The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands ed. by Carsten Schapkow, Shmuel Shepkaru and Alan Levenson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands ed. by Carsten Schapkow, Shmuel Shepkaru and Alan Levenson Elisha Russ-Fishbane Carsten Schapkow, Shmuel Shepkaru, Alan Levenson eds. The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 273 pp. The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands is a collection of impressive scholarship in celebration of historian Norman (Noam) Stillman, Schusterman/Josey Professor of Judaic History Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma. The volume, with a forward from the president of the university, doubles as a gesture of gratitude from Professor Stillman’s colleagues for the broad reach of his career as scholar of the Islamic world and Sephardic/Mizrahi [End Page 249] studies and for his lasting service as founding director of the Schusterman Center for Judaic & Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. In the words of the volume’s editors, “the articles reflect Noam’s broad range of interests,” from Jewish history, law, and culture in the medieval Islamic world to literary and musical production, as well as patterns of immigration and modernization in the Sephardic/Mizrahi orbit (4). As a tribute to the meticulous scholarship of the festschrift honoree, most contributors either document new frontiers of scholarship or provide fresh angles and methodologies on established fields of research. The first half is generally devoted to medieval matters and the second half largely to modern, although chapters 6 and 7 appear to have been reversed (thus chapters 1–5, and 7 constitute the medieval portion, while 6, and 8–12 cover modernity). Other editorial puzzles emerge in arrangement and selection, such as the decision to open the volume with a study of a fairly obscure exegetical theme in Sadducee and Karaite inheritance law (ultimately arguing that the latter did not take the hermeneutical path of the former), and closing with the only article in the collection that has no connection with the Islamic sphere, focusing on the post-Herzl activities of Max Nordau. Slightly jarring are the more mundane editorial oversights, such as recurring typographical errors in many of the chapters, but the quality of the scholarship outweighs these defects. Beyond the volume’s overarching concern with Jewish life and culture in the Islamic context, there are few self-evident thematic links between the essays. A handful of contributors touched on points of connection and tension in the Jewish-Islamic encounter, a theme at the forefront of Professor Stillman’s scholarly interests over the years. Reuven Firestone reexamines the Quranic polemic against Sabbath violators from the vantage point of the history of religions, positing a fresh methodological approach to scriptural polemic directed against established rival religions. In his reassessment of the medieval Islamic toponymy of the Holy Land, Jacob Lassner traces the diversity and development of the post-Quranic terminology for the region in Islamic sources through the tenth century. Although Lassner is mainly interested in technical considerations of the nuances of Arabic nomenclature, he concludes with the intentionally provocative assertion that historical scholarship may be used to counter the respective tendencies of Jews and Arabs in modern times “to declare ‘historic Palestine’ as their genuine homeland,” thus promoting “genuine scholarship above partisan sensibilities” (63). Mark Cohen’s contribution on the impact of Arab mercantile customs on geonic and Maimonidean jurisprudence, part of a larger project on the socioeconomic background of Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, suggests a striking tendency of medieval Jewish legists of the Islamic milieu to accommodate and integrate mercantile practices prevalent among their gentile neighbors. Cohen documents the so-called “custom of the merchants” (pp. 88, 97) in Islamic legal and mercantile sources, but so too in Cairo Geniza letters. The documents of the Cairo Geniza, a significant interest of Professor Stillman’s own scholarly career, are also the focus of Renée Levine Melammed’s study on the challenges and unpredictability of the daily life of women in the medieval Mediterranean. Much like her predecessors in this field, including S. D. Goitein and [End Page 250] Joel Kraemer, Mellamed lets the documents and their colorful details take center stage, while acknowledging that they leave us with more questions than answers. Quite valuable are the five documents Mellamed...