The twelfth-century traveler Benjamin of Tudela, in his Itinerary, describes and quantifies the Byzantine-Jewish communities along his famous route. Building on his account and a number of other primary sources, modern scholarship has met with some success in outlining Byzantine-Jewish settlements, and as a result of these efforts, the map of the Byzantine Empire now includes many cities and towns known to have housed Jewish populations. However, the mere demarcation of these places and the counting of the Jews, while instructive, do not fully satisfy the needs of economic history. Rather, these reports provide a first step in the larger process of describing and interpreting the Jewish economy, which extends beyond the pinpointing of static locations. Economic history, fundamentally rooted in the concept of exchange, requires a representation of the movement of people, goods and ideas among fixed points, with particularly compelling applications to the Jews of the Middle Ages whose Diasporic existence colored every aspect of their lives. Studied in this more dynamic way, the demography of Byzantine Jewry serves an essential purpose in laying the groundwork for the economic history of the relevant Jewish communities and its meaning.

Four patterns characterize Jewish settlement and movement in the Middle Byzantine period. First, within the empire, the Jews generally, although not exclusively, inclined towards its urban centers and trade routes.