Under crescent and cross : the Jews in the Middle Ages / Mark R. Cohen.

Spine title: Under crescent and cross.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [201]-269) and index.

Ch. 1. Myth and Countermyth -- Ch. 2. Religions in Conflict -- Ch. 3. The Legal Position of Jews in Christendom -- Ch. 4. The Legal Position of Jews in Islam -- Ch. 5. The Economic Factor -- Ch. 6. Hierarchy, Marginality, and Ethnicity -- Ch. 7. The Jew as Townsman -- Ch. 8. Sociability -- Ch. 9. Interreligious Polemics -- Ch. 10. Persecution, Response and Collective Memory.

The exacerbation of Arab-Israeli conflict at the time of the Six-Day War in 1967 gave birth in some quarters to a radical revision of Jewish-Arab history. At stake was the longstanding, originally Jewish, "myth of the interfaith utopia" in which medieval Muslims and Jews peacefully cohabited in Arab lands - a utopia that many Arabs claimed had continued until the emergence of modern Zionism. Some Jewish writers challenged this notion with a "countermyth of Islamic persecution," suggesting that Jews fared not much better socially and politically under Islamic rule than they did under Christendom. Full of implications for Jewish, Islamic, and European historians, both myths form the backdrop of this provocative book aimed at enriching our understanding of medieval gentile-Jewish relations.