Maimonides and the Merchants : Jewish Law and Society in the Medieval Islamic World / Mark R. Cohen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cohen, Mark R., author.

Series:

Jewish culture and contexts.

Jewish Culture and Contexts

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Maimonides, Moses, 1135-1204. Mishneh Torah.

Maimonides, Moses.

Mishneh Torah (Maimonides, Moses).

Jewish merchants--Islamic Empire--History--To 1500.

Jewish merchants.

Commercial law (Jewish law)--History--To 1500.

Commercial law (Jewish law).

Partnership (Jewish law)--History--To 1500.

Partnership (Jewish law).

Islamic Empire--Commerce--History--To 1500.

Islamic Empire.

Islamic Empire--Ethnic relations--History--To 1500.

Genre:

History

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (247 pages).

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The advent of Islam in the seventh century brought profound economic changes to the Jews living in the Middle East, and Talmudic law, compiled in and for an agrarian society, was ill equipped to address an increasingly mercantile world. In response, and over the course of the seventh through eleventh centuries, the heads of the Jewish yeshivot of Iraq sought precedence in custom to adapt Jewish law to the new economic and social reality. In Maimonides and the Merchants, Mark R. Cohen reveals the extent of even further pragmatic revisions to the halakha, or body of Jewish law, introduced by Moses Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah, the comprehensive legal code he compiled in the late twelfth century. While Maimonides insisted that he was merely restating already established legal practice, Cohen uncovers the extensive reformulations that further inscribed commerce into Jewish law. Maimonides revised Talmudic partnership regulations, created a judicial method to enable Jewish courts to enforce forms of commercial agency unknown in the Talmud, and even modified the halakha to accommodate the new use of paper for writing business contracts. Over and again, Cohen demonstrates, the language of Talmudic rulings was altered to provide Jewish merchants arranging commercial collaborations or litigating disputes with alternatives to Islamic law and the Islamic judicial system.

Contents:

Introduction

Codification and legal change

Halakha and the custom of the merchants

Updating the Halakha

Partnership

Commercial agency (Ṣuḥba)

Ṣuḥba

Agency in the code

Proxy legal agency

Sale and contract

Judicial autonomy

Conclusion : legal change and originality.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes chapter notes (pages 153-208), bibliographical references (pages 209-227), and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Jun 2017)

ISBN:

9780812294002

0812294009

OCLC:

1049662503