Vida Judaica na Diáspora

Como viviam os Judeus em terras muçulmanas? O tema é objeto de dois novos livros Sacred Treasure: The Cairo Genizah escrito por Mark Glickman e In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands escrito por Martin Gilbert. Eles são resenhados por Ackerman-Lieberman. O livro de Glickman ressalta uma fonte de informação extremamente valiosa a Genizah de Cairo. Underpinning Glickman’s account of the development of the field of Genizah study, his question persists: Why has the Genizah largely escaped the Jewish communal imagination, beyond a handful of scholars in Israel and North America? His two-part answer merits our attention because it speaks to the unsettling nature of the find: first, “while the Dead Sea Scrolls testify to a glorious past in the Land of Israel, the Genizah documents paint a vivid picture of Jewish life thriving outside the Land — and in Egypt, no less!”; and second, amid a contemporary Jewish population that connects to Jewish life through “the knowledge that the words of the prayer book we recited today are the very same ones that Jews have always recited…. The Genizah, however, shows us that, at least during the Middle Ages, Jewish tradition was anything but monolithic.”