A genizah is a storage area in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery designated for the temporary storage of worn-out Hebrew-language books and papers on religious topics prior to proper cemetery burial.
Judah Halevi was a Sephardic Jewish poet, physician and philosopher. He was born in Al-Andalus, either in Toledo or Tudela, in 1075. He is thought to have died in 1141, in either Jerusalem, at that point the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, or in Alexandria, Egypt.
The Cairo Geniza, alternatively spelled Genizah, is a collection of some 400,000 Jewish manuscript fragments and Fatimid administrative documents that were kept in the genizah or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat or Old Cairo, Egypt. These manuscripts span the entire period of Middle-Eastern, North African, and Andalusian Jewish history between the 6th and 19th centuries CE, and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world.
The Aleppo Codex is a medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. The codex was written in the city of Tiberias in the tenth century CE under the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate, and was endorsed for its accuracy by Maimonides. Together with the Leningrad Codex, it contains the Aaron ben Moses ben Asher Masoretic Text tradition.
Judeo-Arabic dialects are ethnolects formerly spoken by Jews throughout the Arab world. Under the ISO 639 international standard for language codes, Judeo-Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage under the code jrb, encompassing four languages: Judeo-Moroccan Arabic (aju), Judeo-Yemeni Arabic (jye), Judeo-Iraqi Arabic (yhd), and Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic (yud).
The siege of Jerusalem during the First Crusade lasted for one month and eight days, from 7 June 1099 to 15 July 1099. It was carried out by the Crusader army, which successfully captured Jerusalem from the Fatimid Caliphate and subsequently founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Having returned the city and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to Christian rule, the siege was the final major armed engagement of the First Crusade, which had been proclaimed in 1095 to recover the Holy Land for the Christians in the context of the Muslim conquest. A number of eyewitness accounts of the battle were recorded, with the most quoted events being derived from the anonymous Latin-language chronicle Gesta Francorum.
The Rhineland massacres, also known as the German Crusade of 1096 or Gzerot Tatnó, were a series of mass murders of Jews perpetrated by mobs of French and German Christians of the People's Crusade in the year 1096, or 4856 according to the Hebrew calendar. These massacres are often seen as the first in a sequence of antisemitic events in Europe which culminated in the Holocaust.
Egyptian Jews constitute both one of the oldest and one of the youngest Jewish communities in the world. The historic core of the Jewish community in Egypt mainly consisted of Egyptian Arabic speaking Rabbanites and Karaites. Though Egypt had its own community of Egyptian Jews, after the Jewish expulsion from Spain more Sephardi and Karaite Jews began to migrate to Egypt, and then their numbers increased significantly with the growth of trading prospects after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. As a result, Jews from many territories of the Ottoman Empire as well as Italy and Greece started to settle in the main cities of Egypt, where they thrived. The Ashkenazi community, mainly confined to Cairo's Darb al-Barabira quarter, began to arrive in the aftermath of the waves of pogroms that hit Europe in the latter part of the 19th century.
Shelomo Dov Goitein was a German-Jewish ethnographer, historian and Arabist known for his research on Jewish life in the Islamic Middle Ages, and particularly on the Cairo Geniza.
Rabbi Solomon Aaron Wertheimer, was a Hungarian rabbi, scholar, and seller of rare books.
The history of the Jews and the Crusades is part of the history of antisemitism toward Jews in the Middle Ages. The call for the First Crusade intensified the persecutions of the Jews, and they continued to be targets of Crusaders' violence and hatred throughout the Crusades.
Sefer ha-Qabbalah was written by Abraham ibn Daud around 1160–1161. The book is a response to Karaite attacks against the historical legitimacy of Rabbinic Judaism and contains, among other items, the controversial tale of the kidnapping by pirates of four great rabbinic scholars from Babylonian academies, whose subsequent ransoming by Jewish communities around the Mediterranean accounts for the transmission of scholarly legitimacy to the rabbis of Jewish centers in North Africa and Christian Spain.
Monieux is a commune in the Vaucluse department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France.
Obadiah the Proselyte, also known as Johannes of Oppido was an early-12th-century Italian convert to Judaism. He is best known for his memoirs and the oldest surviving notation of Jewish music, both unique survivals.
The Palestinian minhag, as opposed to the Babylonian minhag, refers to the minhag of medieval Palestinian Jews concerning the siddur.
Benjamin Ze'ev Kedar is professor emeritus of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was president of the international Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (1995–2002), chairman of the board of the Israel Antiquities Authority (2000–12) and vice-president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2010–15). He is 2019 The EMET Prize for Art, Science and Culture laureate in history , the 2020 Israel Prize laureate in history research. and in 2024 he won the Prix Gustave Schlumberger de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
Ronnie Ellenblum was an Israeli professor at the department of geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, specializing in Medieval geographies, the history of the Levant in the Middle Ages, and the history of the Crusades. His latest studies deal also with environmental and climatic history, the history of Jerusalem, and the development of historic cities in general. Ellenblum headed the Vadum Iacob Research Project and was involved in the creation of several databases dealing with the history of Jerusalem ; with the maps of Jerusalem and with English translations of documents and charters of the Crusader Period. Ellenblum has developed a comprehensive theoretical approach to 'Fragility,' claiming that a decade or two of climatic disturbance could lead to severe societal effects, and that the amelioration and even stabilization of climatic conditions for several decades can lead to a period of affluence. His theory of Fragility is based on a thorough reading of a wealth of well-dated textual and archaeological evidence, pointing to periods of collapse, and affluence in the entire Mediterranean Basin during the Roman Optimum, and describing these processes yearly, monthly and even daily.
Ascalon was an ancient Near East port city on the Mediterranean coast of the southern Levant that played a major role during several historical periods.
Maṣliaḥ ben Solomon ha-Cohen, alternatively Matzliach, was a Gaon and the leader of the Palestinian Gaonate in Fustat, the principal Talmudic academy and central legalistic body of the Jewish community in Palestine. He also held the title of Ra'is al-Yahud, from at least 1127 until his possible murder in 1139. After his death, the Gaonate split between Damascus in Syria and Fustat in Egypt.
The population of the region of Palestine, which approximately corresponds to modern Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan, has varied in both size and ethnic composition throughout its history.
