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It is widely held today that classical Islamic law frees wives from any obligation to do housework. Wives’ purported exemption from domestic labor became a talking point among Muslims responding to Orientalist stereotypes of the “oppressed Muslim woman” by the late nineteenth century, and it has been a prominent motif in writings by Muslim feminists in the United States since the 1980s. In Wives and Work, Marion Holmes Katz offers a new account of debates on wives’ domestic labor that recasts the historical relationship between Islamic law and ethics. She reconstructs a complex discussion among Sunni legal scholars of the ninth to fourteenth centuries CE and examines its wide-ranging...
Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism explores the discursive formation of the commandments as a generative matrix of Jewish thought and life in the posttalmudic period. Each study sheds light on how medieval Jews crafted the commandments out of theretofore underdetermined material. By systematizing, representing, or interrogating the amorphous category of commandment, medieval Jewish authors across both the Islamic and Christian spheres of influence sought to explain, justify, and characterize Israel’s legal system, divine revelation, the cosmos, and even the divine order. This volume correlates bodies of knowledge—such as jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics, pietism, and kabbalah—that are normally treated in isolation into a single conversation about a shared constitutional concern.
Text and context -- The mother of the messiah -- The messiah son of David and the suffering servant -- The servant messiah beyond Sefer Zerubbabel -- The dying messiah son of Joseph -- Sefer Zerubbabel after Islam
This is a seminal study of cultural attitudes to old age among Jews of the medieval Mediterranean and Near Eastern regions. Rigorously researched and accessibly written, it will appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines as well as to the broader public. While the focus is on Jewish society and culture, critical context regarding the social history of ageing is provided by comparative perspectives from the Muslim world as well as from Spain and Provence and other areas of Christian Europe that were in the Arabic Andalusian cultural orbit. The study draws on many literary genres and scholarly disciplines: philosophy and theology, ethics and law, biblical commentary, Hebrew poetry, medical literature, and a host of marriage contracts, personal letters, and family and communal records from the Cairo Genizah. The result is a nuanced portrait of ageing as both a lived reality and a cultural paradigm in medieval Jewish society.
This volume examines new developments in the fields of premodern Jewish studies over the last thirty years. The essays in this volume, written by leading experts, are grouped into four overarching temporal areas: the First Temple, Second Temple, Rabbinic, and Medieval periods. These time periods are analyzed through four thematic methodological lenses: the social scientific (history and society), the textual (texts and literature), the material (art, architecture, and archaeology), and the philosophical (religion and thought). Some essays offer a comprehensive look at the state of the field, while others look at specific examples illustrative of their temporal and thematic areas of inquiry. The volume presents a snapshot of the state of the field, encompassing new perspectives, directions, and methodologies, as well as the questions that will animate the field as it develops further. It will be of interest to scholars and students in the field, as well as to educated readers looking to understand the changing face of Jewish studies as a discipline advancing human knowledge
Medieval slavery has received little attention relative to slavery in ancient Greece and Rome and in the early modern Atlantic world. This imbalance in the scholarship has led many to assume that slavery was of minor importance in the Middle Ages. In fact, the practice of slavery continued unabated across the globe throughout the medieval millennium. This volume – the final volume in The Cambridge World History of Slavery – covers the period between the fall of Rome and the rise of the transatlantic plantation complexes by assembling twenty-three original essays, written by scholars acknowledged as leaders in their respective fields. The volume demonstrates the continual and central presence of slavery in societies worldwide between 500 CE and 1420 CE. The essays analyze key concepts in the history of slavery, including gender, trade, empire, state formation and diplomacy, labor, childhood, social status and mobility, cultural attitudes, spectrums of dependency and coercion, and life histories of enslaved people.
Much of what we know about life in the medieval Islamic Middle East comes from texts written to impart religious ideals or to chronicle the movements of great men. How did women participate in the societies these texts describe? What about non-Muslims, whose own religious traditions descended partly from pre-Islamic late antiquity? Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt approaches these questions through Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). Using hundreds of everyday papers preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Eve Krakowski follows the lives of girls from different social classes—rich and poor, secluded and physically mobile—as they prepared to marry an...
An authoritative guide to Jewish studies, reflecting the latest research in a diverse and flourishing field Jewish studies is a dynamic, interdisciplinary field that draws on the methods of the modern academy—historical research, anthropology, literary studies, philosophy, religious studies, sociology, feminism, and the study of the arts and culture, among others—to illuminate the past and present of Jewish life, thought, and expression. This book provides an entry point to Jewish studies for readers who want to learn about the questions it raises and the insights it generates. Although no single volume can capture the full breadth of the field, this Princeton Companion encompasses some ...
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