In 711, a small Muslim invading force composed of Arabs and Berbers crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from North Africa and began a military campaign that overthrew the Visigothic Kingdom and inaugurated a new chapter in Islamic and European history. It also marked the beginning of a new era in Jewish history. The Arabs applied the name al-Andalus to the newly acquired Iberian territory, probably recalling the Vandals, one of the Germanic tribal groups who formed the prior Christian kingdom. Henceforth, the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule would be known as Andalusia or al-Andalus. Al-Andalus endured for almost 800 years in an ever-contracting territory until its last stronghold, the Nāṣrid Kingdom of Granada, fell in 1492. Since the end of the fifteenth century, the name Andalusia has denoted the small southwestern province at the tip of the Iberian Peninsula; the entire, unified, peninsula became known as Spain. The Jews recall the area as Sepharad and its Jewish inhabitants and their descendants are designated Sephardim.

Piyyuṭ (pl. piyyuṭim) is the Hebrew term for liturgical poetry that embellishes the public recitation of the statutory prayers recited in the synagogue by the precentor (ḥazzan). As a substitute for most of the fixed versions of the obligatory prayers (except for the berakhot), its function was to introduce variety, in this case through artistic poetic expression, to the established, statutory prayers.

The period covered by this volume – from roughly 600 to 1500 ce – witnessed radical transformations both within the Jewish community itself and in the broader contexts in which the Jews found themselves. By focusing on the Islamicate world, this volume necessarily engages questions about how the development, rise, and maturation of Islam itself from its cradle in the Arabian Peninsula to its florescence and expansion from the Iberian Peninsula in the West to India and China in the East shaped that context. The rise of Islam and its penetration into Byzantine, Sasanian Persian, and Visigothic domains had a decisive influence on Jews and Judaism in these regions as the conditions of daily life and elite culture shifted throughout the Islamicate world. At the outset of this period, the vast majority of world Jewry lived in the “East,” with the spiritual and demographic center of Babylonia/Iraq occupying a place of particular prominence. Islamic conquest and expansion would come to have a definite effect on the shape of the Jewish community as the center of gravity shifted west to the North African communities, and long-distance trading opportunities led to the establishment of trading diasporas as far from the early centers as the Malabar Coast of India. Of course, with the turn of the millennium, the seedling Jewish communities of Christian Europe would begin to take root. By the end of our period, many of the communities on the “other” side of the Mediterranean had come into their own – while many of the Jewish communities in the Islamicate world had retreated from their high-water mark. Here, too, developments in the broader Islamic context – the rise of the Berber Almoravid (al-Murābiṭ) and Almohad (al-Muwaḥḥid) dynasties in the West, the Ayyūbid and Mamlūk sultanates in North Africa and the Levant, and the Mongol Īlkhāns in the East – trickled down to all levels of Jewish society and significantly transformed Jewish life. Although there would be areas of continued Jewish flourishing and creativity – particularly in the areas of piyyuṭ, mysticism, and rabbinic literature in the form of legal responsa (teshuvot), these shifts in the broader society led to a retrenchment of many aspects of Jewish life. The history of medieval Jewish civilization, then, is inextricably entwined with that of Islam. And as some amount of people, texts, practices, and ideas migrated from the Islamicate world to the Christian world in this period and were therefore at least partially responsible for nurturing Jewry on both north and south of the divided Mediterranean intellectually, spiritually, religiously, and even organizationally, Jewish life in Islamic lands produced a heritage that provided a formative impress on subsequent Jewish life in Christian Europe.

Chapter Five: Imperial Creations (192–284 CE) investigates the outcome of these negotiations between the citizens and their imperial overlords, as the balance of Roman involvement in Antioch shifted from provincial to imperial in an increasingly unstable climate. Antioch was not yet a completely imperially governed city, as the civic administration retained a visible degree of agency and still presented itself as a distinct body. Even so, the Antiochians were forced to adjust under intensified Roman rule as the imperial government exploited the city’s resources and interrupted civic operations.

The mind relies on time to make sense of the flow of experience. Human societies develop different ways of creating and marking time. Although systems for reckoning time in any given society are established by people, they are also based on the temporal sequences of nature and on the inner life of the individual. This chapter deals with two systems of time used in the society of the Jews of the medieval Islamic world whose material remains are preserved in the Genizah. It starts with the cycle of life – from an individual’s birth all the way to death. Then, it proceeds to discuss the community’s rhythms of time and the way time structured the annual cycle.

According to chroniclers and Byzantine hagiographers, the kingdom of Ḥimyar, whose capital was located in Yemen but whose territory encompassed the majority of the Arabian Peninsula, was Jewish at the beginning of the sixth century ce. The Islamic scholarly tradition confirms this fact and notes that Judaism was introduced to Yemen by an ancient king. The same sources also mention influential Jewish communities in northwestern Arabia.

This chapter introduces readers to the study of ancient Antioch. It not only surveys the long-standing interest in the city but also critiques traditional characterizations of Antioch as a prominent, yet static, capital for the Seleucid and Roman empires. This is understandable considering the perceived limitations of both the textual and archaeological evidence. However, full examination of the coin evidence for Antioch helps challenge monolithic descriptions by revealing the different civic, provincial, and imperial authorities making use of the city. More specifically, this chapter introduces the approach of applied numismatics, digital mapping, and Exploratory Data Analysis to study the iconography, distribution, and likely circulation of the coins minted at Antioch. More than a coin study, however, the primary goal of this book is to encourage a better integration of material often left to specialists into a deep and comprehensive history of the people at and in relationship with the ancient city.

The medieval period was a time of important changes in Jewish book culture in the Muslim world. While book production and use were to some extent a continuation of ancient traditions, medieval Jewish readers discovered an array of unprecedented subjects and genres. Unlike anonymous or apocryphal transmission of antiquity, individual medieval authors strove to shape and control the circulation of their original works by fostering the notion of an “authorized” and “correct” text. Books took new physical forms and formats, used newly introduced book materials, and acquired a new status as sought after vehicles of scientific knowledge, pleasurable pastimes, or as prized collectors’ pieces. A book’s appearance depended on its cultural context but was also related to its intended destination: public use in a synagogue or a house of learning, a trophy acquisition for the library of a wealthy bibliophile, or for personal use as modest textbooks for scholars or schoolchildren. The reader and his capacity to make use of the books, his reading comfort, and his literacy and linguistic skills were all important considerations when a book was made.

The prominence of poetry and other kinds of literary work in which the skill displayed in the writing contends for attention with the work’s contents was an outstanding feature of Judeo-Arabic society in our period and one that distinguishes this society from all earlier and most succeeding Jewish societies until the nineteenth century. Arabic-speaking Jewish writers, in the period covered by this volume, produced literary works of lasting appeal not only because some were profound thinkers, sensitive souls, or linguistically gifted individuals, but because Arabo-Islamic society created institutions in which artistic writing played an important public role, thereby encouraging the cultivation of elegant language and literary craftsmanship among its subject peoples as well. Poetry and fine writing were first and foremost instruments of public life and secondarily of upper-class social life and entertainment. The literary forms cultivated for these purposes were vehicles for the expression of communal attitudes as well as individual writers’ personal views and even inner experience. The age of Judeo-Arabic ascendancy produced, for the first time in Jewish history, something we can recognize as literature, in the artistic sense of the word.

In this chapter we describe the medieval sciences as studied, transmitted, and practiced within the different Jewish communities in Islamic lands. We have followed a rough chronological scheme, based on general demographic and cultural shifts. We begin by treating the period up until the tenth century, about which very little is known. In the second and longest section, we examine Jewish scientific activity through the tenth to the end of the twelfth century, first as reflected in direct sources (extant manuscripts preserved in European libraries and the documentary material in the Cairo Genizah) and then in indirect sources (nonscientific writing in which scientific theories appear in passing). After that we turn to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and, finally, treat the fifteenth century on its own.

Chapter Three: Imperial Transitions (129 BCE–31 BCE) clarifies that it was the civic body that outlasted the fall of the Seleucid Empire and weathered Roman annexation. For much of this transitional period, the dysfunction of the final Seleucid kings and the subsequent hands-off attitude of the Roman generals and governors present within the city and Levant allowed or forced the Antiochians into managing their own internal affairs. In the early years of Roman rule in particular, it is difficult to claim that Antioch served as a provincial capital, because so much of the city was defined by the far more restricted authority of the citizens themselves.