At the King's Gate: The Jews of Abbasid Baghdad, 750-1258

• In Event: Works-in-Progress Group in Jewish Studies

Abstract

Jennifer Grayson will present a chapter from her book manuscript, entitled At the King's Gate: The Jews of Abbasid Baghdad, 750-1258. The book examines the relationship between Babylonian rabbinic authorities and Abbasid state power in medieval Baghdad. It traces a five-hundred-year-long process by which the institutions of Jewish communal rule came to be incorporated into the Abbasid state apparatus, and it describes the consequences of these political changes for Iraq’s Jews and for the exercise of rabbinic authority throughout the Jewish world. Ultimately, the book argues that Jewish communal institutions and the political institutions of the society in which Jews lived were more closely aligned than traditional historiography has led us to believe: the power of Jewish leaders depended on the support of Muslim rulers, and the claims to authority that Jewish leaders made held meaning precisely because of the Islamic political milieu in which they were asserted. This realization allows us to integrate Jews and Jewish sources into the broader history of Abbasid imperial rule and thus to deprovincialize Jewish history.

Author

• Jennifer Grayson, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill