398 fred astren
paradigmatic later. Historians have noted that medieval Jewish communities, each
operating autonomously, were connected radially. This is evident in the land-based
topography of Ashkenaz after the massacres of the First Crusade, when such radial
connections were exploited to generate region-wide responses to violence and its
aftermath (including the ransoming of captives, books, and sacred objects)
(Glick, 1999: 63–65). The network of radial inter-community connections in the
Mediterranean were imagined and in fact worked differently in an environment where
proximity was not necessarily linked to distance. The sea offers points of contact that
surprise the observer by not being linear, sequential, or requiring intermediation. In
this regard, the twelfth-century rabbinic imaginary could not only include Aaron of
Baghdad’s magical one-day voyage from Jaffa to Gaeta, but also a journey to Spain
unmediated by Italian transmission. In the eighth or ninth century, the mysterious
Natronai Gaon came “by miraculous means (kviẓat ha-derekh) from Babylonia and
taught them Torah and returned [to Babylonia], that he did not come in a convoy nor
was he seen on the road ...” (Judah ben Barzillai, 1902–03: x–xii, cited by the editor,
Schor).
In contrast, the importance of a journey taken by the shortest or most direct route
(derekh keẓarah) is more prosaically noted in a colophon of an eleventh-century gram-
matical work that encapsulates the link between the Muslim East and the southern
Italian-Ashkenazi axis:
This is the book Horayat ha-qore, which was brought from Jerusalem to Bar[i] by
the shortest route. Joseph b[en] Ḥiyya the scribe brought it from there, [it] having
been composed in Arabic at the time he copied it there. Then, R[abbi] Nathaniel
b[en] Meshullam converted it from Arabic into the Holy Language in the city of
Mainz. (Gil, 1992: 548)This practical and self-conscious little record of textual transmission takes care to note
an unperturbed direct connection to the East—the same value in which the more
arresting rabbinic legends have a stake.
After all is said and done, sometimes the imagined is really imaginary. One of the
first documents published by Solomon Schechter from among the thousands of leaves
brought to Cambridge from the Cairo Geniza in 1896 was a Hebrew letter written by
one of Ibn Daud’s four legendary captives, Rabbi Ḥushiel of Qayrawān, and addressed
to another of the captives, Rabbi Shemariah ben Elḥanan of Fustāṭ (Schechter, 1899).
From it, we begin to learn that there were no Muslim pirates or captured and ran-
somed rabbis, but more simply a purposeful and unremarkable immigration to
Ifrı̄qiyya from somewhere in Christendom, probably southern Italy. It is quite likely
that the letter was carried by a Jewish merchant.
MerchantsA defining dimension of Jewish history in the Mediterranean from late antiquity
through the Middle Ages is the marked involvement of Jews in mercantile activity
(Arenson, 2000). The association between Jews and merchants was used by the
Belgian historian Henri Pirenne to help argue his famous thesis that it was the Muslim
conquests and not the Germanic migrations that brought an end to the antique world