Mark Cohen
Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East (emeritus)
Princeton University
Born in Boston, I attended Brandeis University (BA), Columbia University (MA), and JTS (MHL, Rabbi, PhD). Princeton was my first (and only) regular position, and I taught there for 40 years before retiring in 2013. I have focused my research on Jewish life as reflected in the Cairo Geniza documents and I directed the Princeton Geniza Project from its inception in the mid-1980s until my retirement.
I helped train about 10 PhDs, including two from Columbia, Marina Rustow (my successor at Princeton) and Jessica Goldberg (now at UCLA). Most of my books draw on the Geniza. In my retirement I continue to lecture and write articles and letters of recommendation for former students and current colleagues…and play the piano, on which I am an adult beginner.
Selected Publications
Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt
Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages
Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt
The Voice of the Poor in the Middle Ages: .An Anthology of Documents from the Cairo Geniza
The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah
Al-mujtama’ al-yahudi fi Misr al-islamiyya fi’l-‘usur al-wusta
Maimonides and the Merchants: Jewish Law and Society in the Medieval Islamic World