Genuine, refined, and updated scholarship in recent decades has gradually refuted the view of nationalism as a strictly modern phenomenon. That view in general had tended to interconnect nationalism with the industrial revolution and capitalism. According to this approach, the objective emergence of national markets combined with subjective manipulations by interested capitalists served to mold, often invent, nationalism; the conspicuous political expressions of this modern process are – per the modernists – the national states of western Europe. By contrast, my approach criticizes this dogmatic, often Marxist and Eurocentric, view, and is closely related to the new keen scholarship, which explores nationalism and nationhood, also beyond Europe, deep into antiquity, and aspires to avoid dogmas which ignore the rich, variegated, and eventful history of ethnopolitical identities. The Jewish nationalist case, as we shall see, conspicuously fits into the meaningfully nuanced long history category.

In this chapter, I look at the development of Jewish and Islamic commercial law over the early Islamic centuries to argue that the Islamic "commercial revolution" may be found in the eleventh rather than the eighth century. I argue, therefore, that any migration of Jews westward in the early Islamic centuries was not the result of such a commercial revolution.

In this chapter, I look at the scribal practice of Jews and Muslims in the early Islamic Mediterranean to argue that there was not a large wave of migration from East to West. I present an alternative explanation here for the disappearance of what scholars have called the "Early Vulgar Judeo-Arabic Spelling" -- the disappearance of which could be used to support the idea of a substantial migration westward.

In this chapter, I argue that even amidst expanding commercial opportunities in the newly founded Islamic garrison cities, Jews continued to maintain a presence on the rural periphery of Iraq and continued to serve in agrarian roles.

In this chapter, I identify a stratum of Jews whose exposure to early Islam (such as it was) led them to straddle a permeable boundary between Judaism and nascent Islam. Over the course of the early Islamic centuries, however, as that boundary became less permeable, these erstwhile fence-sitting Jews abandoned their Jewish identity and depleted the Jewish community on the rural periphery of much of its vitality and communal institutions, contributing to the disintegration of the Jewish community of Iraq.

In this chapter, I revisit the idea of a substantial Jewish population from the Islamic East in Egypt by looking at the names of individuals as they appear in documents in the Cairo Geniza. My study reveals that a small core of individuals in medieval Egypt hailed from the East, but onomastic practices do not suggest that a massive migration from East to West took place. I compare these findings with other studies looking at the names of Muslim individuals; these comparanda confirm my conclusions concerning the Jewish minority.

In this chapter, I summarize the arguments in the book.

In this chapter, I trace out the history of the idea that Jewish urbanization under early Islamic regimes and subsequent migration under an Islamic "commercial revolution" were responsible for the development and expansion of the Jewish community of North Africa.

In this chapter, I place the imagined migration of Jews from East to West in the broader context of other migratory movements in the medieval Islamic world, and I conclude that the sort of long-distance, "uncoordinated" migration in search of economic opportunity imagined by the received wisdom is otherwise unknown in the early Islamic world. With this in mind, I argue against the idea of Jewish exceptionalism and support the idea of local factors rather than a westward migration as contributing to the rise of Mediterranean Jewry.

This Afterword brings Jewish evidence from the imperial period into the discussion of intertextuality in the Roman world as a way to underscore and at times challenge the themes animating the volume as a whole. Focusing on the problem of how to read silences and aporiae, it homes in on the observation made by Uden in the volume that many groups in the long second century shared in common a habit of defining themselves as sui generis, ‘projecting an artificial sense of isolation from others’. The early rabbis were masters of this sort of imagined recusal from the historical cultural landscape into their own internal categories genres and narratives, despite the reality of their participation in the Roman world. Pushing farther, the Afterword posits that rabbinic literature in some ways writes intertextuality large – by restricting itself to commentarial genres, the fiction of revelation, and refusal of authorship, the corpus strips itself of the apparatus of literary originality and ownership. In so doing it manifests explicitly what all literature implicitly is: intertextual, collaborative, connective. In its exaggerated posture of isolation, despite the fact of its embeddedness, rabbinic literature claims its place as part of the Roman bookshelf of the second century.

What is the importance of the Talmud, that it merits a comprehensive history? In this chapter, the author paints a picture, in broad strokes, of the importance of the Talmud, to both Jews and their neighbors, through history. The Talmud is the document that ultimately defined the contours and obligations of Jewish practice and belief; how did it gain that centrality and authority? How did the Talmud help shape Jewish society? Why did the Talmud provoke such powerful rejection in Christian circles, and later among Jewish reformers? Offering a word about the difficulties of writing such a history, then defining basic terms and directions, the author in this chapter establishes the foundation of the history to follow.

The rabbis who made their way to Babylonia joined an ancient Jewish community, descendants of Jews who first came to that land at the time of the biblical exile. In that setting, the Babylonian rabbis enjoyed, along with their brothers and sisters, relative peace and comfort, allowing them to explore and elaborate the traditions they learned from their colleagues to the west. But the inherited rabbinic tradition was only one of the forces that shaped the Babylonian Talmudic tradition. There were also the many historical and cultural factors – the traditions of ancient Persia, Zoroastrianism, eastern Christianity, and others – that contributed to the shape of the local rabbinic tradition. In this chapter we review the historical and cultural factors that shaped Babylon in the centuries during which the Bavli emerged. We examine the growth of this rabbinic community and its relationship with the recognized head of the Babylonian Jewish community, the exilarch. Finally, we trace the trends of study that gave birth to a work that, despite its traditional vocabulary, represents what is arguably a radical new “tradition.”