Description
Book SynopsisThe 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
Trade Review
"Maimonides and the Merchants opens a new window onto Maimonides' unprecedentedly systematic and comprehensive code of law. Cohen's exceptionally clear and cogent readings of Mishneh Torah, balanced against previous rabbinic legal writings on the one hand and Geniza evidence on the other, successfully establish Mishneh Torah as a social-political endeavor addressed to a real-life audience." * Islamic Law and Society *
Table of Contents
Notes and Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1. Codification and Legal Change
Chapter 2. Halakha and the Custom of the Merchants
Chapter 3. Updating the Halakha
Chapter 4. Partnership
Chapter 5. Commercial Agency (Suhba)
Chapter 6. Suhba-Agency in the Code
Chapter 7. Proxy Legal Agency
Chapter 8. Sale and Contract
Chapter 9. Judicial Autonomy
Conclusion. Legal Change and Originality
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
