Podcast
The vast majority of Jews in the Middle Ages lived in the Islamic world. While the salience of that fact has long been recognized for the survival of Judaism after antiquity, we still know remarkably little about how medieval Jews navigated one of the fundamental conditions of their existence: the states under whose rule they lived. Hitherto unknown documents from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of manuscripts discovered in a medieval Egyptian synagogue, suggest that Jews maintained surprisingly close and extensive contacts with the courts of caliphs and sultans, their bureaucracies and provincial officials. This lecture will present some of that evidence and discuss its implications for the Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, as well as for the history of premodern Islamic statecraft.
Marina Rustow
(Johns Hopkins University)
About the Speaker: Marina Rustow is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of the Humanities and associate professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.
