The Convergence of Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions

Contributors

Contributors Efrat E. Aviv completed her doctoral studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University. She specializes in Turkish studies. Her dissertation was entitled “Fethullah Gülen—A Religious Leader and an Ideologist in Turkey of the 1980s and the 1990s.” She received her master’s degree in Jewish history from Bar-Ilan University in 2002 (Magna cum laude). Her thesis was entitled “Community, Culture, and Feminism: The Jewish Community of Izmir on the Eve of the ‘Young Turk Revolution,’ 1899–1908.” She teaches Turkish and Ottoman history at Bar-Ilan University and is conducting her postdoctoral research at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) on the Bar-Ilan campus. She has published articles on Turkish affairs in Israeli newspapers and translated Turkish poetry into Hebrew. Leigh N. Chipman is a historian of medieval Islamic medicine, specializing in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries ce. She received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006 and held a Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellowship at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel, during 2006–2008. In addition to her doctoral research, which focused on pharmacy and pharmacists in Mamluk Cairo, Leigh has worked extensively on the medical material of the Cairo Genizah. She is currently working on a study of an early commentary on Ibn Sina’s al-Qanun fi al-tibb, Qutb al-Din Shirazi’s al-Tuhfa al-sa῾diyya, which will shed further light on the medical history of Il-khanid Iran. Yehoshua Frenkel, PhD, teaches Medieval Islamic history at the University of Haifa. His recent publications include “Public Projection of Power in Mamluk Bilad al-Sham,” Mamluk Studies Review 11, no. 1 (2007): 39–54; and “Women in Late Mamluk Damascus in Light of Audience Certificates (sama῾at) of Ibn Mibrad,” in Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk Eras, ed. U. Vermeulen (Peeters, 2006), 409–23. 326 r Contributors Libby Garshowitz, PhD, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto; past director of Jewish Studies; member of various committees at the University of Toronto, in the general community and in professional organizations. She still teaches and directs graduate students in medieval Hebrew poetry. Her research interests, professional presentations , and publications include textbooks for the teaching of Hebrew at university level, articles on the Jews of Spain, Jewish-Christian relations; Christian scriptures; legal status of conversa women after the 1492 Expulsion; medieval Hebrew poetry; contemporary Israeli literature; biblical and medieval exegesis, and book reviews. Bat-Sheva Garsiel, PhD, teaches in the Department of Middle East History at Bar Ilan University. She has taught at other colleges and universities in Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Among her publications is Bible, Midrash , and Quran: An Intertextual Study of Common Narrative Materials (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2006) [Hebrew]. Professor Juliette Hassine of blessed memory, who passed away in August 2010, was an internationally known scholar on the writings of Proust. She published five books and sixty articles as well as contributed forty-one entries, thirty of which are extended articles, to the Dictionnaire Marcel Proust (Champion, 2004, Académie française Prize 2005). All these publications are based principally on research of Proust’s drafts and manuscripts according to the Critique génétique. Her list of publications also includes books she edited, many studies in fields such as comparative literature and Hebrew literature, among the latter a book on Daliah Rabikovitch’s poetry. During the last ten years, Hassine conducted research on Moroccan manuscripts of historical and literary value in Hebrew and JudeoArabic from the first half of the nineteenth century. Michael Katz, PhD, is a senior lecturer in the Departments of Psychology and Education at the University of Haifa. He is head of the Program of Education and Human Development. Katz holds bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, psychology , and political science from Bar-Ilan University, master’s degree in social psychology from Bar-Ilan University, and master’s and doctoral degrees in mathematics from Oxford University. He has held research and teaching positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bar-Ilan University, the London School of Economics, Queen’s University at Kingston (Ontario), and San Francisco State, and was a visiting scholar at Oxford and Stanford. Ronald C. Kiener, PhD, is professor of religion and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn. After an undergraduate degree Contributors...