Was there a unifying merchant culture in the medieval Middle East? Was economic life an arena in which religious differences were muted and common practices trumped identity particularism? Was there a particularly Jewish way of doing business, and in what contexts was it deployed? Economic and social historians of the region have for the most part answered in the positive to the first two questions and in the negative to the third, making the final question moot. In his first monograph Phillip Ackerman- Lieberman, a historian of medieval Jewish life in the Islamicate Middle East and an expert in Jewish law, argues that we should rethink this dominant paradigm. The commercial material in the “documentary Geniza,” the wide-ranging corpus of daily-life documents preserved in the document repository of Old Cairo's Ben Ezra synagogue, has been taken by three generations of historians to reflect not only Jewish but also more broadly medieval Middle Eastern economic behavior. But the assumption of Jewish “typicality” says more about the humanistic outlook and wishful thinking of previous scholars than about realities of medieval life, Ackerman-Lieberman argues. He finds that Jewish commercial practice as portrayed in the Cairo Geniza followed Jewish legal precepts more closely and disregarded them less frequently than previously thought and that the convergence between the economic and cultural practices of Muslims and those of the resident religious minorities of the Islamic world still requires a convincing explanation—which his conclusions attempt to provide.

The author approaches his subject from within the field of documentary Cairo Geniza studies, thus following S.D. Goitein, the doyen of the field, and his epigones, especially Moshe Gil, A.L. Udovitch, and Mark R. Cohen, the latter two themselves Ackerman- Lieberman's teachers. Unlike his predecessors and many of his contemporaries, the author focuses not on the more prolific epistolary material about business practices in the Cairo Geniza but almost exclusively on the somewhat overlooked, smaller corpus of legal documents relating to partnerships. He argues that legal documents have featured relatively little in the study of commercial culture, partly because of what anthropologist Lawrence Rosen has described as an all too stark boundary drawn by western historiography between legal theory and court practices on the one hand and actual social practices on the other, and partly because technical language and formulaic structures make legal documents seem “boring” as compared to the more evocative and varied interpersonal correspondence (p. 63). Indeed, a central contribution of this book consists in the presentation and analysis of the technical aspects of Geniza legal documents pertaining to the economy and particularly to partnerships; the author's research, which began with his doctoral work, assembled a corpus of more than one hundred previously little-known such documents (agreements of agency, partnership, and commenda partnership, as well as release documents), 15 representative examples of which are most helpfully included as an appendix in this book. Ackerman-Lieberman's painstaking analysis of these documents and their juxtaposition with Jewish legal texts is invaluable for understanding the intertwining of economy, law, and culture, even though in the opinion of this reviewer the limitations of this approach for understanding the intertwining of Jewish and Muslim social and economic life in general remain significant.

The author divides his material into four chapters. Chapter One takes on the so-called Princeton school of Geniza studies to argue that the typicality of the Jewish merchants of the Geniza documents has been misleadingly amplified on account of an increasing commitment of twentieth-century scholars, starting with Goitein and in some ways intensifying in his followers, to a particular vision of Muslim-Jewish symbiosis. As Ackerman-Lieberman himself acknowledges in his Preface (p. x), the drawing of very stark lines in this chapter has heuristic value; yet at times it verges on oversimplifying the wide-ranging and often heuristically oriented work of three generations of Geniza scholars, and on dismissing efforts to do precisely what he calls for, for example, juxtaposing the testimony of Geniza documents with that of relevant non-Geniza materials before asserting any kind of typicality for the behavior patterns observed in the former.

Chapter Two contains the book's most valuable and original contribution. Here Ackerman-Lieberman unearths the Geniza material that relates to contractual partnership and other types of commercial collaboration and juxtaposes them with Jewish and Muslim legal theory to show a preponderance of Jewish legal norms. In particular, the performance of the qinyan, a Jewish ritual of initiation of joint ownership, plays a central role in the formal ratification of some mercantile collaborations, as it does in other realms of Jewish life. Jewish legal constructs are often preferred to ones deriving from Islamic law, even though both are used; a particularly important example of that obtains in the cases where the Jewish isqa is preferred to the Islamic qirad (the equivalent of the western commenda). Another valuable insight of this chapter relates to the recent debate about the degree of informalism in medieval Middle Eastern economic life (pp. 53–64). Jeremy Edwards and Sheilagh Ogilvie famously took issue with Avner Greif's modeling of the Geniza merchants' world as one of informal ties and closed coalitions where private-order punishment took the place of more formal institutions and modes of contract enforcement. The importance of informal ties and informal agency relations is crucial to Greif's model and comes directly from Goitein's, and even more so Udovitch's reading of the relevant material. Questioning the validity of this reading, Jessica Goldberg demonstrated that although agency relationships indeed predominate in the total sum of recorded collaborations in the Geniza corpus, partnerships make up a more significant percentage of the total than calculated by Udovitch. More importantly, she showed that agency relations, far from unstructured or informal, were governed by rules of reciprocity. The same conclusions are reached by Ackerman-Lieberman, although his emphasis on the importance of the Jewish legal construct of partnership predominates in his reading of the material.

The next two chapters offer the “how” and the “so what” of the author's conclusion, exposed in Chapter Two, that Jewish commercial practice was characterized by a specifically Jewish legal focus on partnership. Chapter Three seeks to demonstrate that the “apparent—and significantly incomplete—correspondence between Jewish legal norms and the details of commercial arrangements” was not just a “happy coincidence” (p. 172) but instead was promoted by the very nature and mechanics of Jewish courts; at court, merchants received a Jewish legal education which they then carried with them to the practice of commerce. Finally, in Chapter Four the author creatively combines insights from the work of Robert Bonfil (on the particularism of Jewish communities of Renaissance Italy) and Rina Drory (on the impact of Muslim literature on medieval Jewish culture) to produce the hybrid “specular-relational model” for explaining the convergences between different confessional groups in the medieval Middle East. Ackerman-Lieberman here reminds us that the profit motive and the vague concept of embeddedness do not constitute adequate descriptions or explanations of what Jews and Muslims had in common in the marketplace or the broader social world they commonly inhabited. The convergences at the level of detail, he argues, obscure a more structural and functional convergence: both Jews and Muslims were legalistic in their approach to commerce, both relied on a mix of formal and informal institutions, and both looked to their discrete religious laws in order to provide these formal and informal structures. Thus, the typicality of the Geniza businessmen in the Middle Eastern Islamicate context is one of “mentalités rather than behaviors” (p. 196). The “specular-relational model” allows for the possibility that coexistence did in fact entail a degree of convergence without necessitating a blurring of identity lines, and Ackerman-Lieberman argues that Jewish culture existed “in tension with an Islamic cultural system, with Rabbanite Jewish norms and practices developing at times in contradistinction with Islamic norms and practices instead of simply in parallel” (p. 206).

The major weakness of this book's main argument stems from the source of the work's greatest merit: the almost exclusive focus on legal documents and legal theory. While contributing to our understanding of medieval Jewish legal culture in the Islamicate world, the author offers little contextual information about the individuals named and the business and legal arrangements attested in these documents, and his conclusions seem to imply that the performance of religious identity in commerce was pervasive. Even if that were true among coreligionists, what happened in interfaith or cross-cultural transactions, which, as the author himself notes (p. 344n1), must have constituted an important part of the overall story? The Muslim counterparts of the Geniza merchants, while featuring in the title of the book, are largely missing from Ackerman-Lieberman's otherwise detailed grappling with the material. This is not surprising given the nature of the documentary corpus: commercial legal documents in the Geniza are almost exclusively the product of all-Jewish collaborations, themselves only a fraction (however significant) of the entire range of collaborations of Jewish merchants. That range is much better represented in the epistolary material, and reckoning with that testimony more comprehensively and in detail would have been useful.

Ultimately historical actors, either individuals or social groups, act according to multiple axes of belonging and deploy different strategies depending on context. Ackerman- Lieberman's points that social integration need not mean conformity and assimilation and that in fact “it is equally possible that a sense of embeddedness and security would have led Jews to manifest their behavior in ways that expressed their distinctiveness” (pp. 210 and 216) make sense. But as the author himself avers, the Geniza documents offer several examples in which Jewish merchants chose to contravene Jewish law, and Jewish courts accepted a range of solutions, some of which clearly derived from Islamic law. Geniza documents also demonstrate robust and crucial collaboration of Jewish with non-Jewish merchants, most prominently Muslims. All this raises the question of when and why Jewish businessmen would have chosen to express particularism, and what particular conjunctures would have elicited the performance of specifically religious identity. In other words, it raises the question of the representativeness of the particular documentary sample that the author puts at our disposal. His approach elides a clear answer to that question.

Overall, this is a useful and highly readable book. It represents one of the many exciting new directions in the scholarship of the Cairo Geniza documentary material that will be of interest not only to medieval historians but also to economic and legal historians in general. That this reviewer does not agree with the rather insular image of medieval Middle Eastern communities that emerges from the “specular-relational model” is in no way a rejection of the contributions of the book, and particularly of the reminder that Jews and other religious groups of the medieval world did not shed their religious identity in the marketplace but in fact found even there adequate space and occasion to perform it.