This essay analyzes an unpublished manuscript of a giudiata, a poem mocking Jewish funerals that was written and performed in Rome in the mid-seventeenth century.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

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

As the densest single corpus of documents pertaining to everyday life in the medieval Middle East and Islamic world before the 1250s, the Cairo Geniza material has been mined to investigate not only the economic roles of Jews in the Islamicate world they inhabited but also the relationship between merchants and the state, the structure of business ties, the nature, market share, and circulation of

Jewish communal organization has always been a major topic in Jewish historiography, not only because of its importance in the past, but also because of its continuing importance as a model for contemporary Jewish life. This essay traces the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship on Jewish communal life from its beginnings in the early research conducted by the Wissenschaft scholars

In this essay, some of the central issues concerning the legal phraseology of commercial contracts in the Geniza are discussed. These issues include not only questions about the text of these contracts themselves and the relationship of commercial contracts to Jewish and Islamic law but also what insights commercial contracts in the Geniza might offer social and economic historians into how both court

Goitein’s Mediterranean Society is remarkable and paved the way for a generation —indeed, generations—of scholars. In this brief note, I discuss some of the fundamental questions Goitein left unanswered.

This essay argues that we cannot fully grasp what has been at stake in discussions following the January 2015 attacks in Paris, nor the symbolic place Charlie Hebdo has subsequently come to hold in French society, unless we pay attention to the ways in which gender, sex, and race have shaped both Charlie Hebdo’s visual register and contemporary representations of Frenchness and difference. Within the

Are Muslims the “new Jews” of Europe? The spectacle of Middle Eastern and African refugees shuttled by train from camp to squalid camp has understandably drawn parallels to the darkest pages in twentieth-century continental history. Such a historical comparison between Islamophobia and antisemitism, however, risks missing their ongoing interrelation. This article examines that interrelation, arguing

This article opens with an assessment of the narratives that emerged in the immediate wake of the Charlie Hebdo / Hyper Cacher events in January 2015. It does so by examining the differing hashtags of the moment—#jesuisCharlie, #jesuisjuif, #LassBat—and how each offered a distilled account of what the moment meant; these competing interpretations were echoed in the news coverage and the commentary

To date, scholars have rarely talked about contemporary antisemitism and Islamophobia in France as part of a single story. When they have, it has typically been as part of a framework for analyzing racism that is essentially competitive: some depict Islamophobia as less a real problem than a frequent excuse to ignore antisemitism; others minimize antisemitism as an unfortunate but marginal phenomenon

This article reexamines the satire of Charlie Hebdo through the lens of comedy theory and cultural studies. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “the carnivalesque” and Linda Hutcheon’s concept of “irony’s edge,” it considers the wide variety of potential meanings that are encoded within Hebdo’s highly controversial comedy and religious representations. Introducing the notion of the “ambigramic

This article explores tensions in French Jewish discourses about antisemitism in the post-2000 period. Drawing on commentary from French Jewish intellectuals, national Jewish organizations, and the French Jewish press from the mid-2000s until after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, I note a complex relationship between change and continuity in discursive characterizations of French antisemitism

The unexpected revitalization of Polish Jewish traditionalism—Hasidic and non-Hasidic—is particularly visible in the realm of education. During the interwar period, a combined influx of pious refugees from the Soviet Union and generous American Jewish philanthropy bolstered traditionalist Jewish elementary schools (hadarim) and yeshivot. At the same time, traditionalists reformed those hitherto sacrosanct

Though Jews arrived late in Bologna, they soon came to form a considerable community, numbering several hundred by the end of the fourteenth century. The existing historiography of this community is strongly characterized by ideas of inclusion and normalization of Jewish relations with Christian society. In contrast, the historiography of Jews in Renaissance Italy is heavily marked by references to

This article examines the gendered politics of public health initiatives among Jews in interwar Poland by focusing on the establishment and activity of the Warsaw School of Nursing (Szkoła Pielęgniarstwa przy Szypitalu Starozakonnych w Warszawie). Founded in 1923 and funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the school’s staff believed that they could shape the attitudes and behaviors

The emigration movement among Soviet Jews is usually dated to the 1960s–1990s. This essay focuses on the premovement emigration in the 1950s, which prepared the ground for the massive departure of Jews and non-Jewish members of their families, primarily to Israel and the United States. The parameters for leaving the Soviet Union in the 1950s were in many ways similar to the parameters for returning

This essay examines similarities between the Hebrew chronicle of Shlomo bar Shimshon and the Latin chronicle of Albert of Aachen. Both sources describe the massacre of Rhineland Jews during the First Crusade and the subsequent defeat of the Crusaders by the Hungarians and the Bulgarians. On the basis of similarities in structure, content, and language between these two accounts, I argue that Shlomo

During the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, rabbinic scholars of law in Franco-German communities had an at best ambivalent attitude toward the codification of Jewish law. Even Rabbi Joseph Caro’s Shulḥan ˋArukh, first printed in Venice in 1565, was not well received by all. While students of the law from the lower ranks seem to have embraced the code, many leading rabbis—particularly