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Ezra Blaustein

Ezra Blaustein is a doctoral candidate in the history of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he is writing a dissertation on Maimonides’s Book of the Commandments and its connections to Islamic legal theory.

Historical Agency

Historical Agency

By: Ezra Blaustein

Among the many papers discovered in the Cairo Geniza are documents, including letters between Yeshua ben Ismail of Alexandria and Khalluf ben Musa in Qayrawan, in present-day Tunisia. The papers showing disintegration of their partnership shine a light on how a particular kind of business agreement affected the composition of a halakhic guidebook still widely consulted to this day.