Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World²⁶

Michael Cook, William Chester Jordan, and Peter Schäfer, Series Editors

Jews, Christians, and Muslims captures the increasingly sophisticated attention paid by scholars in recent decades to the historical relations—political, social, intellectual, and cultural—among these three groups. The series publishes innovative and wide-ranging scholarship that addresses an expansive array of issues, such as political and economic conflict; religious, intellectual, and social interactions; and mutual influences in ritual, liturgy, imagery, symbols, literature, law, family, and other spheres. Broadly historical, the series embraces work that fruitfully incorporates methods and insights from other disciplines, including but not limited to law, religion, literary studies, anthropology, art history, and sociology.

The Apple of His Eye: Converts from Islam in the Reign of Louis IX William Chester Jordan
The thirteenth century brought new urgency to Catholic efforts to convert non-Christians, and no Catholic ruler was more dedicated to this undertaking than King Louis IX of France. His military expeditions against Islam are well...
The Rebellion of the Daughters: Jewish Women Runaways in Habsburg Galicia Rachel Manekin
The Rebellion of the Daughters investigates the flight of young Jewish women from their Orthodox, mostly Hasidic, homes in Western Galicia (now Poland) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In extreme cases, hundreds of...
The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue Marina Rustow
The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of...
Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain Sarah Stroumsa
Al-Andalus, the Iberian territory ruled by Islam from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, was home to a flourishing philosophical culture among Muslims and the Jews who lived in their midst. Andalusians spoke proudly of the region's...
Cultural Exchange: Jews, Christians, and Art in the Medieval Marketplace Joseph Shatzmiller
Demonstrating that similarities between Jewish and Christian art in the Middle Ages were more than coincidental, Cultural Exchange meticulously combines a wide range of sources to show how Jews and Christians exchanged artistic and...
Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter Jonathan Marc Gribetz
As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict persists, aspiring peacemakers continue to search for the precise territorial dividing line that will satisfy both Israeli and Palestinian nationalist demands. The prevailing view assumes that this...
The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the "People of the Book" in the Language of Islam Sidney H. Griffith
From the first centuries of Islam to well into the Middle Ages, Jews and Christians produced hundreds of manuscripts containing portions of the Bible in Arabic. Until recently, however, these translations remained largely neglected by...
American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire Heather J. Sharkey
In 1854, American Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Egypt as part of a larger Anglo-American Protestant movement aiming for worldwide evangelization. Protected by British imperial power, and later by mounting American global...
The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice Yaacob Dweck
The Scandal of Kabbalah is the first book about the origins of a culture war that began in early modern Europe and continues to this day: the debate between kabbalists and their critics on the nature of Judaism and the meaning of...
Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages Jonathan Elukin
This book challenges the standard conception of the Middle Ages as a time of persecution for Jews. Jonathan Elukin traces the experience of Jews in Europe from late antiquity through the Renaissance and Reformation, revealing how the...
Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker Sarah Stroumsa
While the great medieval philosopher, theologian, and physician Maimonides is acknowledged as a leading Jewish thinker, his intellectual contacts with his surrounding world are often described as related primarily to Islamic philosophy....
The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna David Sorkin
In intellectual and political culture today, the Enlightenment is routinely celebrated as the starting point of modernity and secular rationalism, or demonized as the source of a godless liberalism in conflict with religious faith. In...
The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam Sidney H. Griffith
Amid so much twenty-first-century talk of a "Christian-Muslim divide"--and the attendant controversy in some Western countries over policies toward minority Muslim communities--a historical fact has gone unnoticed: for more than four...
A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain Mark D. Meyerson
This book significantly revises the conventional view that the Jewish experience in medieval Spain--over the century before the expulsion of 1492--was one of despair, persecution, and decline. Focusing on the town of Morvedre in the...
Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought David N. Myers
Nineteenth-century European thought, especially in Germany, was increasingly dominated by a new historicist impulse to situate every event, person, or text in its particular context. At odds with the transcendent claims of philosophy...
Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain Ross Brann
Power in the Portrayal unveils a fresh and vital perspective on power relations in eleventh- and twelfth-century Muslim Spain as reflected in historical and literary texts of the period. Employing the methods of the new historical...
Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence Elliott Horowitz
Historical accounts of Jewish violence--particularly against Christians--have long been explosive material. Some historians have distorted these records for anti-Semitic purposes. Others have discounted, dismissed, or simply ignored the...
In the Shadow of the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and Conversos in Guadalupe, Spain Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau
On June 11, 1485, in the pilgrimage town of Guadalupe, the Holy Office of the Inquisition executed Alonso de Paredes--a converted Jew who posed an economic and political threat to the town's powerful friars--as a heretic. Wedding...
Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe Elisheva Baumgarten
This book presents a synthetic history of the family--the most basic building block of medieval Jewish communities--in Germany and northern France during the High Middle Ages. Concentrating on the special roles of mothers and children...
The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain Mary Elizabeth Perry
In 1502, a decade of increasing tension between Muslims and Christians in Spain culminated in a royal decree that Muslims in Castile wanting to remain had to convert to Christianity. Mary Elizabeth Perry uses this event as the starting...
Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt Mark R. Cohen
What was it like to be poor in the Middle Ages? In the past, the answer to this question came only from institutions and individuals who gave relief to the less fortunate. This book, by one of the top scholars in the field, is the first...
The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam David M. Goldenberg
How old is prejudice against black people? Were the racist attitudes that fueled the Atlantic slave trade firmly in place 700 years before the European discovery of sub-Saharan Africa? In this groundbreaking book, David Goldenberg seeks...
Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah Peter Schäfer
In this beautifully realized study, Peter Schäfer investigates the origins of a female manifestation of God in Jewish mysticism. The search itself is a fascinating exploration of the idea of a feminine divinity. And Schäfer's...
Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. Seth Schwartz
This provocative new history of Palestinian Jewish society in antiquity marks the first comprehensive effort to gauge the effects of imperial domination on this people. Probing more than eight centuries of Persian, Greek, and Roman...
Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France Susan L. Einbinder
When Crusader armies on their way to the Holy Land attacked Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley, many Jews chose suicide over death at the hands of Christian mobs. With their defiant deaths, the medieval Jewish martyr was born. With...
A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean Molly Greene
Here Molly Greene moves beyond the hostile "Christian" versus "Muslim" divide that has colored many historical interpretations of the early modern Mediterranean, and reveals a society with a far richer set of cultural and social...