332 · Contributors
Israel and the Maghreb: From Statehood to Oslo (2004); Israel and the Aliyah
from North Africa: 1948–1970 (2007), in Hebrew, winner of the Renée and
Nessim Ga ̓on Book Award for 2008; and Israel on the Threshold of the Sev-
enth Decade: New Studies on Security and Foreign Policy (co-edited with Dr.
Yitzhak Ronen, forthcoming). He is currently working on The European
Union and the Maghreb: Political Tensions Offset by Common Interests; Israel
and the Mediterranean: Sixty years of Fluctuating Coexistence; and two books
on French Jewry: The Jews of France, 1945–1995: A Portrait of a Western
European Community and Clouds of Danger: French Jewry in the First Two
Decades of the Twenty-first Century.
Yaacov Lev (PhD, University of Manchester) is tenured full professor of
Islamic medieval history at Bar-Ilan University. He is the author of Char-
ity, Endowments, and Charitable Institutions in Medieval Islam (2005). He
and Dr. Miriam Frenkel led a research group on “Charity and Piety in
the Middle East in the Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Continuity
and Transformation” at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, in
2006–2007. Currently he chairs the Department of Middle Eastern Studies
at Bar-Ilan University.
Avigdor Levy (PhD, Harvard University) is professor of Near Eastern
and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. He has published five books
and numerous articles on Ottoman history, the Jews in the Ottoman Em-
pire, Syrian politics, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. His books include The
Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire (1992), The Jews of the Ottoman Empire
(1994), and Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History (2002). He is an editor
of the five-volume Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (2010).
Rachel Maissy-Noy holds a PhD degree in Middle Eastern history from
Bar-Ilan University. Her dissertation is entitled Aspects of Jewish History
as Narrated by Egyptian Historiography. In addition to having earned an
MA degree from the University of Haifa for the thesis “Palestinian His-
toriography and Its Relation to the Territory of Palestine,” she received a
teaching certificate in computer science from the Haifa-based Technion.
Dr. Noy is well versed in Arabic language and literature. Her most recent
publication is “Palestinian Historiography in Relation to the Territory of
Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 42 (November 2006).