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This is a monograph about the medieval Jewish community of the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria. Through deep analyses of contemporary historical sources, mostly documents from the Cairo Geniza, life stories, conducts and practices of private people are revealed. When put together these private biographies convey a social portrait of an elite group which ruled over the local community, but was part of a supra communal network.
Living with the Law explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000-1250), relating medieval gossip, marital woes, and the voices of men and women of a world long gone. Probing the rich documents of the Cairo Geniza, a unique repository of discarded paper discovered in Cairo synagogue, the book recovers the life stories of Jewish women and men working through their marital problems at home, with their families, in the streets of old Cairo and in Jewish and Muslim courts. Despite a voluminous literature on Jewish law, the everyday practice of Jewish courts has only recently begun to be investigated systematically. The experiences of those at a legal, social, and cultural...
The crusades are often seen as epitomising a period when hostility between Christian West and the Muslim Near East reached an all time high. This edited volume reveals a more complex story, exploring how the Holy Wars led on the one hand to a reinforcement of the beliefs and identities of each side, but on the other to a growing level of cultural exchange and interaction.
Offering an edition of secular poems taken from the earliest, fifteenth-century manuscript, this book seeks to evaluate Moses Dar??’s poetry in the light of the Andalusian-Hebrew poetical tradition and within the context of Hebrew literary activity in the Muslim East.
This book contributes to the history of medieval Jewry in general, as a basis for a comparative study of the position of the Jews in Christian Europe in the Late Middle Ages. The eight articles written by leading experts on this topic pay special attention to the following issues: the measure of tolerance of the Mamluk rulers and the Muslim populace toward the Jews; Jews in government positions and as court physicians; conversion and attitudes toward converted Jews; the Sufi (mystical) nature of Jewish leadership and its relation to the Sufi Islamic discourse; professional, intellectual, and legal interactions between Jews and Muslims. In the end, the contributions help us to sharpen our understanding of Jewish life during the Middle Islamic Period in the Near East.
A study of religious thought and practice across a broad social spectrum, but within a well-defined historical context, this book is an interdisciplinary endeavor that incorporates the tools of philology, social-history and historical-anthropology. Focusing on the mosques, public assemblies, cemeteries and shrines of Syrian Muslims in the period of the crusades and the anti-Frankish jihad, the book describes and deciphers religious rites and experiences, liturgical calendars, spiritual leadership, and perceptions of impiety and dissent. Working from a perspective that breaks down the dichotomization of religion into 'official' and 'popular,' it exposes the negotiation, construction and dissemination of hybrid forms of religious life. The result is an intimate and complex presentation of the texture of medieval Islamic piety.
Der Loskauf von Sklaven und Gefangenen hat den Mittelmeerraum von der Antike bis in die Frühe Neuzeit geprägt. Er stellt, eng verbunden mit der Geschichte der Sklaverei, nicht nur verschiedene Facetten des Bemühens um deren Beseitigung dar, sondern ist darüber hinaus auch selbst ein entscheidender Bestandteil verschiedener Konflikt- und Beziehungsgeschichten. Die vierzehn Beiträge dieses Sammelbandes, die auf eine von der DFG geförderte internationale Tagung im September 2013 in Paderborn zurückgehen, betrachten die Thematik erstmalig unter der vorrangigen Fragestellung nach der Bedeutung von Religion. Sie untersuchen epochenübergreifend und aus jüdischer, christlicher und muslimisc...
The origins of Judaism’s regional ‘subcultures’ are poorly understood, as are Jewish identities other than ‘Ashkenaz’ and ‘Sepharad’. Through case studies and close textual readings, this volume illuminates the role of geopolitical boundaries, cross-cultural influences, and migration in the medieval formation of Jewish regional identities.
"Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence - a religious movement built around the study of and commentary on the Hebrew Bible and steeped in a culture of bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text. Standard works of modern scholarship reinforce this view -- that the Jewish tradition has always embraced the Bible as a blueprint for the religious life. In this monograph, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that this depiction of the tradition does not hold for much if its existence -- and more specifically, not for the first thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. Prior to the modern era, late antique and early medieval rabbi...