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.

Scholars from across the humanities and sciences have deepened our understanding of the relationship between environmental and human health, revealing the centrality of race as a critical variable. Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have revealed the centrality of race in disparities in access to healthy environments and medical care. Structural inequalities that stem from the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and imperial violence are embedded with racial ideologies that supported those systems. The growth of biomedicine and Western medical institutions in the context of slavery, colonialism, and empire produced medical ideologies of racial difference in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarly, environmental movements that emerged in the context of European and US empires emphasized conservation at the expense of indigenous land rights. The long-term impacts of slavery and colonial policies are apparent in studies of environmental damage and health disparities. In the late twentieth century, environmental activists in the Global South and southern USA challenged racism and postcolonial development, and advocated for environmental justice.

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.

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century black radical David Walker’s preoccupation with resource extraction and the history of New World slavery in his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Walker’s account of the history of colonization and enslavement as a matrix of dehumanization, violence, resource extraction, and capital accumulation highlights the importance of understanding the long history of extraction as more than just an effect and driver of capitalist appropriation, expropriation, and accumulation, and brings into focus the global and racialized dimensions of that history, which disrupt the standard teleology of capitalism’s appropriation of resources.

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.

Ecomedia studies refers to the discipline within the environmental humanities that examines the way media systems and artifacts are embedded in ecological relationships. In one sense, the media in ecomedia designates the tools of mass communication already associated with the term. But ecomedia studies insists that media are not just text, image, and sound transmitted through machines, not just the technologies of transmission, but the social and material relationships that make transmission possible. As opposed to the older discipline of media studies, "ecomedia" understands these relationships as a kind of agency beyond the immediate cultural purposes of mediated content. Ecomedia is also distinct from the older concept of media ecologies, which employs ecology as a metaphor for the way media embed themselves in social systems and coproduce social relationships. One may analyze the media ecology of Instagram as an agent of selfie production, but unless that analysis includes an understanding of Instagram's ecological effects, it is not an ecomedia analysis. In its emphasis on the materiality and agency of media in the biosphere, ecomedia studies distinguishes itself as an aspect of environmental humanism's drive beyond a merely human world.

This chapter examines some of the more powerful encounters between feminism and environmentalism to offer the reader an understanding of both historic points of tension and opportunities for rich collaboration. Reading the environmental humanities broadly, the chapter highlights diverse lines of feminist research that drive toward more just, inclusive, and ecologically vibrant futures. It focuses on critical feminist work that challenges hegemonic conceptions of gender and nature, the body and place, and dominant understandings of knowledge production.The reader will become acquainted with key concepts such as essentialism, intersectionality, the nature/culture dualism, environmental justice, and the anthropocene, and with key subfields including ecofeminism, feminist science studies, corporeal feminism, and biopolitics.

Busy with our own world, we often think that animals are just a part of it, minor players in the large, smart, progressive lives of humans. But if we flip the point of view, things change. What are the animals’ worlds that remain inaccessible to us? Be they wild or domestic, animals hold for themselves seething multitudes of points of view that work below the surface of our own ways of understanding them. An encounter with an animal is a moment in which we come to recognize that animals have lives beyond us. In this look from myriad nonhumans, we realize there are more points of view than our own, and that there are other ways of dwelling on earth that are just as important to these animals as ours are to us. This allows us to better consider the ecosystems of which they and we are a part and to change the narrative about how we live with other animals on this shared earth.

Risk in the global economy is often borne by those with the least political agency or monetary resources, who also bear the brunt of the environmental damage inflicted by a system of unstoppered industrial development. Environmental humanities seeks greater justice and equality within human societies and in all ecological relationships; it can therefore model how risk is absorbed by those without access to economic and political advantage. We have to imagine a more equitable society before we can build it. The environmental humanities can create opportunities for creative and scholarly work to rethink its organizational and logical structure, to risk upending received rhetorical models in creative and scholarly work. Environmental humanities has a chance to reconceive how the “human” relates to the world around it, questioning the human as primary subject and imagining a way of seeing and describing the world as a horizontal shared space rather than a vertical, teleological hierarchy. It’s risky to practice new modes of expression. It’s even riskier to subordinate the human in a field where the word “human” is predominant. Environmental humanities is the place to take that risk.

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.

Rights discourse is marked by ambivalence – the enunciation of rights alongside the attendant exclusions and violations of said rights. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the language of rights was used to justify the French and American revolutions even as women and the enslaved were excluded from the category of rights bearers. The human-based conception of rights also excluded the environment. This chapter proposes that extension of rights to both humans and nonhumans is at the core of the environmental humanities (EH). EH discourse of rights attends to the marginalization of communities disproportionately affected by the distribution of ecological risks and nonhuman ecologies threatened by anthropogenic activities such as resource extraction and energy use. Enunciations of rights in EH demonstrate a commitment to not only a select group of humans but to all humans as well as to the rights of nonhumans. However, EH discourse of rights is not without tensions, including the competing claims to rights among humans and between the interests of human and other-than-human worlds. The chapter concludes with an exploration of these tensions in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.

The present chapter concerns the Jewish inhabitants of the vast area stretching from modern Iran in the west to China in the east, and from the Central Asian steppes in the north to the shores of the Persian Gulf in the south. Most of the chapter is dedicated to the Jews of the Iranian world, namely, the territories which were historically inhabited by Iranian-speaking peoples, from the advent of Islam up to the rise of the Safavids in the early sixteenth century. I conclude this chapter with the history of Jewish presence in territories historically ruled by Chinese dynasties, as most of the sources relating to Jews in this part of the world indicate their possible Iranian origin.

This chapter proposes a lithic environmental humanities that explores entanglements where rocks and humans mesh as mutually affective agencies and materialities, and humans are seen as "walking, talking minerals." Situating rocks as a cornerstone of contemporary geohumanities, the chapter engages a range of disciplinary perspectives, from the role of rocks in nature writing and poetry that contest a "whitening of deep time" to an "animaterialist" ecophilosophy’s view of stone as lively matter, from an emerging theory of mineral evolution to a speculative archaeological and neuro-aesthetic view of rock as the originating medium of human symbolic expression. Emphasizing touch and haptic thinking, the chapter combines materialist and mystical relations to rocks, and concludes by presenting a contemporary turn on the ancient art of viewing stone appreciation, conceived as a contemplative practice with rocks.