Under the Shade of the Cross and the Crescent: Jews in the Middle Ages

The Jewish people go through all stages of the natural cycle — birth, adulthood, maturity, and aging — only to start all over again. Each era of Jewish history can be viewed as a kind of “collective biography.”
From this perspective, the articles of well-known scholars recount the biblical period of Jewish history, the clash of Jewish culture with Hellenism, the situation in which the Jews of Palestine first found themselves under the authority of Christians, the Jews of Babylon who came to realize the intellectual and religious significance of their community, and finally, the “alternative” Jewish culture that flourished in Arabia, where Jews first came into contact with the newly emerged Islam.