Sixty years have passed since S. D. Goitein first drew attention to the Geniza documents as a unique source for writing the economic history of the Middle East. Since then, the work of researchers further documented how important are these documents, especially in the absence of medieval quantitative data. Recently, however, the content and the interpretation of the Jewish traders’ letters from the Geniza, became a subject of debate and controversy. Some of it was related to the place of Jewish law in the transactions and contracts enacted by these traders while others contested the new economic theory paradigm of inefficient economic institutions that used the letters as evidence.
