← Back to author list

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

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.