The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands is a collection of impressive scholarship in celebration of historian Norman (Noam) Stillman, Schusterman/Josey Professor of Judaic History Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma. The volume, with a forward from the president of the university, doubles as a gesture of gratitude from Professor Stillman's colleagues for the broad reach of his career as scholar of the Islamic world and Sephardic/Mizrahi studies and for his lasting service as founding director of the Schusterman Center for Judaic & Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

In the words of the volume's editors, “the articles reflect Noam's broad range of interests,” from Jewish history, law, and culture in the medieval Islamic world to literary and musical production, as well as patterns of immigration and modernization in the Sephardic/Mizrahi orbit (4). As a tribute to the meticulous scholarship of the festschrift honoree, most contributors either document new frontiers of scholarship or provide fresh angles and methodologies on established fields of research. The first half is generally devoted to medieval matters and the second half largely to modern, although chapters 6 and 7 appear to have been reversed (thus chapters 1–5, and 7 constitute the medieval portion, while 6, and 8–12 cover modernity). Other editorial puzzles emerge in arrangement and selection, such as the decision to open the volume with a study of a fairly obscure exegetical theme in Sadducee and Karaite inheritance law (ultimately arguing that the latter did not take the hermeneutical path of the former), and closing with the only article in the collection that has no connection with the Islamic sphere, focusing on the post-Herzl activities of Max Nordau. Slightly jarring are the more mundane editorial oversights, such as recurring typographical errors in many of the chapters, but the quality of the scholarship outweighs these defects.

Beyond the volume's overarching concern with Jewish life and culture in the Islamic context, there are few self-evident thematic links between the essays. A handful of contributors touched on points of connection and tension in the Jewish-Islamic encounter, a theme at the forefront of Professor Stillman's scholarly interests over the years. Reuven Firestone reexamines the Quranic polemic against Sabbath violators from the vantage point of the history of religions, positing a fresh methodological approach to scriptural polemic directed against established rival religions. In his reassessment of the medieval Islamic toponymy of the Holy Land, Jacob Lassner traces the diversity and development of the post-Quranic terminology for the region in Islamic sources through the tenth century. Although Lassner is mainly interested in technical considerations of the nuances of Arabic nomenclature, he concludes with the intentionally provocative assertion that historical scholarship may be used to counter the respective tendencies of Jews and Arabs in modern times “to declare ‘historic Palestine’ as their genuine homeland,” thus promoting “genuine scholarship above partisan sensibilities” (63). Mark Cohen's contribution on the impact of Arab mercantile customs on geonic and Maimonidean jurisprudence, part of a larger project on the socioeconomic background of Maimonides's Mishneh Torah, suggests a striking tendency of medieval Jewish legists of the Islamic milieu to accommodate and integrate mercantile practices prevalent among their gentile neighbors.

Cohen documents the so-called “custom of the merchants” (pp. 88, 97) in Islamic legal and mercantile sources, but so too in Cairo Geniza letters. The documents of the Cairo Geniza, a significant interest of Professor Stillman's own scholarly career, are also the focus of Renée Levine Melammed's study on the challenges and unpredictability of the daily life of women in the medieval Mediterranean. Much like her predecessors in this field, including S. D. Goitein and Joel Kraemer, Mellamed lets the documents and their colorful details take center stage, while acknowledging that they leave us with more questions than answers. Quite valuable are the five documents Mellamed publishes as appendices with accompanying translation, all of which provide a sample of material she has collected as part of her larger field of investigation into this topic.

From a more modern lens, Vera Moreen offers another approach to the history of the Jewish-Muslim encounter through a historical-literary examination of a martyrological tradition in (most likely) nineteenth-century Bukhārā. Moreen focuses on the periodic afflictions and persecutions suffered by the Bukhāran communities during this period and the importance of martyrological poems, of which she publishes one in translation, as an invaluable, if somewhat fragmentary, source of information on Jewish efforts to retain their identity, at times exuding a “faith in and love of Moses … akin to the veneration of Muḥammad” (117), under intermittent political-religious pressures to renounce their heritage. Other contributors shed valuable light on the literary and musical heritage of Mizrahi Jewry, including Ofra Tirosh-Becker's study of Judeo-Arabic renditions of the Scroll of Antiochus, recited in the Algerian community of Ghardaïa on the Sabbath of Hanukah, and Edwin Seroussi's analysis and critique of the pioneering scholarship of the early twentieth-century musicologist, Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, on Moroccan Jewish liturgical music.

Three contributors focus on quite different aspects of the Sephardic and Mizrahi experience. Jane Gerber offers a reassessment of the courtier tradition in Iberian Jewish culture, emphasizing the importance of material evidence as a source of historical information. Pointing to the example of the El Transito synagogue built by the fourteenth-century courtier, Samuel Halevi of Toledo, Gerber illustrates the impact of prevailing architectural motifs and elite political culture on one Castilian Jewish courtier. Gérard Nahon, in the one French essay included in the volume, advances new archival research documenting the immigration and economic integration of the Portuguese New Christians of Saint-Esprit in Bayonne, France, during the eighteenth century. Although constrained geographically and in their sphere of activity, members of the Portuguese community maintained a robust communal base independent of its former economic contacts with the Iberian Peninsula. Equally important from the cultural standpoint, Nahon documents the extent to which many of the Portuguese merchants exhibited an emergent Jewish identity, as illustrated by the effort to rename their ships with prominent biblical names, for example, Le Sallomon, Le Roy David, La Sara (163). Bat-Zion Eraqi-Klorman's contribution takes up the important themes of integration and accommodation within postimmigration Yemenite communities during the first half of the twentieth century. Confronted with structural and institutional challenges from the prevailing Ashkenazic establishment in Palestine and, somewhat later, in Israel, Yemenite communities struggled to balance their traditional forms of male education with new pedagogical paradigms for boys and girls alike. Eraqi-Klorman illustrates key examples of creative accommodation to emerging forms of secularism beyond the school system, such as within synagogue practice and the new realities of Israeli society. While conservative voices did make themselves heard within the Yemenite community, Eraqi-Klorman describes a number of influential Yemenite rabbinical leaders who were a voice of moderation and integration during a period of rapid change.

The editors of the festschrift provided one final service in including a comprehensive list of Professor Stillman's many books and articles through the publication date of 2015. These alone are eloquent testimony to his productivity and versatility as a scholar as his career has now entered a creative new phase.