Examining Debt Acknowledgements in the Cairo Geniza as Co-produced Artifacts of Religious Entanglement

The discovery and investigation of historical documentary sources in the Cairo Geniza has changed our understanding of how Muslim and Jewish communities lived together in the medieval Fatimid empire. In these sources we find evidence of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim tradesmen, family members, and neighbors interacting with each other in a variety of social contexts and even engaging with each other'sreligious institutions. Geniza sources demonstrate that Jews and Muslims absorbed and borrowed legal norms from each other when constructing their own documents and practices, though juridical elites in both religious communities seldom acknowledged this. The framework of »co-production« providesa useful heuristic to understand this discursive pattern of »compliance and resistance« that can be observed in Islamic and Jewish legal texts in the aforementioned context.