NES
Faculty
Mark R. Cohen
Professor of Near Eastern Studies
email: mrcohen@princeton.edu
webpage: The Princeton Geniza Project
I earned my college degree at Brandeis University, studying European and
American history and Jewish studies. During a post-graduate year as a Visiting
Fulbright Scholar at the University of London I had my introduction to
both Islamic history and Hebrew poetry written in Muslim Spain, and that
decided my research field: the history of Jews living in Arab lands in
the Middle Ages. I completed an M.A. in history at Columbia University,
followed by four years of training in classical Judaica at the Jewish Theological
Seminary and then my doctoral work at that same institution.
My first book, a study of the origins of an important institution of medieval
Jewish self-government in Egypt, is based primarily on Cairo Geniza documents
and most of my scholarship since then has centered on that unique source.
In 1983 I was asked to contribute a book to a new series of basic introductions
to Jewish history and culture to be translated into Arabic for readers
in countries like Egypt. I am particularly proud of that publication--an
overview of Jewish life in Islamic Egypt through the mid-14th century--for
it is, as far as I know, still the only book of its kind in Arabic written
by a specialist in Jewish history.
I regularly teach the Department's courses in medieval Jewish history
(under Islam and under Christendom), as well as graduate seminars dealing
either with Near Eastern Jewish history or Judaeo-Arabic (mainly Geniza
documents). I have been instrumental (along with Professor Udovitch)
in training graduate students to use the Geniza for general Islamic social
and economic history. An example would be Olivia Remie Constable's dissertation
published as Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment
of the Iberian Peninsula, 900-1500 (Cambridge University Press, 1994),
and Hassan Khalilieh's dissertation published as Islamic Maritime
Law: An Introduction (Brill, 1998). Several other graduate students have done
a field in Jewish-Arab history under me for their Generals. A new dissertation
on Jewish history was completed under my supervision in May 2001.
Years ago I used to co-teach an undergraduate seminar in the History
Department with Natalie Zemon Davis on the Jews in Early Modern Europe;
the idea for the book on the autobiography of a 17th-century Venetian
Rabbi listed below arose out of teaching that course.
In the mid-sixties, when I began graduate work, I thought I had chosen
a relatively uncontroversial corner of the Jewish past, but developments
in the Middle East at the end of that decade placed Jewish-Arab history
in the purview of polemicists and propagandists.
My book, Under Crescent and Cross, a comparative study of Islamic-Jewish and Christian-Jewish relations in the Middle Ages, tries to avoid the pitfalls of much of recent writing about the Jews of Islam. It has been translated into Turkish, Hebrew, German, Arabic and French, with Spanish expected in 2009. In 2005 I published Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt and The Voice of the Poor in the Middle Ages: An Anthology of Documents from the Cairo Geniza.
Representative publications:
Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt: the Origins of the Office of Head of the Jews, ca. 1065-1126, Princeton 1980.
Al-mujtama` al-yahudi fi Misr al-islamiyya fi’l-`usur al-wusta (Jewish Life in Medieval Egypt 641-1382) (translated into Arabic), Tel Aviv 1987.
The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena's Life of Judah, translated and edited by Mark R. Cohen, with introductory essays by Mark R. Cohen and Theodore K. Rabb, by Howard Adelman, and by Natalie Zemon Davis and historical notes by Howard Adelman and Benjamin Ravid, Princeton 1988.
Jews among Arabs: Contacts and Boundaries, co-edited with A.L. Udovitch, Princeton 1989.
Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, Princeton, 1994; revised edition 2008. |
