jews 401
documented in his Itinerary (Benjamin of Tudela, 1907). A good example of
movement in the internal economy of Jewish knowledge is the first Jewish prayer
book compiled by ‘Amram ben Sheshna Gaon, head of the rabbinic academy of Sura
in the ninth century. Written for the Jews of Spain in response to a rabbinical query,
it was never fully accepted there (Brody, 1998: 191–193). Such early regional particu-
larity foreshadowed the increasingly independent rabbinate established under Ḥisdai
ibn Shaprūṭ and Rabbi Ḥanokh, and later mythologized in Ibn Daud’s Tale of the
Four Captives.
Rabbinic Judaism and Mediterranean connectivity comes together in the biogra-
phy of Maimonides (d. 1204), the greatest of medieval rabbis and philosophers (and
aforementioned disparager of history), who was a younger contemporary of Abraham
Ibn Daud, author of Sefer ha-Kabbalah. The life and works of Maimonides are richly
recorded both in rabbinic tradition and in documentary evidence of the Geniza,
which includes autographs. Born into a family of rabbinic judges in Almoravid
Córdoba, the teenaged Maimonides lived through the Almohad occupation of al-
Andalus in 1148, which established a political regime whose Muslim religio-political
sensibilities did not allow for the recognition of non-Muslim communities. Along
with many Jews, he emigrated to Almohad Fez in order to escape the regime’s strict
policies in al-Andalus. Five years later, with his father and brother, he sailed to Palestine
and later settled in Fāṭimid Egypt, where he eventually entered into the service of the
Ayyūbid vizier as a physician. Later he was appointed rā’is al-Yahūd, head of the
Jewish community of Egypt (Kraemer, 2008: 216–220).
Maimonides briefly describes his personal encounter with the Mediterranean on
the journey from Morocco to Crusader Acre, during which “a great wave almost
inundated” the ship (Kraemer, 2008: 127). Interestingly, like the Geniza merchants
among whose documents are found his autographs, Maimonides made some income
as a merchant before serving at the Ayyūbid court (Kraemer, 2008: 161–162).
Maimonides’ brother David was involved in the India trade until his untimely drown-
ing somewhere in the Indian Ocean in 1174. This personal loss indirectly points to
the late twelfth-century rise of Italian shipping in the Mediterranean, a circumstance
that led Jewish mercantile networks to turn away from what they called “the Sea” and
refocus on the Red Sea and the India trade (Goitein and Friedman, 2008).
Early modern and modern migrationsNot merely spanning the Mediterranean, the shape of Maimonides’ migrations were
fashioned by four different Muslim regimes, each of whose political cultures inclined
toward a variety of legal, religious, and philosophical positions, and whose influences
on Maimonides are debated among scholars (Stroumsa, 2009: 7–10). Among these
debates is the question of whether Maimonides converted to Islam under the
Almohads, as a variety of sources report that many Jews did in order to save their lives.
Many continued to live (often openly) as crypto-Jews, a decision that some sources
explicitly report Maimonides took (Kraemer, 2008: 99–124). Maimonides’ trajectory
of emigration from al-Andalus is less common than that undertaken by a majority of
Jews (including Ibn Daud), who moved to the Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia.
Extending that pattern, the scholars Judah ibn Tibbon and Joseph Kimḥi emigrated
to Provence, where they acted as proponents of Judeo–Arabic Iberian–Jewish tradition