There is a growing and evolving field of research focused on Jews living in the Islamic world, from South Asia to North Africa and beyond, and from the Middle Ages to the present. Since last year, the Jewish Culture and Contexts series (JCC), which is published by Penn Press in collaboration with the Katz Center, has published four books breaking new ground on this scholarly frontier. These studies spotlight Jewish communities at different places and times throughout Islamic history, illuminating them with a diverse array of written and material sources.

Natalie Dohrmann (NBD): Ahuvia, tell us a bit about your broad scholarly interests, and what especially excites you about them personally and/or intellectually.

JQR 115.2 is now available, online and in print.

In this issue:

Christian Stadel identifies a Syriac source for a passage in the Aramaic Scroll of Antiochus, thereby characterizing the text as a more complex composition than previously assumed.

The Jewish Culture and Contexts series is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in association with the Katz Center. The series is co-edited by Steven Weitzman, Francesca Trivellato (Institute for Advanced Study), Shaul Magid (Dartmouth College), and Beth Berkowitz (Barnard College), and its goal is to deepen understanding of Jewish culture within the specific historical and geographic contexts in which it has developed. Broadly interdisciplinary, this series features monographs in all areas of Judaic studies.

Although it may seem like our staff brings a zealous, 24/7, laser-sharp focus to their work at the Katz Center, some (ok, all) have talents and interests that reach beyond our walls.

The study of Jewish law has deep roots in Jewish history. With due respect to philosophers and mystics, halakhists assumed a position of millennial dominance in Jewish intellectual culture from the destruction of the Second Temple to the Paris Sanhedrin in 1808. The study of Jewish law did not disappear but became a subsidiary field of the larger project of modern Jewish studies—from the Wissenschaft scholars Zecharias Frankel, I. H. Weiss, and D. Z.