Caravan Revolution

The Islamic conquest of the Persian and Byzantine empires in the 7th century brought a commercial revolution in its wake. Jews, formerly engaged primarily in agriculture and handcrafts, now entered long-distance trade, employing merchant customs unknown to the Talmud but known to us thanks to the hundreds of letters of merchants discovered in the Cairo Geniza. How Jewish jurists, especially Maimonides, coped with this incompatibility between law and society is the subject of the lecture by Princeton professor of history Mark R. Cohen.