Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman

The business of identity : Jews, Muslims, and economic life in medieval Egypt

The Cairo Geniza is the largest and richest store of documentary evidence for the medieval Islamic world. This book seeks to revolutionize the way scholars use that treasure trove. Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman draws on legal documents from the Geniza to reconceive of life in the medieval Islamic marketplace. In place of the shared practices broadly understood by scholars to have transcended confessional boundaries, he reveals how Jewish merchants in Egypt employed distinctive trading practices. Highly influenced by Jewish law, these commercial practices served to manifest their Jewish identity in the medieval Islamic context. In light of this distinctiveness, Ackerman-Lieberman proposes an alternative model for using the Geniza documents as a tool for understanding daily life in the medieval Islamic world as a whole.

Law and the Culture of Israel

Legal scholar Robert Bork wrote in 2003 that the Israeli Supreme Court “has set a standard for judicial imperialism that can probably never be surpassed, and, one devoutly hopes, will never be equalled elsewhere” (Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges. Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 2003, p. 134). Menachem Mautner’s new book seeks to sketch the development of that “judicial imperialism,” which (in Bork’s view) gives “less and less reason for the Israeli people to bother electing a legislature and executive; the attorney general, with the backing of the Supreme Court, can decide almost everything for them” (Ibid., p. 120). The fruits of some two decades of study exploring the decline of legal formalism and the rise of a values-laden approach within the Israeli Supreme Court, Law and the Culture of Israel contextualizes the Court’s development within an Israeli Kulturkampf brewing since the Israeli Knesset elections of 1977, which brought low the left-wing Alignment and heralded the decline of power among what Mautner calls the “Liberal Former Hegemons” (LFH) of the Labour Movement. As this group’s power waned in the legislature, the Court began to adopt an increasingly activist approach so that