Abraham L. Udovitch

Lucette Valensi

Jacques Perez

The once numerous and vital Jewish communities of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia have disappeared, succumbing during the past century to the assimilating temptations of French culture, or, more recently, to the pressures of migration. Only the two communities of the island of Jerba still remain. Only they have succeeded in maintaining and reproducing their religious and social institutions, in adjusting to the new realities around them while preserving intact their cultural, communal identity. This lavishly-illustrated book, first published in 1984, portrays the life and history of two Jerban Jewish villages and explores the paradoxes of their continuity. How and why are they so fully Jewish while, at the same time, so thoroughly embedded in their Muslim, North African environment? Although its focus is one small ethnic group, the implications of this study extend to the broad subject of relations between Arabs and Jews in modern times.

The Communities of Jerba, Tunisia

The Last Arab Jews

From the point of view of economic history, the ideal way to study any institution of commercial law would be to compare the information contained in legal codes and treatises with the material relating to its application in economic life as manifested by actual contracts, letters, and business records found in archives and other repositories. In the case of the early centuries of the Islamic period, available sources unfortunately preclude such a procedure. Theoretical legal texts exist in abundance, but any corresponding documentary material is for all practical purposes non-extant. In order to determine if the framework in which the trade and commerce of the early Islamic period was carried on--a trade known to have been active and important--we must of necessity rely on legal treatises for most of our information, which trying wherever possible to call upon whatever meager help other literary sources may provide. In the absence of documentary and similar sources, the possibility of investigating the quantitative aspects of trade is all but eliminated. However, in those areas of trade which have been described as qualitative, such as the variety of goods exchanged, the specialization of the merchant class, and the complexity of business methods, legal and other literary sources provide a great deal of valuable information. It is with the institutions of partnership and commenda in the early Islamic period, two of the qualitative components of trade, that Abraham L. Udovitch makes his primary focus in Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam.

Abraham L. Udovitch

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