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.

The history of waste records a relationship that has altered over time, resulting in various literal and symbolic manifestations. Waste Studies crosses conventional disciplines to offer ethical frameworks which pay attention to, understand, and act on bodily, cultural, and societal waste. With examples from novelists Toni Morrison and Wolfgang Hilbig, this chapter illustrates a number of aspects of waste in literature: waste as material agent; waste as metaphor; and narratives structured as waste, with little hope for clarity. The strategy of slow practice through narrative construction can prove a means to inculcate an ecological sensitivity and awareness we carry with us beyond the act of reading. While waste categories often are used to dismiss, deny, and reject certain humans, other-than-human agents, and material items, waste has also been used as a means to provoke compassion and ethical engagement by which we can develop a compassionate commonality with wasted beings to act for them, for us, and for the world. Waste Studies argues that the humanities can vibrantly and dynamically work to improve all of our lives in a concrete and material way.

This chapter investigates the multiple ways that coal and oil generate story, revealing humanity’s abiding intimacy with unearthed matter throughout history. Spotlighting the influential term “petrofiction” coined by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh (from Latin petra, meaning “rock”), it introduces authors, critics, and activists whose works interrogate fossil fuels’ lively and lethal geological agency. Recent tales of coal and oil often portray conjunctions between embodiment and environment that are unhealthy, chronic, and entrenched; furthermore, these detriments are predominantly borne by the poor, Indigenous peoples, and communities of color. Both Ida Stewart’s poem naming the many degradations caused by mountaintop removal mining (Gloss)and Ann Pancake’s novel narrating the failed containment of coal slurry impoundment dams (Strange as This Weather Has Been) confront the toxic enmeshment of human beings in the Appalachian coalfields. Petrocritical approaches magnify harms of coal and oil and point out their pivotal role in ongoing climate crises. Petrocriticism also suggests that paying attention to human and nonhuman voices inflected by coal and oil supplies the energy needed for ecological remediation, and for more just, and more inhabitable, futures.

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.

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.

Chapter 7 directs critical attention to contemporary narratives that are coalescing in popular technology discourses that imagine climate crisis as an occasion to expand on structures of capitalism. This narrative template – whose leitmotif is making rather than saving nature – turns away from what Ramachandra Guha termed “varieties of environmentalism” in celebrating technological acts of inventing, designing, and rebuilding biophysical worlds. It begins by addressing the parallel emergence of a high-tech planet and a planet in peril as divergent stories of global capitalism. It then examines two visions of remaking the planet: geoengineering and terraforming. These overlapping engineering arenas draw an expressly environmental portrait of innovation that imbues the tech industry with quasi-magical capacities that can be leveraged either to improve on or to transcend the Anthropocene. Offering a counterpoint to this techno-utopia, the chapter concludes with an analysis of Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990), which satirizes the colonial logic of world-building fantasies while making the planet a charismatic character with a story of its own.

Despite the critical role of plants in enabling all life on Earth, many people fail to recognize the importance of vegetal life ("plant blindness"). Further, most modern Eurowestern knowledges of plants tend to instrumentalize them, focusing on how plants are useful rather than on how they live their lives. The field of Critical Plant Studies (CPS) has recently emerged in the Humanities to challenge this situation; this chapter explores some of the central preoccupations of this body of work. Broadly speaking, CPS considers the histories and power dynamics involved in Eurowestern utilitarian relations with the vegetal world. In addition, borrowing from insights in the Natural Sciences and also from much older forms of plant knowledge, it considers plants as living organisms with their own forms of agency, being, and desire. These two threads are woven throughout the chapter, with the aim to demonstrate that plants are sophisticated and influential agents caught up in historical and ongoing forms of biopolitics, and that overcoming plant blindness means noticing not only what the plants are doing for us, but also how we are implicated in their unfolding lifeworlds.

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.

Climate change is often discussed in terms of linear units of time. This chapter covers the meaning of linear time and its implications for how climate change is narrated.  There are concerns about how narrating climate change in this way can eclipse issues of justice in the energy transition. There are of course different ways of telling time. This chapter provides a narration of climate change inspired by particular Indigenous scholars and writers. These conceptions of time narrate time through kinship, not linearity. One implication is that issues of justice are inseparable from the experience of climate change.

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.

Approaching food systems today as a global pharmakon can help advance an Environmental Humanities response to the risks and unknowns of food. Whether it is the difficulty fish have in distinguishing microplastics from plankton, or the trouble humans who live in urban food deserts have finding fresh edibles, food in the early twenty-first century carries unprecedented threats of undernourishment, toxicity and death alongside its promise of life. Paradoxically, the ethics and politics emerging in response to the pharmakon of food may not always involve attempts to purify or certify it “free” of social and environmental ills. One alternative is to tell stories about “food-power” that highlight the agency of other species within a relational ontology that reveals human control, including efforts to control for food safety, to be a fiction. On their own, stories of food-power cannot confront the “power to devour” through which some humans assert their exceptionalism and domination. Gutsy struggles against food injustices by colonized and Indigenous people also show that food is neither an object nor a subject but a multispecies relationship protected through both story and action.

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.