Download PDF | Jews, Christians and Muslims in Medieval and Early Modern Times A Festschrift in Honor of Mark R. Cohen, Brill 2014.
441 Pages
Foreword
For his entire teaching career from 1973 to 2013, Mark R. Cohen taught at Princeton University. He retired in July 2013, as the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East. During these four decades, he formed a generation of students and scholars, created and gave intellectual direction to two major interdisciplinary programs at Princeton University, and produced an impressive and distinct body of scholarship that shaped the research agenda of Judaeo-Arabic studies worldwide. By its range of topics and by the distinction of its contributors, this volume of essays in his honor, offered by his colleagues and former students, constitutes an appropriate tribute to his achievements.
I had the opportunity and privilege to work with Mark during his entire tenure at Princeton University and to observe first hand the quiet determination and devotion with which he realized his own vision of Jewish historical studies. It was he who organized an interdisciplinary Committee for Jewish Studies at Princeton University and served as its chairman from its inception in 1982 to 1995. The appearance of this volume provides a splendid occasion for his colleagues and friends to gratefully acknowledge his indispensable role in the growth of the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton, a program that has now grown to one of international renown with a distinguished faculty numbering more than twenty-five people. Without Mark Cohen’s perseverance and dedication and vision, this would not have come to be. After the death of S. D. Goitein in 1985, his famous “Geniza Lab,” consisting of his notes, translations, transcriptions, photocopies and microfilms of most of the documentary Geniza, was transferred to the National Library in Jerusalem, but a copy of all this material was left in Princeton and formed the nucleus of the Princeton Geniza Project.
It was Mark’s pioneering vision that gave rise to the Princeton Geniza Project that between 1985 and 2005 made the transcriptions and translations of some 4,000 Geniza documents available online to the scholarly world. This has been a boon for specialists, but even more so for non-specialists unable to read or decipher these sources who could now have reliable access to these valuable and unique documents. In 1985, Mark was one of the first (if not the very first) to realize the potential of the new computer technology for Geniza research, a potential that is now coming to worldwide fruition through the Friedberg Genizah Project. Mark Cohen is an energetic proponent, to use his phrase, of the “Geniza for Islamicists,” that is, of its general relevance for all those interested in the social, economic, and cultural history of the Islamic Mediterranean world, and beyond that for scholars of medieval European societies. Beyond its utility to scholars, the driving force for the Geniza project is precisely Mark Cohen’s firm conviction concerning the ecumenical relevance of these sources for historians and social scientists.
In seeing the society revealed to us by the Geniza documents as representative of a general Mediterranean society, Mark Cohen followed in the footsteps of S. D. Goitein. This view, in turn, has translated into Mark’s most impressive accomplishment: the emergence of a generation of younger scholars in Mediterranean and Near Eastern history whose research was nourished by the Geniza materials that Mark’s training and instruction made available to non-specialist scholars. The range and variety of their research topics is truly impressive, ranging from medieval maritime law to Iberian trade in the Mediterranean, from the urban history of South Arabian port cities or the culture of late medieval Coptic communities to the geography of trade and traders in the Mediterranean. Mark Cohen’s scholarly focus has been on the Geniza materials, which, by his own definition, constitute the “secular” Geniza, documents from everyday life—business letters, communal letters, and personal letters, court records, marriage contracts, deeds of divorce, wills, accounts, lists of recipients of charity and of gifts for charitable purposes, and official documents such as petitions to be submitted to the Muslim authorities.
These individual fragments, which we call the “documentary Geniza” (as opposed to the “literary Geniza”), constitute no more than 5 percent of Geniza documents. Basing himself on this corpus, Mark Cohen has, over the past three decades, reinvented himself as a historian several times. He has sought to explore new subjects and fields on the cutting edge of Jewish historical studies, and made the documentary Geniza speak to a variety of topics. He began with a meticulous and innovative work on Jewish self-government in medieval Egypt, to which subject he devoted a book and several important articles. He then moved on to a new major project in social and communal history by straining to hear the voices of the medieval Cairene poor, and exploring how Geniza society confronted the problem of the poor and destitute in its midst. From the frontiers of social history, Mark Cohen has now moved on to study the innovation in the development of Jewish religious law (halakha) at the time of Maimonides as the society of his time came to terms with the social and economic realities of the Islamic Mediterranean world. Mark Cohen’s 1994 book, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, has become a classic and has set new terms for thinking about the historical relationship between Judaism and Islam and between Jews and Muslims through the ages. Mark has been eloquent and persuasive in dispelling a series of myths about the JewishMuslim past and in proposing a new paradigm for understanding the reality and the dynamic of this interaction in the past as well as in the present. His work has become the new benchmark in this field. And while the discussion on these issues continues, and while we are all deeply gratified to pay tribute to his contribution in so many areas, we are also happy in the knowledge that the discussions he initiated are continuing and that we can all look to his further contributions in the future.
Notes on Contributors
Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman is assistant professor of Jewish studies and law and affiliated assistant professor of Islamic studies and history at Vanderbilt University. He defended his dissertation, “A Partnership Culture: Jewish Economic and Social Life Seen through the Legal Documents of the Cairo Geniza,” under the tutelage of Mark R. Cohen in 2007. He served as a major contributor and section editor for the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (Brill, 2010), and coedited (with Rakefet J. Zalashik) A Jew’s Best Friend: The Image of the Dog throughout Jewish History (Sussex Academic Press, 2013). His book The Business of Identity: Jews, Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt was published by Stanford University Press in 2014.
Yaron Ayalon teaches Middle Eastern, Ottoman and Jewish history at Emory University. He received his PhD in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 2009, and has also taught at the University of Oklahoma. His work focuses on natural disasters in the Ottoman Empire, reading and literacy, social history, and Sephardic history, with emphasis on Syrian Jewry. His soon-to-be published book deals with natural disasters in the Ottoman Empire. It argues for a new interpretation of religious boundaries in Ottoman society, and for placing greater emphasis on the role disease and other natural calamities played in the rise and fall of the Empire.
Menahem Ben-Sasson is president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and professor in the Department of Jewish History, specializing in the social and intellectual history of medieval Jewry in Islamic lands from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries. He is the author of The Emergence of the Local Jewish Community in the Muslim World: Qayrawān, 800–1057 (in Hebrew, 1996) and of numerous articles and edited volumes, including, most recently, Uncovering the Canon: Studies in Canonicity and Genizah (2010, coedited with Robert Brody, Amia Lieblich and Donna Shalev).
Olivia Remie Constable is a professor of medieval history and the Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. She taught in the History Department at Columbia University for six years after receiving her PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1989; she then moved to the History Department at the University of Notre Dame in 1995. She has published Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula 900–1500 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), which won the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America; Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997; second edition 2011); and Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2003). She is currently working on a new book project examining Christian perceptions of Muslim identity in late medieval Spain.
Remie Constable has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, she has been the recipient of fellowships from the NEH, the ACLS, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and she was named a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2009. Natalie Zemon Davis is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History emerita at Princeton University and adjunct professor of history at the University of Toronto. Among her numerous publications are Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (1995); The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (2000); and Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (2006). In 1987, she served as president of the American Historical Association, and in 2010 she was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities.
Arnold E. Franklin is an associate professor in the History Department at Queens College, City University of New York. He received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton in 2001. His research focuses on medieval Jewish society in the Islamic world. His recent book, This Noble House: Jewish Descendants of King David in the Medieval Islamic East (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), is a study of the profound concern with genealogy that developed among Jews in Arabic-speaking lands.
Miriam E. Frenkel is a senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History and the School of History at the Hebrew University. She has also taught at St. Petersburg State University, Stockholm University and the University of Pennsylvania. Until recently she was deputy chair of the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East. Her main fields of research are the Cairo Geniza, the cultural and social history of medieval Judaism in the lands of Islam, and medieval cultural encounters between Judaism and Islam. She is the author of “The Compassionate and Benevolent”: The Leading Elite in the Jewish Community of Alexandria in the Middle Ages (Ben-Zvi Institute, 2006), winner of the 2007 Shazar prize, and articles on literacy, poverty, charity, pilgrimage and slavery in medieval Jewish society in the Islamic world.
Jessica L. Goldberg is associate professor of medieval history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She studies the medieval history of the Mediterranean basin, Christian Europe, and the Islamic world, exploring how institutions develop and how they work in the context of daily life. In most cases, these inquiries fall into the areas of economic and legal history, defined broadly enough to include the study of geographic imagination or legal culture. Her first book, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and their Business World, was recently published by Cambridge University Press (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Jane Hathaway is professor of Islamic history at Ohio State University. She received her PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton in 1992. She is the author of The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1500–1800 (Pearson/Longman, 2008), as well as three other books and many articles on topics related to the Ottoman Empire and Jewish communities under Muslim rule. Martha Himmelfarb is the William H. Danforth Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Between Temple and Torah: Essays on Priests, Scribes, and Visionaries in the Second Temple Period and Beyond (Mohr Siebeck, 2012).
William Chester Jordan is Dayton-Stockton Professor and chairman of the History Department at Princeton University. He is a former director of the Program in Medieval Studies and has also been director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies (1994 to 1999). He is the author of several books, including The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989) and, most recently, Men at the Center: Redemptive Governance under Louis IX (Central European University Press, 2012).
Hassan S. Khalilieh is a senior lecturer in the Department of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa. He received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1995 and his LLM in admiralty and maritime law from Tulane University in 2006. He specializes in maritime law and the maritime history of the medieval Mediterranean. He is the author of Islamic Maritime Law: An Introduction (Brill, 1998) and Admiralty and Maritime Laws in the Mediterranean (ca. 800-1050): The Kitāb Akriyat al-Sufun vis-à-vis the Nomos Rhodion Nautikos (Brill, 2006).
Ivan G. Marcus is the Frederick P. Rose Professor of Jewish History and professor of history and of religious studies at Yale University. He was the chair of the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale from 2004-2008. He received his BA from Yale College (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), his MA from Columbia University, and a MHL and PhD from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1975. He has been a Woodrow Wilson fellow, an NEH fellow (twice), and a Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellow. He has also been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has written Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany, which was a finalist in 1982 for a National Jewish Book Award; Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (Yale University Press, 1996; Hebrew revised edition by Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1998; and paperback edition by Yale University Press, 1998). His most recent book is The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times (University of Washington Press, 2004). He is now writing What Jews Think about Gentiles and is translating into English the Hebrew classic of Jewish spirituality from medieval Germany, Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pietists), for the Yale Judaica Series.
Roxani Eleni Margariti is an associate professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. She received her PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2002. Her research interests include Indian Ocean history, social and economic history of the Middle East, maritime material culture and technology, and reception of Islamic monuments in Greece. She is the author of Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and coeditor, with Adam Sabra and Petra M. Sijpesteijn, of Histories of the Middle East: Studies in Middle Eastern Society, Economy and Law in Honor of A. L. Udovitch (Brill, 2010).
Jessica M. Marglin is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on the history of Jewish-Muslim relations in North Africa during the early-modern and modern periods. She received her PhD from Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies in January 2013, under the supervision of Mark R. Cohen. She is currently at work on a manuscript that uses law as a lens through which to understand Jews’ integration into Moroccan society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her publications include articles in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Jewish Quarterly Review, and in edited volumes. She graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and earned her master’s from Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Marina Rustow is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and an associate professor in the Department of History. She is author of Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) and coeditor of Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Raymond P. Scheindlin is professor of medieval Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and director of the Shalom Spiegel Institute for Medieval Hebrew Poetry. His latest book is The Song of the Distant Dove: Pilgrimage Poetry by Judah Halevi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Petra M. Sijpesteijn holds the Chair of Arabic Language and Culture at Leiden University. After obtaining her PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2004, she was a junior research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford (2003–2007) and chargée de recherche at the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris (2007-present). She published numerous articles on papyrology and early Islamic history and is the author of Shaping a Muslim State: The World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Uriel Simonsohn earned his PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 2008 and is currently an assistant professor in the Department for Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa. His publications focus on the history of Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Near East and Mediterranean Basin from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages. Among those, his recent book, A Common Justice: The Legal Allegiances of Christians and Jews under Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), deals with the social history of the Jewish Rabbanite and Eastern Christian communities in the early Islamic period. Sasson Somekh DPhil (Oxon), was born in 1933 in Baghdad, Iraq and in 1951 settled in Israel, where he served as professor of Arabic literature at Tel Aviv University until his retirement. He was visiting professor at Princeton, New York University, Oxford and Uppsala (Sweden). Two autobiographical volumes have so far been published by him: Baghdad, Yesterday (2007), and Life after Baghdad (2012).
Norman A. Stillman is the Schusterman/Josey Professor of Judaic History and director of the Program in Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He received his PhD in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970. His scholarship in English, French, and Hebrew has explored various aspects of cross-cultural encounters in Arab lands, with an emphasis on Jewish-Muslim relations. He is the Executive Editor of the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (Brill, 2010). His books include The Jews of Arab Lands (JPS, 1989) and The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (JPS, 1991). His latest work focuses on the Jews of North Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A. L. Udovitch is professor of Near Eastern Studies emeritus at Princeton University. At Princeton he served as chair of the Near Eastern Studies Department (1974–1977 and 1980–1994) and held the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professorship of Jewish Civilization in the Near East. He specializes in the social and economic history of the medieval Middle East, and his many publications include the seminal Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam (Princeton University Press, 1970) and, with Lucette Valensi, The Last Arab Jews: The Communities of Jerba, Tunisia (Harwood, 1984).
David J. Wasserstein is professor of history, Eugene Greener, Jr. Professor of Jewish Studies, and professor of classics at Vanderbilt University. A specialist in Judaism, Islam, and the classical world, he is interested in how those three traditions intersect culturally, linguistically and politically. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002-1086 (1985), The Caliphate in the West: An Islamic Political Institution in the Iberian Peninsula (1993); and, with Abraham Wasserstein, of The Legend of the Septuagint: From Classsical Antiquity to Today (2006). He is the coeditor of several volumes on Judaism, Islam, and classical antiquity, including, most recently, From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East (2009). Oded Zinger is a graduate student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University working on a dissertation tentatively titled “Gender, Society and Courts: Marital Disputes in Medieval Egypt according to Documents from the Cairo Geniza.” His research focuses on how individuals creatively maneuver among their individual interests, legal prescription and societal expectations. His publications include “When ‘the One Who Is with Me’ Is Not with Me: Long-Distance Marriages in the Cairo Geniza” (in Hebrew), Peʿamim: Journal for the Study of Oriental Jewry 121 (2009) and, with Luke Yarbrough, “Appendix of Primary Source Readings” in Heinz Halm, The Arabs: A Short History, expanded edition with documents (Markus Wiener, 2011).
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