan.84 The development of these cities would haveinspired some immigration on the part of those wishing to avail themselvesof expanded trading opportunities, leading to the growth of areas such as theBaghdadi suburb of al-Karkh. Yet it seems there is little evidence that thismigration was broad-based, or that those who migrated to the garrison citiescame specifically from the agricultural sector. Indeed, those who moved tothe new cities seem to have come from other cities; and the development ofthose cities provided a stimulus to agriculture that would likely have inspiredmany to intensify, not to lessen, their connection to the land. Since the Ara-bic chronicles do not point to prominent Jewish settlement in Baghdad—eventhe Jewish presence in al-Karkh is difficult to adduce—it is hard to supportthe reading of Moses b. Jacob’s responsum and the accompanying corpusof geonic evidence as indicating a disproportionate and broad-based Jewishmigration to the cities and an occupational shift into crafts and trade. Themuch later description of communities in the twelfth-century travelogue ofBenjamin of Tudela and the thirteenth-century documentary evidence foundin the Cairo Geniza from the city of Mosul both point to Jewish settlementswell beyond Baghdad;85 these settlements may have been the result of em-igrations from Baghdad, or they may indeed represent the perpetuation ofcommunities that never migrated to Baghdad in the first place.

81Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 236.82Michael Morony, “The Effects of the Muslim Conquest on the Persian Population of Iraq,”Journal of Persian Studies 14 (1976): 50.83Christians of the tribe of –Ijl in particular were involved in this migration. Morony, Iraqafter the Muslim Conquest, 240.84Kennedy, “Feeding the Five Hundred Thousand,” 182 (on Basra), 189 (on Baghdad). Alsoon Baghdad, see Lassner, Shaping of –Abbasid Rule, esp. 208–23.85For Benjamin’s report, see Marcus N. Adler, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (London,1907), 55–64. For details concerning the Mongol invasion and a subsequent earthquake affect-ing the Jewish community, see letters from the Jewish community in Mosul dated December1236 (Ms Heb a 3.24, Bodleian Library, Oxford) and May 1237 (Taylor-Schechter GenizahCollection 20.128, University Library, Cambridge).



What Happened to the Jews?

Jewish urbanization in the eighth and ninth centuries has been linked by his-torians to a subsequent broad-based westward migration to Syria and NorthAfrica.86 This observation accords well with a narrative of regional unrestamidst the Zanj uprisings in the late ninth century and urban unrest in the firsthalf of the tenth century, which culminated in the seizing of caliphal powerby Buwayhid amırs. Urban unrest in Iraq would have encouraged westwardmigration. The connection between urbanization and subsequent migrationwas strengthened by the work of Eliyahu Ashtor, who argued that the bulkof these migrants were involved in urban professions—specifically, as mer-chants or judges.87 Their westward migration, in turn, would explain the riseof the Jewish mercantile community of North Africa whose documents arepreserved in the Geniza and the numerical decline in the Babylonian Jew-ish community in the same period. Yet the waning of the Babylonian Jewishpopulation need not be explained by migration. Rather, if the bulk of theJewish community remained involved in agricultural pursuits as the demand

86For a discussion of this migration, its causes, and the evidence supporting it, see Ashtor, “Unmouvement migratoire.” Note, however, that the bulk of Ashtor’s evidence from the Genizafor migration from Iraq to Egypt postdates the ascent of the Buwayhid amırs by at least half acentury. Ibid., 203.87Ashtor, “Un mouvement migratoire,” 196. It is beyond the scope of this article to discussthe problems with Ashtor’s article. However, it should be noted that where the Judeo-Arabicdocuments of the Cairo Geniza are concerned, it would seem that Ashtor holds that the ap-pearance of a toponym (that is, a geographic nisba) alluding to Iraq indicates ancestry in Iraq,whereas in fact it need indicate no such thing. Geographic nisbas could indicate that an in-dividual did indeed have ancestry in a particular place, but they could also indicate that theindividual had visited that place or simply had business or even scholastic affiliations there.The fact that nisbas might be passed on from one generation to another makes the business ofhistorical demography through onomastics particularly difficult, yet Ashtor seems to acceptthis evidence at face value, as though individuals bearing the nisba “al-Baghdadı” themselvescame from Baghdad. Moreover, the vast majority of the documentary evidence from the Ge-niza postdates by at least a century the beginning of the “massive current” he identifies, andthe conclusions he draws demand a more careful treatment of the onomastic data. The Ara-bic chronicles and prosopographical literature on which he relies are generally not concernedwith Jews (Jacob Ibn Killıs obviously being a notable exception). Further, the number of Jewsinvolved in mercantile pursuits and scholarly or religious pursuits—the two social classes towhich Ashtor attributes a migratory movement—was likely a small subset of the total popu-lation. Of this population, Ashtor identifies some 2 percent as having migrated westward. Ifone relies on Jacob Neusner’s rather sanguine estimate of an entire population of six hundredthousand to one million Jews, the entire migratory movement over the course of two centurieswould likewise have been a small subset of some twelve thousand to twenty thousand Jews(Jacob Neusner, A History of the Jews in Babylonia [Atlanta, 1965–70], 2:246). While sucha migration would have indeed made its mark on Palestinian and North African Jewry in themedieval period, it hardly seems to be a flood of the proportions Ashtor envisions.



for foodstuffs expanded in the second half of the eighth century, they wouldhave suffered from the unrest, decline in demand for agricultural commodi-ties, and decay of irrigational infrastructure that led to soaring prices andwidespread famine in the middle of the tenth century. The Islamic historianIbn Miskawayh chronicles this very situation:

This year [946] prices rose so high that people had absolutely nobread and ate the dead, or grass or any creature that had died a nat-ural death or carrion. . . . Men, women and children would standon the highroad perishing of famine and crying Hunger, hunger,till they collapsed and died. So many were the corpses that theycould not be buried in time, and the dogs devoured their flesh. Thepoor migrated in vast numbers and continuous lines to Basrah toeat dates, and most of them perished on the road; those of themwho reached the place died after a short time.88

As the Abbasid caliphs themselves ceded power to their amırs, local condi-tions would continue to decline. Without clearer evidence that the bulk of theJewish population moved to the garrison cities in the eighth century, the veryreasonable explanation that Jews continued in their agricultural pursuits—though as métayers rather than as landowners—should be maintained.

Further study is required to explore the demographic and economic fateof the Jewish population of Iraq under the early Abbasids. Geonic literaturewill continue to be a crucial source for understanding the experience of theBabylonian Jewish population. However, my analysis here points to the ten-dentiousness of the geonic record and the difficulty of drawing conclusionsconcerning the bulk of the Jewish population from such a small number ofsources that may or may not be representative of that population as a whole.Review of the geonic sources in light of the corresponding (and no less ten-dentious and difficult) Arabic sources may pave the way for a competinghistorical account of the erosion of Iraqi Jewish demographic hegemony inthe first centuries of Abbasid rule.

Acknowledgments I thank the participants in the Judaica Electronic Workgroup (JEW),James Grady of the Vanderbilt Writing Studio, Arnold Franklin of Queens College, and theanonymous reviewer for Jewish History for their helpful and very detailed comments on earlierversions of this article.

88Ibn Miskawayh, The Eclipse of the –Abbasid Caliphate, ed. and trans. D. S. Margoliouth(Oxford, 1920), 5:99.


Revisiting Jewish Occupational Choice and Urbanization in Iraq Under the Early Abbasids

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