In this chapter, I place the imagined migration of Jews from East to West in the broader context of other migratory movements in the medieval Islamic world, and I conclude that the sort of long-distance, "uncoordinated" migration in search of economic opportunity imagined by the received wisdom is otherwise unknown in the early Islamic world. With this in mind, I argue against the idea of Jewish exceptionalism and support the idea of local factors rather than a westward migration as contributing to the rise of Mediterranean Jewry.