Contributors r 327from the University of Minnesota, he earned his PhD in religious studies from
the University of Pennsylvania (1984). He is co-author of The Early Kabbalah
(Paulist Press, 1986), and the editor of a critical edition of the anonymous Hebrew
paraphrase of Saadia Gaon’s Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, to be published by the
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Michael M. Laskier holds a PhD in history from UCLA. An internationally rec-
ognized authority on modern Jewish history, Israel and the Arab world, and
modern Middle Eastern/Maghrebi studies, he is a tenured full professor at the
Department of Middle Eastern Studies, Bar-Ilan University, and director of the
Menachem Begin Center for the Study of Resistance Movements. Publications
include North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century: The Jews of Morocco, Tu-
nisia, and Algeria (New York University Press, 1994, 2nd ed., 1997), winner of the
U.S. National Jewish Book Award; The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in
Modern Times (Columbia University Press, 2003), co-edited with Reeva S. Simon
and Sara Reguer; Israel and the Maghreb: From Statehood to Oslo (University Press
of Florida, 2004); Israel and the Aliyah from North Africa, 1948–1970 (Ben-Gurion
University Press, 2007), in Hebrew, winner of the Renée and Nessim Ga’on Book
Award for 2008; and Israel on the Threshold of the Seventh Decade: New Studies on
Security and Foreign Policy (co-edited with Dr. Yitzhak Ronen, to be published by
Bar-Ilan University Press). He is currently working on a book entitled The Euro-
pean Union and the Maghreb: Political Tensions Offset by Common Interests and
two books on French Jewry, The Jews of France, 1945–1995: A Portrait of a Western
European Community and Dangerous Curves: French Jewry at the Beginning of the
Twenty-first Century.
Yaacov Lev, PhD, University of Manchester, is a tenured full professor of Islamic
medieval history at Bar-Ilan University. He is the author of Charity, Endowments,
and Charitable Institutions in Medieval Islam (University Press of Florida, 2005).
He served as co-leader with Dr. Miriam Frenkel of a research group on “Charity
and Piety in the Middle East in the Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Conti-
nuity and Transformation,” at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, in
2006–2007. Currently he is the chairperson of the Department of Middle Eastern
Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
Jessica Marglin is a doctoral student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies
at Princeton University. Her research focuses on the history of Jewish-Muslim
relations in North Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is writ-
ing her dissertation on the history of Jews in the Moroccan legal system in the
nineteenth century. She received her master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies
from Harvard University, where she also completed her undergraduate studies.