professor at the Department of Jewish History and the School of History at the Hebrew University, head of the Dinur Center for the study of Jewish History.

Phd. From the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Main fields of research: Geniza studies, cultural and social history of Medieval Judaism in the lands of Islam, medieval cultural encounters between Judaism and Islam. 

Prized Books

• M. Frenkel and H. Ben Shammai (eds.), The Jewish Medieval Library; Booklists from the Cairo Geniza  Collected by the Late Prof. N. Alloni, 512 pages. Jerusalem Ben Zvi Institute, 2006. (won the AJL RAS Division Bibliography award for 2006).
• M. Frenkel ,`The Compassionate and Benevolent`; The Leading Elite in the Jewish Community of Alexandria in the Middle Ages, Jerusalem Ben Zvi, 2006 (won the Shazzar prize

Articles on various aspects of medieval Jewish life under Islam.

• 2011: Ella Darivoff  Term Fellowship at PennU, Rose and Henry Zifkin Teaching Fellowship at PennU.
• 2016 : visiting fellow at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

Jewels:Another Channel for the Study of Mediterranean Societies

The Cairo Geniza is replete with references and information about jewellery. They appear in trousseau lists, commercial correspondence, wills and personal letters. None the less, beside a very short chapter in Goitein’s magnum opus “A Mediterranean Society”, the subject has not been properly studied yet. The proposed paper tries to establish the relevance of jewellery to the study of Mediterranean cultures and to help open a field of possibilities for future studies. It will discuss the “mobility” of jewels around the Mediterranean through commerce, marriage and immigration and the need to explore their role in the connectedness of the Mediterranean and how far it corresponds to the connectivity through micro regions model set by Horden and Purcell. It will refer to materials, shapes and techniques of jewellery as reflected in the Geniza documents, but will mainly deal with their cultural significance. Since jewels, like all material artefacts, are not simply descriptive, but also discursive, the paper will discuss jewels as a meaning- laden semiotic system in a patriarchal Mediterranean society. As such, so it is believed, jewels expressed, constructed and negotiated social relations and ideologies, especially of gender, sexuality and control. Special attention will be given to the gender perspective of jewels and to their ascribed magical power. The rhetoric of jewels as manifested in contemporary poetry and literature will also be considered. The paper focuses on medieval Jewish societies in the Mediterranean basin as reflected in the Cairo Geniza and in contemporary literary sources, but comparisons will be made to other Mediterranean societies, mainly of the classical world.