Jewish Studies

Focuses on medieval Jewish civilization, from the fall of the Roman Empire to about 1492. The coverage is international, presenting people, culture, and events from various countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Though the existence of Jewish regional cultures is widely known, the origins of the most prominent groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad, are poorly understood, and the rich variety of other regional Jewish identities is often overlooked. Yet all these subcultures emerged in the Middle Ages. This volume spans the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, and explores Jewish cultural developments in western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia Minor.

Volume 5 examines the history of Judaism in the Islamic World from the rise of Islam in the early sixth century to the expulsion of Jews from Spain at the end of the fifteenth.

Volume 6 examines the history of Judaism during the second half of the Middle Ages. Through the first half of the Middle Ages, the Jewish communities of western Christendom lagged well behind those of eastern Christendom and the even more impressive Jewries of the Islamic world.

The Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World Online (EJIW) is the first cohesive and discreet reference work which covers the Jews of Muslim lands particularly in the late medieval, early modern and modern periods.

This bibliography focuses on Jewish society in the Islamic world from the 7th century to the emergence of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 16th century. Primary concern is given to political, economic, and cultural developments, with a particular focus on exploring the Jews’ encounter with Islam and Islamic civilization.

“Anti-Judaism” refers to antipathy toward Judaism as a faith and to Jews as practitioners of that faith (as distinct from racial anti-Semitism). The literature in this area is huge, and the selections are necessarily limited. The focus throughout is on anti-Judaism in Christian Europe, with particular focus on the High Middle Ages and later.

This bibliographical essay concentrates on the medieval period, which was the formative stage in the development of Jewish political philosophy. Renaissance political thought is included, since it is essentially a continuation of the medieval outlook. Modern Jewish political thought is initiated in the mid-17th century by Spinoza’s revolutionary outlook, which dismantled the medieval view.