Ageing in Medieval Jewish Culture - Hardcover

by Elisha Russ-Fishbane (Author)

This is a seminal study of cultural attitudes to old age among Jews of the medieval Mediterranean and Near Eastern regions. Rigorously researched and accessibly written, it will appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines as well as to the broader public. While the focus is on Jewish society and culture, critical context regarding the social history of ageing is provided by comparative perspectives from the Muslim world as well as from Spain and Provence and other areas of Christian Europe that were in the Arabic Andalusian cultural orbit.

The study draws on many literary genres and scholarly disciplines: philosophy and theology, ethics and law, biblical commentary, Hebrew poetry, medical literature, and a host of marriage contracts, personal letters, and family and communal records from the Cairo Genizah. The result is a nuanced portrait of ageing as both a lived reality and a cultural paradigm in medieval Jewish society.

Author Biography

Elisha Russ-Fishbane is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, and the author of Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt (2015), which was awarded the Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize for best first book in Jewish Studies by the American Academy for Jewish Research.