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Did Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages cohabit in a peaceful "interfaith utopia"? Or were Jews under Muslim rule persecuted, much as they were in Christian lands? Rejecting both polemically charged ideas as myths, Mark Cohen offers a systematic comparison of Jewish life in medieval Islam and Christendom--and the first in-depth explanation of why medieval Islamic-Jewish relations, though not utopic, were less confrontational and violent than those between Christians and Jews in the West.Under Crescent and Cross has been translated into Turkish, Hebrew, German, Arabic, French, and Spanish, and its historic message continues to be relevant across continents and time. This updated edition, which contains an important new introduction and afterword by the author, serves as a great companion to the original

They are voices that have been silent for centuries: those of captives and refugees, widows and orphans, the blind and infirm, and the underclass of the ""working poor."" Now, for the first time, the voices of the poor in the Middle Ages come to life in this moving book by historian Mark Cohen. A companion to Cohen's other volume, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt, the book presents more than ninety letters, alms lists, donor lists, and other related documents from the Geniza, a hidden chamber for discarded papers, situated inside a wall in a Cairo synagogue. Cohen

What was it like to be poor in the Middle Ages? In the past, the answer to this question came only from institutions and individuals who gave relief to the less fortunate. This book, by one of the top scholars in the field, is the first comprehensive book to study poverty in a premodern Jewish community--from the viewpoint of both the poor and those who provided for them. Mark Cohen mines the richest body of documents available on the matter: the papers of the Cairo Geniza. These documents, located in the Geniza, a hidden chamber for discarded papers situated in a medieval synagogue in Old

Under three successive Islamic dynasties--the Fatimids, the Ayyubids, and the Mamluks--the Egyptian Office of the Head of the Jews (also known as the Nagid) became the most powerful representative of medieval Jewish autonomy in the Islamic world. To determine the origins of this institution, Mark Cohen concentrates on the complex web of internal and external circumstances during the latter part of the eleventh century.Originally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Abstract
Economic historians, beginning with Avner Greif, have looked to business letters from the Cairo Geniza to understand how medieval merchants in the Islamic Mediterranean organized business collaboration. They have noticed the prevalence of agency relations, which followed "informal" arrangements, unlike formal partnerships, which employed written contracts. This "method" was called ṣuḥba ("companionship") in Arabic, and it entailed reciprocal exchange of favors between business "friends." Much attention has been given to what Greif calls "private order" enforcement of agency contracts, whereby merchants belonging to a "closed" consortium reported instances of cheating or opportunism by a fellow merchant, in place of enforcement by religious courts. However, economic historians relying on the Geniza documents have paid inadequate attention to evolving Jewish law in the Islamic milieu. The present article, focusing on a mercantile dispute, brings evidence to show that Jewish legal scholars adopted a feature of Islamic judicial practice to strengthen their role in enforcement of informal agency contracts. In his Code, the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides put the final touches on this accommodation by incorporating agency into the law pertaining to contract enforcement among partners.

Since the inception of the "computer age," much talk has been heard about applying this relatively new technology for manipulating information to the medieval manuscript fragments from the Cairo Geniza. The uses of the Geniza, particularly its documentary sources, for Middle Eastern history will be well known to many readers of this Bulletin. The thousands of letters, court records, marriage contracts, lists, and other documentary treasures, preserved for centuries in a large discard chamber in what is today the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, and written in Hebrew or Judæo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew letters), with a small number in Arabic language and script, constitute an unmediated source for the reconstruction of what the late Professor S. D. Goitein called the "Mediterranean Society" of Jews, Muslims, and Christians of the high Middle Ages.

Bericht über ein Datenbankprojekt an der Princeton University zur Erfassung und Erschließung mittelalterlicher Dokumente aus der Kairoer Genisa. Es wurde eine trilinguale Software entwickelt (Hebräisch, Arabisch, Englisch), die eine integrierte Verarbeitung der Texte in den drei Sprachen und Schriften ermöglicht. (DÜI-Hns)