In this chapter, I identify a stratum of Jews whose exposure to early Islam (such as it was) led them to straddle a permeable boundary between Judaism and nascent Islam. Over the course of the early Islamic centuries, however, as that boundary became less permeable, these erstwhile fence-sitting Jews abandoned their Jewish identity and depleted the Jewish community on the rural periphery of much of its vitality and communal institutions, contributing to the disintegration of the Jewish community of Iraq.