Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issues 5 and 6 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in April and October 1983, by Paul Fenton, with a response in the next issue by S.D. Goitein:
An exciting discovery recently made in the Unit may well open a new chapter in the history of Hebrew printing. Dr Paul Fenton has dated a Hebrew print in the Genizah Collection (... Read Moremamluk
Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Michael Rand
on Wed 15 Sep 2021
Michael, what are you working on at the moment?
I’ve recently finished a book (Studies in the Medieval Hebrew Tradition of the Ḥarīrīan and Ḥarizian Maqama) on what, for lack of a better word, we can call the “classical” maqama. A maqama is a rhymed-prose narrative into which poems are inserted. The sorts of maqamas on which I am working are called picaresque maqamas, as they involve the adventures of a narrator and a hero. Picaresque maqamas went into the makeup of... Read More
Has tags: Arabic, Genizah Fragments, literature, mamluk, poetry, Q&A, theatre
Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 29 Jul 2021
Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issue 23 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in April 1992, by Abraham David:
During the Mamlūk period (1250-1516), the land of Israel was politically and economically attached to the Egyptian centre and was ruled from Cairo by emirs and governors with varying degrees of authority.
From the second half of the fifteenth century, Jewish sources paint an interesting picture of relations... Read More
Has tags: charity, Genizah Fragments, Hebron, Jerusalem, mamluk, Ottoman, Safed
Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 8 Jul 2021
Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issue 12 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in October 1986, by Mordechai A. Friedman:
The ban of Rabbenu Gershom ben Judah of Mainz (early eleventh century), which prohibited polygamy among the Ashkenazim, was never accepted by Jewish communities living under Islam. But how polygamous were these Jews during the so-called “classical” Genizah period of the High Middle Ages, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries?
... Read MoreHas tags: betrothal, Crusaders, divorce, Genizah Fragments, Gershom, get, Goitein, Karaite, mamluk, marriage, Mordechai Akiva Friedman, polygamy, responsa, Simcha Assaf, slave