With few exceptions, medieval Islamic literature shows little curiosity regarding non-Muslims. The Jews of northern Arabia, especially those who lived in Medina (pre-Islamic Yathrib), are a prominent exception, due to their role both as supporters and adversaries of the Prophet Muḥammad. The huge medieval literary output about Muḥammad provides many details about them. The details are often problematic, but they are by no means impenetrable. In any case, one’s expectations must take into account the limitations imposed by the very nature of the source material.

In the thirteenth century, Judaism and Islam gave birth to two monumental works which had a lasting impact on their respective mystical systems: within Judaism and the Kabbalistic tradition it was the Zohar, the Book of Splendor, “which was destined to overshadow all other documents of Kabbalist literature by the success and the fame it achieved and the influence it gradually exerted.” According to Yehuda Liebes, who has studied the method and process of its compilation and the identity of those who participated in this process, the Zohar seems to have been compiled by “the mid-thirteenth-century circle of ‘Gnostic Kabbalists’ in Castile.” Within the Muslim mystical tradition, it was the work of the Andalusian born Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240), in particular his Meccan Revelations (al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya), in which “he was to express in writing that vast range of esoteric knowledge, which, until his time, had been transmitted orally or by way of allusions only.” That these two thirteenth-century mystical works, which mark turning points in the history of Jewish and Islamic mystical traditions, were conceived within such temporal and spatial proximity is thought-provoking. The fact that both were compiled by mystics of Spanish origins raises the question of possible common roots. Indeed, although Kabbalah, geographically and temporally speaking, relates to post-Andalusian Jewish history, when one adds up the literary testimonies stemming from the tenth century onward, it appears that the question of Kabbalistic origins should be viewed with an Andalusian prehistory in mind. In spite of clear differences between the two – the Zohar was compiled in Aramaic in the later part of the thirteenth century within a Jewish circle from the north of Spain living under Christian rule; the Meccan Revelations was written in Arabic in the earlier part of that same century by an Andalusian Muslim (albeit after having left al-Andalus for the eastern Muslim world) – both the Zohar and the Meccan Revelations mark the culmination of an intellectual, mystically inclined process, which, for Andalusian Jews and Muslims alike, had started approximately two centuries before, that is, in the tenth century, when certain teachings were brought to al-Andalus from the East and inspired there a growing interest in the mystical dimension of the religious life.

Our knowledge of Jewish art and architecture in Islamic societies during the Middle Ages depends on a small corpus of surviving works: illustrated manuscripts, mostly those discovered in the Cairo Genizah; texts that describe artistic activity and works of art; isolated synagogue remains; and a few nearly complete synagogue buildings from medieval Spain – which were created under Christian rulers in the Mudéjar style of art, a style which perpetuated traditional Islamic forms and styles. The Islamic visual arts and material culture are likewise reflected in Hebrew illuminated manuscripts of Christian Spain, including important figurative miniatures in Sephardi Haggadah manuscripts.

With the inception of the late antique period, Antioch finally transformed fully into the role of imperial Roman city and capital. As explored in Chapter Six: Imperial City (284–450 CE), even this status did not end the expression or boldness of the Antiochians, but the civic structure as a whole continued to evolve under the now formalized imperial presence and the Christianization of the empire. Antioch and its people were integrated into the Roman imperial system to a greater degree than ever before.

In his “Prolegomena to the Medieval History of Oriental Jewry,” Eliyahu Ashtor notes the poverty of sources documenting the demographic development of Jews in medieval Islamic lands. Although scholarly estimates draw on systematic methods in forming conjectures, they nonetheless admit of wide variation. The size of any population responds to “a complex of biological, social, and cultural factors,” including plague, socioeconomic transformations, migration, and conversion. In this chapter, I discuss population estimates for Jews in Islamic lands from the rise of Islam through the fifteenth century – critically evaluating the sources, methods, and assumptions that scholars have used to arrive at them.

Jews of medieval Islamicate lands were avid consumers and producers of historical writing. They constructed histories that strove to reflect on contemporary political and cultural developments. They considered both their history and that of others, and in some cases preserved rare information about periods from which few writings have survived. Included here are prose texts written by authors who spent all or parts of their life in Islamic lands, including general, universal, and local histories, individual and communal letters, travelogues, and the approaches to history implicit in the writings of some leading medieval Jewish scholars. Written in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Arabic, or – rarely – Aramaic, most Jewish historical works originated in the central areas of Jewish settlement: Andalusia, North Africa, Syria-Palestine, and Iraq.

The Jewish community of the Yemen is well known for having been amongst the oldest in the Arabian Peninsula with origins in the early first millennium ce, if not far earlier since oral traditions recall a first arrival even before the destruction of the First Temple in 587 bce. As one of the most important contemporary scholars of Yemenite Judaism, Yosef (Joseph) Tobi, and other scholars, have noted, this timeline has strongly impacted scholarship on Yemenite Jewry, leading some of the early scholarship on Yemenite Jews to express a “romantic, even Orientalist, view that perceives this community as … embodying unchanged ancient tenets of Judaism from the Talmudic period, and resembling an ‘authentic’ old Jewish society.” This chapter joins a body of more critical approaches now emerging that understand Yemenite Jewry as a dynamic and complex society and it is for this reason that readers find the Yemen paired here with India, a region where firm evidence for a Jewish presence before 1500, and in particular the matter of first arrivals, continues to elude scholars and generates as much debate as the Yemenite material. If this chapter skirts the question of “first arrivals,” it nevertheless links the two regions because a large proportion of it will focus on the exceptional documentary corpus known as the Cairo Genizah and more specifically the body of documents that S. D. Goitein nicknamed his “India Book,” material relating to the Jewish trade between the eastern Mediterranean and South Asia, via the Yemen. While the Yemen, and ʿAden in particular, remain at the center of “India Book” documents, all of this material is deeply entangled through trade, travel, and marriage with South Asia and wider Mediterranean and Indian Ocean networks. The wider context for these connections is, of course, the trans-Eurasian trade boom of the period. The “India Book” material within the Cairo Genizah offers exceptional opportunities to flesh out for the Yemen, but also India, what otherwise remains the barest bones of Jewish history. This material, together with local literary production and extra-communal sources dating to the twelfth to fourteenth centuries – much of it in fact recovered from the Cairo Genizah – offers the potential for new histories and discourses. We start, though, with these barest of bones and the broad outlines of the history of Jews in the Yemen and India.

Jewish-Muslim polemics are as old as Islam. Many Qurʾānic verses challenge the Jews and Jewish ideas. The earliest debates between Jews and Muslims took place between the Jews of Medina and Khaybar, on the one hand, and Muḥammad and his disciples, on the other. The only sources that describe the disputations between Jews and Muḥammad are Islamic. For example, in several places, the Qurʾān criticizes Jewish ideas about the afterlife. Qurʾān 2:94 states: “Say: ‘If the Last Abode with Allāh is yours exclusively, and not for other people, then long for death – if you speak truly.’” This verse indicates that some Jews – like the talmudic sages – believed that the afterlife exists and is meant for the Jews alone. Elsewhere it is stated (3:77): “There shall be no share for them in the world to come” (lā khalāqa lahum fī al-ākhira) – a statement that appears to reject the talmudic perception expressed, inter alia, in Talmud Bavli Sanhedrin 90a: “All Israel has a portion in the Hereafter” (kol Yiśrael yesh lahem ḥeleq la-ʿolam ha-ba). Other verses (2:80 and 3:24) criticize the Jewish belief that Jews who are sent to hell will spend only a few days there. While these verses do not specify the length of time that Jews must spend in hell, they do seem to clash with the talmudic belief in Talmud Bavli Shabbat 33b, that the maximum sojourn is twelve months.

The Jewish communities of Egypt and North Africa are arguably the best-documented Jewish communities in the medieval Islamic world (with the possible exception of those of Palestine). The riches of the genizot of Cairo and geonic responsa open unparalleled vistas for the study of Jewish life in these regions and attest to the strong links between them. As explored further below, Egypt and North Africa shared a common orientation toward the Mediterranean and were tied by a vibrant maritime and overland trade. In 969, the dynasty that had ruled over the central Maghrib from the beginning of the century conquered Egypt and subsequently proclaimed this victory by establishing its new capital in it (Cairo, Arabic al-Qāhira, “the victorious”). The transfer of the religious, military, and administrative center of the empire from the Maghrib to Egypt constituted another strong connection between the two regions. The combination of these commercial and political ties brought about a substantial migration and settlement of Maghribī Jews to Egypt, a process that further bonded the regions together and proved decisive in shaping their Jewish communities.

Jewish perceptions of and attitudes toward Muslims and Islam during the latter’s classical age, when the vast majority of Jews lived in the lands of Islam, were always conditioned by the Jews’ status as a small religious community, widely dispersed yet overrepresented in the major urban centers of Iberia, North Africa, and the Middle East. During the ninth through twelfth centuries (corresponding to the High Middle Ages in Christendom) the Jews of Islam enjoyed full communal autonomy and achieved significant economic prosperity even as a subject minority. Rabbanites and Karaites alike vigorously built new communal institutions and produced singularly important cultural achievements that would transform and rival the inheritance of rabbinic Judaism. However, interpretation of the Jews’ experience under the orbit of classical Islam has been quite varied and is itself historically constructed. In recent years it has been dominated by two fundamentally adverse presentist scholarly paradigms, each with supposed implications for understanding conflict in the modern Middle East.

“Magic” is a notoriously difficult term whose exact meaning tends to change from one scholarly treatment to the next. For the purpose of the current survey, magic is the attempt to achieve concrete results in the real world through actions that seek to harness or influence supernatural forces. However, as much of Judaism easily falls under such a definition, in the following survey we shall focus especially on practices that remained outside the framework of “normative Judaism” as embedded in its standard halakhic codes and prayer books.

The range of Jewish religious variety in medieval Islamic societies was shaped both by elements innate to Judaism and by the contemporaneous historical environment. Two perennial forces typically shaped modes of difference. Messianic and prophetic claims date back to at least the Hellenistic era, and coupled with apocalypticism promised Jews a final resolution to fundamental problems (in this period, specifically, the problems of Jewish powerlessness and dispersion). Older still was interpretive disagreement over matters of Scripture and law, based on the idea that Jews constitute a scriptural community whose covenantal obligation is to understand and necessarily interpret Scripture in order to live according to its guiding principles. Messianism and interpretive diversity are pervasive, if not intrinsic, to Judaism, yet they act as key components of religious and social movements only in certain historical moments, two of which emerged in the Islamic Middle Ages.

Education in general can be characterized as the interactions among four “commonplaces,” that is, four factors that are usually present in educational situations and enterprises: the learner, the instructor, the milieu, and the subject matter. It is our intention here to marshal the sources that illuminate the assumptions that Jewish communities and individuals living in the medieval Islamic world made about these factors.