Since the nineteenth century, conversos have been among the most prolific lines of research for medievalists and early modern historians. The persecution they suffered at the hands of the Inquisition, the veracity of the claims that attributed to them a clear tendency to remain Jewish in secret long after they were baptized, and their role as cultural agents and active contributors to Spanish culture

The historiography of the Dreyfus Affair has often neglected the crucial role played by Bernard Lazare as the first defender of the wrongly accused French army captain Alfred Dreyfus. Lazare authored three brochures, including the very first published work arguing Dreyfus’s defense, and pursued numerous lines of inquiry and advocacy to keep the Dreyfus case alive in the public sphere. In stark contrast

This article explores the life and work of an important but little-known Jewish-Russian-Ukrainian historian and political liberal, Ilya Galant, and examines his vision of Jewish history in Ukraine. Galant wanted to legitimize the rights of Jews in Russia and “normalize” their presence in Ukraine. To accomplish this goal he interpreted history creatively, demonstrating Jewish-Ukrainian friendship as

By examining the Latin inscription of Rabbi Iacob of Mérida (Lusitania, Spain) on the basis of historical and philological arguments we can establish its dating to the early eighth century, after the Arab invasion. This would confirm the survival of sages who had a leading role in the religious life of Jewish or formerly converted Jewish communities able to clandestinely maintain and preserve their

This article contextualizes Judah he-Ḥasid and the Sefer Ḥasidim by exploring the religious topography of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Regensburg, particularly through the lens of visual and architectural culture. The analysis complements work in economic and religious history that addresses the relationship between Jews and Christians in medieval Germany. The rich manuscript evidence from Bavaria’s

The present study interprets and frames a long-standing question concerning Judah he-Ḥasid’s motivations in migrating to Regensburg against the social and geographical contexts of the Jews of Ashkenaz. By examining the use of Hebrew geographic terminology during the High Middle Ages (Loter, Ashkenaz, Ashkelonia), the article demonstrates that twelfth-century Jews perceived and were engaged in contemporary

What was the role of the medieval pietistic heritage in the re-formation of eighteenth century’s Jewish cultures, consciousness, and identities? Rabbi Judah he-Ḥasid’s will, a short, vague, and enigmatic document, played an important role in the consolidation and crystallization of halakhic identities in the early modern era. This paper traces the document’s infiltration into the canonical halakhic

Recent scholarship has suggested that teachings and practices of the German Pietists permeated Tosafist circles in the Rhineland and elsewhere in Germany. This study demonstrates that there were intellectual and methodological contacts between the Pietists and the Tosafists of northern France as well, in the areas of talmudic studies and Jewish law. Judah he-Ḥasid offered interpretations that were

This article examines several medieval pietistic works in northern France and Germany that shed light on the influence of Hasidei Ashkenaz. It also considers recent scholarship by Israel Ta-Shma, Ephraim Kanarfogel, Haym Soloveitchik, and Benjamin Richler. Ta-Shma and Kanarfogel have argued that the Tosafist school of Evreux was influenced by the religious ideals of the Ashkenazi pietists, whereas

This article examines the use of the words ḥasid and ḥasidah in a wide variety of medieval texts, primarily from Germany, in order to question current scholarly understandings of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz as a social entity. The article outlines the appearance and contexts in which the term can be found in poems, on tombstones, lists of dead, and in stories. The final section of the article investigates possible

This paper examines R. Judah he-Ḥasid’s approach towards journeys to distant places, including pilgrimage to the land of Israel. Unlike other twelfth-century rabbinic authorities who did not object to travel for various purposes and, in certain cases, even encouraged it, R. Judah he-Ḥasid held a uniform, consistent approach that opposed almost any journey beyond the local area. Some scholars have suggested

Sefer Ḥasidim (The Book of the Pious) has long served as a crucial source for medieval Jewish historiography. Yet the dual question of who composed the anonymous text and how its varying recensions came into existence has been a contentious one among scholars of medieval Ashkenaz. In particular, opinions have been split on the issue of the book’s authorship. Ever since the 1538 publication of the editio

Based on Ivan Marcus’s concept of “open book” and considerations on medieval Ashkenazic concepts of authorship, the present article inquires into the circumstances surrounding the production of Sefer Arugat ha-Bosem, a collection of piyyut commentaries written or compiled by the thirteenth-century scholar Abraham b. Azriel. Unlike all other piyyut commentators, Abraham ben Azriel inscribed his name

This study presents a new manuscript witness for the hermeneutics gates that Eleazar of Worms apparently presented as the basis of the esoteric lore he received from his teacher, R. Judah he-Ḥasid. Eleazar of Worms has been widely acknowledged as the recipient of the secrets of German Pietism and the author of the library of texts that would represent the movement. Sefer ha-Ḥokhmah, the Book of Wisdom

This article examines the content and structure of the manuscripts of Sefer Ḥasidim, engaging with ideas concerning its production addressed in Ivan Marcus’s recently published book on Sefer Ḥasidim. Marcus has argued that the book was written piece by piece and not as an integral book and further suggested that each and every manuscript of Sefer Ḥasidim should be taken as a distinct edition of the

This essay analyzes an unpublished manuscript of a giudiata, a poem mocking Jewish funerals that was written and performed in Rome in the mid-seventeenth century. Melchiorre Palontrotti, the author of the composition, was a Roman polemist and author of other published works against Italian Jews, including, among others, the Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto, between 1640 and 1649. After furnishing information

Research on the Jews, the issue of slavery in the southern states, and the American Civil War has naturally focused on the Jews of the United States, who, as citizens, were reluctant to become involved in the debate that divided their country during those years. However, the attitude of the Jews in the Old World towards the events unfolding on a continent thousands of miles away has rarely been studied

This paper revisits the question of the connection between the wars in Eastern Europe (beginning with gezeirot taḥ ve-tat in 1648) and the rise of Sabbateanism. It argues that the key issue is the ways in which the Ashkenazi Jews of Jerusalem dealt with the collapse of Polish-Lithuanian Jewish funding for the Land of Israel in the wake of the wars. Following 1648, an extended transregional philanthropic

Scholarly assessments of Rabbi Moses Sofer (known as the Hatam Sofer) and his position on immigration to the Land of Israel have varied widely. Many scholars have called attention to his negation of the Diaspora and some, such as Ben Zion Dinur, have claimed that Sofer’s teachings led to the beginning of the Jewish national awakening. Owing to the wide-ranging nature of Sofer’s thought and writings

Isaac Sasportas was a member of the Sephardic Diaspora who was born in French Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) around 1779. His uncle, Abraham Sasportas, with whom Isaac lived in Charleston in 1793–1795, was actively involved in the American Revolution and the political struggles of the French Revolution. Isaac embraced the radical politics of his uncle and returned to his native Saint-Domingue.

Agudat Yisrael and the religious Zionist movement (Mizrachi) were the two largest and most influential political organizations of Orthodox Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century. Competing for the support of observant Jews, the two movements were enmeshed in bitter ideological and political struggles. Nevertheless, due to the dire situation of European and Palestine Jewries their political

Menasseh ben Israel, one of the Amsterdam Jewish community’s most prominent seventeenth-century members, was a prolific author who published many books on a wide variety of subjects and in many different languages. The present article presents a comprehensive analysis of his halakhic manual Thesouro dos Dinim, written in Portuguese. Since this manual was inspired by other halakhic texts, modern scholarship

Jewish law imposes far-reaching sanctions upon those who transgress the prohibition of adultery, not least of all the adulteress. Her husband must end the marriage, and following the divorce, the woman is forbidden to marry the adulterer. In addition, the adulteress loses the financial rights recorded in her marriage contract and the identity of the offspring of this act has the status of a mamzer

This article describes how Jews in medieval Crete were involved in, and knowledgeable about, agricultural practices. It pushes back against a persistent view in the scholarly literature that medieval Jews were alienated from the land, and that their disproportionate involvement in trade hastened the Commercial Revolution. The study attempts to show that Cretan Jews took halakhic strictures on agriculture

This article examines anti-Jewish violence in the Second Polish Republic through the lens of gender. By focusing on verbal and physical attacks against female Jewish students at Polish universities in the 1930s, it highlights the radicalization of the antisemitic movement among Poland’s future elite. Jewish women experienced discrimination and increasingly also violence at Polish universities as Jews

Bronia (Breyndl) Baum (1896–1947) was an Orthodox Jewish writer, activist, and journalist. She was born into a Hasidic family in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, moved to Piotrków Trybunalski in 1918, and then to Łódź. In 1925, she left Poland for the Land of Israel. Among poems and articles that she published in Yiddish papers were “Der Yud,” “Dos Yidishe Togblat,” and “Beys Yankev.” She also wrote in Hebrew—“Bat

This article reconstructs the struggle for higher education of Anna (Chaja) Kluger, born into a Hasidic family in fin-de-siècle Kraków. Kluger’s mother, Simcha Halberstam, was a direct descendant of R. Hayim Halberstam, the founder of the Sandz Hasidic dynasty. At the age of fifteen, after completing a prestigious primary school to which she was sent by her parents, Kluger was betrothed to a young

Masha Rol’nikaite’s diary and novels, published in Soviet times, offer a unique perspective on German-occupied Lithuania, yet her oeuvre is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. The books give a vivid account of the destruction of Jewish families and their survival, and of gendered and sexual violence against Jewish and non-Jewish women, effectively confronting a double layer of silence

By conducting a detailed analysis of the diverse evidence of mass rape of Jewish women in Ukraine during the Civil War pogroms, this article explores the impact of gender violence that was employed as a strategic weapon of genocide by pogrom perpetrators. Various accounts of witnesses, humanitarian workers, and medical practitioners suggest that there was a group of victims who demonstrated a similar

Despite the fact that Jewish women statistically outnumbered men in the former market towns of the Soviet Union, the discourse of the “new Jew” in the 1920s and 1930s focused overwhelmingly on the Jewish male and was debated primarily by men. This article explores what the restructuring of the economic base of the shtetl meant for Jewish women during the New Economic Policy and the transition to the

Across East Central Europe, World War I and its violent aftermath impacted Jewish perspectives on home and homeland and forced many Jews to reconsider, reformulate, and at times even discard previous beliefs about the idea of national belonging. In Hungary, the White Terror of the early 1920s set off shock waves among the population of mainly urban Hungarian Jews, who until then had imagined themselves

The Cairo Geniza preserved thousands of Arabic-script texts, among them documents from the Fatimid and Ayyubid government administration. This essay offers a brief overview of the state document corpus from the Geniza. It also surveys previous scholarship on the documents, attempting to push the material further in two ways: by reading it as evidence of Fatimid and Ayyubid strategies of rule, and by

Figures 1 and 2 should have been published in the above-mentioned article. The omitted figures and figure captions appear on the next pages. Figure 1. Solomon ben Judah, letter. Cambridge University Library T-S Misc.35.14 recto. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Figure 2. Solomon ben Judah, letter. Cambridge University Library T-S Misc.35.14 verso. Reproduced

The original article was published with an incomplete caption for fig. 1. Figure 1 with correct caption can be found on the next page. Figure 1. A fragment from a medieval handbook of magic containing recipes for various aims. Cambridge University Library T-S K1.91, fol. 2 recto. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Figures 1 and 2 should have been published in the above-mentioned article. The omitted figures and figure captions appear on the next pages. Figure 1. Image: Unknown author, private petition. Cambridge University Library T-S 13J18.14 recto. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Figure 2. Cambridge University Library T-S 13J18.14 verso. Reproduced by kind permission

The original article was published with incorrect versions of footnotes 5 and 12. The correct text appears below. 5The following conventions were followed in compiling the transcription and translation. Square brackets filled by ellipses indicate a lacuna of any length, text within square brackets the editorial completion of a textual lacuna, parentheses the clarification of readings and meanings.

Scholars generally read Documentary Arabic according to the norms of Standard Arabic, the constructed ideal language of Abbasid literati. But this essay shows that the nonstandard features of Documentary Arabic were not spontaneous creations by the unlearned but rather scribal traditions carefully transmitted from one generation to the next. Umayyad Documentary Arabic was first and foremost the language

Medieval letters from the Cairo Geniza can be broadly classified into private, official, or mercantile correspondence, and all use particular linguistic registers. Official correspondence, for example, shows abundant code switching into Hebrew and the employment of high-style versus lower-style prose. Mercantile letters actively avoid Hebrew and emulate supraconfessional Arabic writing standards. Private

Documentary materials from the Cairo Geniza present scholars with enormous opportunities for historical research. At the same time, both the nature of the materials and the history of scholarship using them lead to some unusual methodological challenges. This essay reviews recent developments in the understanding of the nature of the extant medieval materials as it now appears that Geniza practice

This essay introduces a special triple issue of Jewish History that aims to offer both an introduction to and an in-depth guide for documentary Cairo Geniza studies. We outline the history of scholarship that led to the definition of the documentary or historical Geniza and in particular introduce the work of Shlomo Dov Goitein, the scholar whose work has essentially defined the field for the past

The Cairo Geniza preserved hundreds of Arabic-script petitions to officials at the Fatimid palace. These petitions are more elaborate than those written during the rule of earlier Islamic dynasties. This essay asks three questions about Fatimid petitions and their development: Who were the scribes who wrote them? When (and why) did Arabic petitions assume the elaborate form and format characteristic

This essay analyzes a bill of sale for the enslaved Nubian woman . In Cairo during the year 1108 CE, the Jewish woman Sitt al-Aqrān sold to another Jew, Sitt al-Munā, who was the widow of the prominent Geniza merchant Nahray b. . Bills of sale are the most common form of Geniza evidence for the history of slavery and the slave trade. While scribes composed most bills of sale in Judeo-Arabic, the majority

The study of the interrelatedness of Islamic and Jewish intellectual history relies largely on the manuscript materials preserved in the various Geniza collections. The Firkovitch manuscripts in particular provide ample material for an analysis of the different patterns of reception/transmission/cross-pollination between Jewish and Muslim scholars, though the bulk of the relevant material still needs

Any discussion of women’s letters involves a consideration of levels of literacy, the use of scribes, and an examination of linguistic registers. The use of a scribe does not necessarily mean that the sender was illiterate but possibly means that she was interested in having a more appropriate literary style featured in the letter. The frequency of travel in Geniza society augmented the need for epistolary

S. D. Goitein left a tangible contribution in many areas relating to the cultural, economic, social, political, and legal history of classical Islam. With three monumental studies—the first volume of A Mediterranean Society, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, and India Traders—and numerous academic articles, he also left an indelible imprint on our understanding of the Islamic maritime heritage, providing

The Geniza preserves some of the densest and most detailed evidence for family life that we possess from the medieval Middle East. This essay examines how scholars have used this evidence to date and how they have not yet done so, in three parts. It first assesses Goitein’s foundational work on women and the family—its strengths, its limitations, and its relationship to the study of the family in other

This essay assesses S. D. Goitein’s contributions to the study of domestic slavery and the slave trade in the medieval Middle East between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. As early as 1950, Goitein begin publishing documentary material from the Cairo Geniza that shed light on the lives of domestic slaves and enslaved factotums. In 1967, he published the first volume of his magnum opus, A

In this essay I examine the content, form, and structure of different genres of prenuptial agreements found in the Cairo Geniza.

This essay examines the language and diplomatics of a single medieval Hebrew letter by one of the leading letter writers of the Cairo Geniza, Solomon b. Judah, gaon of the Jerusalem academy in the eleventh century. The letter, composed and written by Solomon himself, is addressed to the head of the rival Babylonian faction in Egypt, Sahlān b. Abraham, with whom he enjoyed an often fraught professional

The Cairo Geniza has proved to be a fascinating trove of information about all aspects of Jewish life in the medieval and early modern period, magic being one of them. Hundreds of manuscripts, in different states of conservation, testify to the interest of Jews in composing and copying magical manuals as well as producing amulets and curses and otherwise attempting to harness the supernatural in order

This essay describes outstanding features of two types of responsa preserved in the Geniza autographs of individual responsa and collections. An example of each type is provided: an autograph responsum of Maimonides and a collection of responsa issued by the academy of Sura under the aegis of Natronai b. Hilai Gaon.

A major problem facing historians of modern medicine is the question of the connection between theory and practice. The Cairo Geniza provides a unique window into this topic in the form of medical prescriptions. This essay explains what a medical prescription is and describes how to analyze fragments identified as prescriptions. This explanation is followed by an example, T-S Ar.30.305, one of the

A century of academic scholarship on the documents of the Cairo Geniza has dramatically transformed the study of medieval Jewry. This contribution examines how the perspectives and methodologies used to analyze this material have shaped modern conceptions about its content and the societies that produced it. Taking as a basis of comparison the discovery of the papyri in Egypt, the development of their

In the medieval Islamic world, the petition served as the primary vehicle for appealing to governing authorities. Jews used the same device, particularly the poor seeking charity, although those petitions rarely followed the exact structure of the Islamic petition and usually were shorter. This essay offers an edition and a translation of a petition seeking charity that is unusually long and follows

This essay deals mainly with the future of research on the history of Arabic medicine and pharmacology based on the documents of the Cairo Geniza. It starts with a very brief review of the research of the history of medicine (which was using the Cairo Geniza documents as a main source) until 2003. Later, it presents the work that I and my research group have done during the last fifteen years. Finally

Research on the documentary Geniza originally had to rely on the spadework done by S. D. Goitein. With the coming of the digital age, research could use data allowing word searches. The earliest project along these lines was the Princeton Geniza Project, a searchable collection of keyboarded Geniza documents. The newest is the comprehensive collection of digitized images in the Friedberg Genizah Project

This essay offers a practical guide to the major collections and editions of Geniza documents as well as to some of the resources available for their study.

S. D. Goitein’s nuanced description of the structure, functioning, and administrative reach of the Jewish community, most fully articulated in the second volume of A Mediterranean Society, was enlarged on, revised, and challenged in the work of two subsequent generations of scholars. Addressing the mixture of hierocratic and democratic elements that Goitein identified within the medieval Jewish community

The letters from the Cairo Geniza are among the most important types of documentary source material available for those interested in the history of the Jewish communities in the Arabic-speaking world during the Middle Ages. At first utilized primarily for the factual information they provide about individuals, events, and communal institutions, these texts have of late begun to be reexamined in terms

This essay examines S. D. Goitein’s tendency to find strong women in Geniza documents. I situate this predilection at the intersection of three separate currents. The first is the growing interest in women’s history in the late 1960s and early 1970s, precisely the time in which Goitein was working on the third volume of A Mediterranean Society. The second is a stereotype with a long history that sees