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.

Climate change undermines the property concepts embedded within histories of capitalism and colonialism, placing them in crisis. As Arctic territories and Pacific island states recede to sea level rise, as wildfires burn through suburban communities in the wealthy world, as global fresh water runs dry, uncertainty shadows what it means to own, to use, and to inhabit. For the wealthier world, survival may depend on owning and occupying less, upon reducing the scale of supply chains and stewarding regional resources. Enter "the commons,” a concept and praxis tied to sustainability in the form of stable subsistence in anthropological literatures, to Indigenous economies and cosmologies worldwide, and to European peasant economies. For the world’s Indigenous, theconcept may be, at best, an incomplete translation of Indigenous traditional knowledges. Yet the commons as concept attempts to combat extractive, colonial economies, offering a justice-oriented and site-specific alternative to the state and the market as organizing systems and stories. This chapter considers the dynamic intellectual history of the commons as it relates to climate change, environmentalism and decolonization.

Over the past two centuries, apocalypse and extinction have become powerful secular tropes, and have been given new urgency in the context of escalating global heating and biodiversity loss. This chapter examines how the environmental humanities can analyse, complicate, democratise, and challenge these tropes. It addresses present-day speculations about the future of the biosphere, both within the field, and in wider culture through the activities of groups such as Extinction Rebellion. It explores the entanglements of these speculations with questions of justice, and offers an analysis of relationships humanity, inequality, and catastrophe in Mary Shelley’s novels Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826). The chapter ends with some suggestions about the role of the environmental humanities in an ecological emergency. In particular, it addresses how the field might contribute to the communal task of finding urgent solutions for social-environmental problems, while at the same time maintaining focus on issues of justice and rigorous critique of totalising narratives, including the language of solutions and of apocalypse itself.

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.

Climate fiction (or cli-fi) is a still-emerging but broad and diverse category of fiction that addresses the challenges of climate change and its impacts on human and nonhuman life, in the present and in the future, on Earth and in more fantastical settings. This chapter offers an inclusive definition of this increasingly urgent genre, aiming to capture what's currently being published and to suggest other possibilities available to future cli-fi writers. Additionally, it sets out to expand the history of the genre, drawing on the work of Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra before offering a taxonomy of cli-fi's various contemporary forms, with examples from literary fiction, hard and soft sci-fi, eco-fabulism, afrofuturism, solarpunk, indigenous futurism, uncivilized writing, and other related subgenres

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.

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.