Inherent in this provision is the notion that law was personal rather than territorial, that individuals were governed – at least with respect to civil matters – by the regulations of their respective religious communities, and not by a universally applied legal system. This chapter examines the authority structures that were maintained by the medieval Jewish community, and through which this fundamental dispensation was put into practice. Out of necessity, it focuses primarily on the two and a half centuries between 1000 and 1250, the period for which we have the most abundant sources.

Jewish learning in Muslim lands in the Middle Ages was transformed by its absorption of Muslim and Greco-Arabic learning, which included grammar and philology, poetics, hermeneutics, and philosophy, all of which contributed to the forging of substantially new methods of Jewish Bible exegesis. Earlier Jewish Bible interpretation was dominated by the creative midrashic forms of “rewriting” the Bible, which had been consolidated in the Talmud and various halakhic and aggadic midrashic compilations. But from the ninth century onward, Karaite scholars in the Muslim East rejected rabbinic authority and spearheaded a new philologically oriented exegetical method.

This chapter deals with family life in the Jewish society of the medieval Islamic world, which is mainly reconstructed on the basis of Genizah finds. It starts with a short survey about the ways in which family, kinship, and pedigree were conceived in this society, and then it goes on to speak about the functions expected and fulfilled by family members. The next paragraph examines the boundaries of the family, focusing on the special role occupied by domestic slaves. Thereafter, I will examine the institution of marriage: its roles, the legal processes required to establish and to end it, and its structure, including a short discussion about polygyny. The chapter ends with a description of the relations between family members as they surface in Genizah documents: spousal relations, relations between parents and children at various ages, and among siblings.

Any serious effort to compose an historical description of the liturgy of Judaism in the Middle Ages must at the outset overcome a number of serious obstacles. First, the whole notion of “the Middle Ages” is one with which students of Islam, Judaism, and Roman Catholicism feel distinctly uncomfortable since it often presupposes a primitive world of intellectual darkness where institutions overshadow individuals, and in which an obsession with rules and authorities negates the illuminating effect of novel thought and expression. Such students are keenly aware that there is a great deal more to the so-called medieval age than its existence as a miserable interlude between the two exciting and productive periods of Greco-Roman antiquity, on the one hand, and the modern centuries that followed the Renaissance and the Reformation, on the other. If, in 1884, it could be claimed that “the first centuries of the middle ages are often termed the dark ages, a name which they certainly deserve,” it must be acknowledged that there is today no shortage of voices that would cry out (if not entirely in unison) that such an assessment amounts to an unjustified generalization, if not a bigoted distortion. Newly discovered data and a commitment to balanced analysis present the opportunity of more careful evaluation.

No single, coherent chapter on the societies of modern Syria (Arabic, al-Shām) and Sicily (Arabic, Ṣiqilliyah) could or would be written today: Sicily is a Western Christian state; Syria an Arab and Islamic one. But for most of the Middle Ages, there was no such clarity about these societies’ dispositions. War and regime change plagued both territories. Political power passed back and forth among Persian, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin conquerors. These rulers included partisans of the popes of Rome, the patriarchs of Constantinople, the Sunnī caliphs of Baghdad, and the Shīʿī imams of Cairo. As a result of these changes in regime, as well as ongoing immigration and emigration, medieval Syria and Sicily came to host ethnolinguistic and confessional communities whose diversity reflected that of their wider Mediterranean world. Among these populations, substantial Syrian and Sicilian Jewish communities survived and often thrived throughout the Middle Ages.

In the present chapter, I survey the major features of Jewish civil law in the Islamicate world through the fifteenth century – the production of halakhic (Jewish legal) literature, the approaches of the most important sages to the sources of law and other legal principles, and the procedures followed by rabbinic courts. I will also focus on how Islamic law influenced the development of halakhah in the Jewish communities in the Islamicate world.

Jews living in the Islamic world during the medieval period had access to a great variety of languages and frequently used several, depending upon the social, cultural, religious, or economic context in which they operated at any given time. But as these languages came to be used within Jewish communities, they developed idiosyncrasies in relation to the particular religious culture in which they grew up and came to form variants that were clearly distinguished from the variety used in non-Jewish communities. While medieval Jews living in Islamic lands used standard varieties of their languages outside of the Jewish community, they also used specific Jewish varieties when communicating with their coreligionists. Over the years, scholars have debated whether there are enough reasons to use the term “Jewish languages” to describe the written and spoken variants used by members of Jewish communities. The purely linguistic arguments seem insufficient to some philologists to justify distinguishing different linguistic systems. These objections aside, the prevailing opinion is that from a sociolinguistic perspective, Jews often used a particular form of language (“sociolect,” “ethnolect,” or “religiolect”) in intra-communal contexts. And in fact, many linguists prefer to use the phrase “Jewish language continuum” to describe the relationship between Jewish languages and the majority-culture languages to which they relate; this terminology allows for scholarly analysis to consider both continuities and differences between Jewish and other varieties of languages. Hebrew is a language closely identified with the history and culture of the Jewish people, and it is often identified as “the language of Judaism,” although as we shall see below the reality is often more complex. In fact, it was far from being the main or only language of the Jews in the Middle Ages. There is no doubt that medieval Jews were at least bilingual and, in some cases, plurilingual, using their many languages to conduct varied activities in all areas of cultural and day-to-day life, and working between languages as translators, dragomans, and go-betweens.

The history of Jewish philosophy is tied to the emergence of philosophy in the Islamic world three centuries after the beginnings of Islam. By the tenth century, the legacy of Greek science and thought had been absorbed, through translations and paraphrases, into Arabic, and had given rise to a new class of Muslims, called appropriately falāsifa (sing. faylasūf). Though small in number, these philosophers saw themselves as distinct from the more numerous theologians or mutakallimūn of Islam. These practioners of kalām were also the beneficiaries of Greek thought and logic, mingled though with issues raised by the encounter of Hellenistic thought with Christianity. Accordingly, the mutakallimūn became skilled apologists on behalf of their faith, dividing into two major camps that differed principally on the need to present the Deity as transparently rational in His relations with mankind.

As examined in Chapter Four: Provincial Negotiations (31 BCE-192 CE), the rise of the principate ushered in a series of significant restructurings of the Middle East, which elevated the place of Antioch into a new provincial role and forged new ties to the city. Although these Roman activities are often portrayed as eclipsing the municipal structures, operations, and identities of the Antiochians, far more complex exchanges both divided and drew together the established civic population and the Roman administration.

Those studying the economic activities of Jews in the medieval Islamic world find themselves in an odd position of glut and dearth. For the vast geographic and temporal sweep of medieval Islamic history, we still know relatively little about the economy in general. A lack of survey scholarship makes it difficult to know a great deal about the economic activities of the Jewish community as a whole for most of its history under Islam, and even more, how to interpret the smattering of economic information that comes from literary sources, chronicles, travelogues, geographies, geonic responsa, legal treatises and formularies. It is hard to understand or sometimes even identify the economic activities of Jews to which these documents occasionally refer, and even harder to put them in the broader context of Islamic society.

Islamic attitudes and policies concerning the Jews in the Middle Ages have been the subject of heated debate in recent decades. Some see a benign, tolerant Islam, protecting its Jewish and other non-Muslim subjects from violence and respecting their religion and religious institutions. Others see conflict, intolerance, persecution, and even antisemitism. The first image harks back to the nineteenth century, a time when Jewish historians tended to paint an exaggerated picture of a “golden age” of Jewish-Muslim harmony, taking al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain, as the model. The idea stemmed from the disappointment Central European Jewish intellectuals felt as Emancipation-era promises of political and cultural equality remained unfulfilled. Historians exploited the tolerance they ascribed to Islam to chastise their Christian neighbors for failing to rise to the standards set by non-Christian society hundreds of years earlier.

Chapter Two: Imperial Beginnings (300–129 BCE) traces Antioch’s gradual promotion to Seleucid capital and the degree to which this role and the policies of the kings shaped life within the city and its status and connections in the wider region. The civic population developed alongside in both its agency and identity, but only emerged from the shadow of the Seleucids intermittently.