Table of Contents Introduction Robert Brody — Canon: An Elusive Concept Sarah Stroumsa — Whose Canon? A Reconstruction of the Philosophical Horizon of Jews in the Middle Ages Moshe Lavee — Haggadic Midrash in the Genizah, as Reflected in the Book Lists of Rav Yosef Rosh Haseder Miriam Fraenkel — Literary Canon and Social Elite in the Geniza Society Daniel Stoekl: Canonization as a Non-Linear Process. What the Christian (and Jewish) Papyri from Egypt Reveal about the Process of Canonization Menahem Ben-Sasson — Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah: Towards Canon Formation in the Life of an Author Yehudah Zvi Stampfer — Writer’s Authority and Halakhic Canon in the Geonic Period Aharon Maman — To What Extent did Medieval Philological Works Survive? Three Case Studies Shulamit Elizur — Hebrew Poetry in the Cairo Genizah: Survival and Canonization of A-Canonical Texts Ze’ev Elkin — Sefer Ha-Galui Gabriela Cerra — Translation and the Canonization of Literary Texts – The Latin Translations of Aratos’ Phaenomena Donna Shalev — Protagoras and the Controversy over ‘First Inventor’ as a Canonical Founding Figure: Prw'toi EuJretaiv In Greek and Subsequent Culture Amia Lieblich — The Second Generation of Kfar Etzion − Collective Memory and the Canon Maya Benish-Weisman — Transformation and Preservation in Jewish Identity Characteristics of Immigrants from the Former USSR Yoel Regev — The Other Side of the Horse: Canon and Kabbalah: Narratives of Two Disintegrating Balance Mechanisms Christof Schmidt — Canon, Gnosis and Modernity − Hans Blumenberg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age Revisited

The Jewish community, a vital cornerstone of the Jewish people's life in the Middle Ages, played a unique role. It provided a framework for the minority Jews in foreign societies, enabling them to not only survive but also preserve their distinct identity and fulfill various purposes despite continuous exile. The book seeks to fill a gap, as it is devoted to a detailed description of the life of a local community, one of the Jewish communities in the Islamic countries of the Middle Ages, the community of Qayrawan in the heart of the Maghreb, Tunisia. This book aims to correct a prevalent misconception in the study of Jewish history. It challenges the notion that the first Jewish communities in the Middle Ages emerged in Ashkenaz at the end of the tenth century. Instead, it highlights the independence of communities in Islamic countries, which derived authority from the central leadership, primarily in Babylon. The book sheds light on the local community of Qayrawan, drawing from a rich array of sources from the Cairo Genizahs. These sources, including historical, literary, and legal documents, were meticulously collected to provide a comprehensive understanding of the people of Qayrawan, their social life and local institutions from the ninth to the eleventh century. The social phenomena of the community’s independence and dependence on the local social centers are discussed against the background of historical events. The book shows that there were independent local communities in Islamic countries as early as the ninth century. However, despite their functional independence and intellectual ability, the community pays tribute to the central leadership without official or functional dependence on it. Incidentally, the discussion of Qayrawan conjures up a picture of the Jewish world in Islamic countries, its connections between East and West, and the location of the bridge community, Qayrawan, at the important junction in which it was located.