In this chapter, I look at the development of Jewish and Islamic commercial law over the early Islamic centuries to argue that the Islamic "commercial revolution" may be found in the eleventh rather than the eighth century. I argue, therefore, that any migration of Jews westward in the early Islamic centuries was not the result of such a commercial revolution.

In this chapter, I look at the scribal practice of Jews and Muslims in the early Islamic Mediterranean to argue that there was not a large wave of migration from East to West. I present an alternative explanation here for the disappearance of what scholars have called the "Early Vulgar Judeo-Arabic Spelling" -- the disappearance of which could be used to support the idea of a substantial migration westward.

In this chapter, I argue that even amidst expanding commercial opportunities in the newly founded Islamic garrison cities, Jews continued to maintain a presence on the rural periphery of Iraq and continued to serve in agrarian roles.

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.

In this chapter, I revisit the idea of a substantial Jewish population from the Islamic East in Egypt by looking at the names of individuals as they appear in documents in the Cairo Geniza. My study reveals that a small core of individuals in medieval Egypt hailed from the East, but onomastic practices do not suggest that a massive migration from East to West took place. I compare these findings with other studies looking at the names of Muslim individuals; these comparanda confirm my conclusions concerning the Jewish minority.

In this chapter, I summarize the arguments in the book.

In this chapter, I trace out the history of the idea that Jewish urbanization under early Islamic regimes and subsequent migration under an Islamic "commercial revolution" were responsible for the development and expansion of the Jewish community of North Africa.

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.