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literature, particularly from the Ottoman Empire, as a source for the social history of Jews. 52
Like Katz, this first generation attempted to understand the scope and functioning of Jewish legal
autonomy by focusing on how rabbinic authorities faced the challenges posed by the availability
of non-Jewish courts. Although these scholars recognized that Jews used non-Jewish courts, the
majority concluded that Jewish legal autonomy was alive and well in the medieval and early-
modern Islamic world—an observation they linked to the ability of these Jewish communities to
thrive (in contrast to other places where Jews enjoyed less autonomy). 53 Even Shlomo Dov
Goitein, who was the first scholar to draw extensively on documentary evidence from the Cairo
Geniza, ultimately concluded that the Jewish community constituted a “state beyond the state.” 54
As with his work in general, Goitein’s meticulous study offers a picture of Jewish legal life that
was far more textured, detailed, and nuanced than previous scholarship on the subject. Yet while
he recognized that Jews used non-Jewish courts, Goitein’s understanding of the society which
produced the Cairo Geniza was one in which the Jewish community provided the institutions—
52
Isidore Epstein, The Responsa of Rabbi Simon ben Zemah Duran as a source of the history of the Jews in North
Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1930); Goodblatt, Jewish Life in Turkey; Haim Zeev Hirschberg, “‘Arkaot
shel goyim bi-yimei ha-geonim,” in Mazkeret: Kovetz torani le-zekher Yitzhaq Ayzik ha-Levi Hertzog, ed. Shlomo
Yosef Zevin and Zerah Varhaftig (Jerusalem: Heikhal Shlomo, 1962); Israel M. Goldman, The Life and Times of
Rabbi David Ibn Abi Zimra; A Social, Economic and Cultural Study of Jewish Life in the Ottoman Empire in the
15th and 16th Centuries as Reflected in the Responsa of the RDBZ (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of
America, 1970).
53
Epstein, The Responsa of Rabbi Simon ben Zemah Duran, 44, 46-7; Goodblatt, Jewish Life in Turkey, 87;
Goldman, Rabbi David Ibn Abi Zimra, 92, 153-5. Aryeh Shmuelevitz was something of an exception to this trend.
Although Shmuelevitz drew solely on rabbinic responsa, he focused on legal (rather than social) history.
Shmuelevitz thus paints a more complex picture of the legal history of Jews, drawing on the responsa literature to
discuss the interplay between Jewish and Islamic law in the early modern Ottoman Empire: Aryeh Shmuelevitz, The
Jews of the Ottoman Empire in the Late 15 th and the 16 th centuries: Administrative, Economic, Legal and Social
Relations as Reflected in the Responsa (Leiden: Brill, 1984), especially Chapter 2.
54
Shlomo Dov Goitein, “Minority Self-Rule and Government Control in Islam,” Studia Islamica 31 (1970): 109 and
idem, A Mediterranean Society, 5 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967-1988), v. 2, 1. While
Goitein addressed Jews’ use of non-Jewish courts, he focused on the extent to which Jewish communal leaders
managed to maintain their judicial authority despite the Islamic government’s tendency to interfere in the
functioning of Jewish law (ibid., v. 2, 395-402). For an excellent biography of Goitein, see Peter Cole and Adina
Hoffman, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (New York: Nextbook, Schocken, 2010),
Chapter 10.
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