With its exploration of cultural attitudes to old age among Jews of the medieval Mediterranean and Near Eastern regions as well as of the social history of ageing, this is a seminal study of an important topic. Rigorously researched and accessibly written, it will appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines as well as to the broader public. While the focus is on Jewish society and culture, critical context is provided by comparative perspectives from the Muslim milieu, as well as from Spain and Provence and other areas of Christian Europe that were influenced by the Arabic Andalusian cultural orbit. The study draws on a vast terrain of literary genres and scholarly disciplines: philosophy and theology, ethics and law, biblical commentary, Hebrew poetry, medical literature, and a host of marriage contracts, personal letters, and family and communal records from the Cairo Genizah. The result is a nuanced portrait of ageing as both a reality and a cultural paradigm in medieval Jewish society.