Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived, this book is more a voyage of discovery than an academic monograph. It takes us to a time—the Middle Ages—and a place—the Middle East—in which there were many different visions of Judaism's future, and it teaches us that this future emerged out of an infinitely richer dialogue than most of us thought possible. Marina Rustow shows us how the jostling of many peoples has shaped our understanding of the history of rabbinic Judaism's emergence. Her crowd of characters ranges from the sages of Babylon and Palestine to the Sultans of Cairo, from desperate captives pleading for ransom to the proud princes of rival Jewish communities, from pillaging crusaders to modern manuscript hunters. The result of their polyphonic interactions is an extraordinarily learned yet lyrical book that transforms our knowledge of how the various different visions of Judaism dealt with their differences in the distant past, and thereby gives us a new sense of how they might do so in the present.

Heresy and the Politics of Community is a fine piece of historical scholarship, presenting the new and exciting idea that the sectarian divide between Rabbanites and Qaraites in the tenth and eleventh centuries in the Middle East not only was not as deep and antagonistic as usually assumed but also hardly existed at all in certain areas. Marina Rustow substantiates this claim through the judicious marshalling of evidence in a book that is highly professional, well conceived, and well executed. It will have a definite impact on the study of medieval Jewish history and is an important contribution to our understanding of Jewish religion and life.

Estrangement and rift between medieval Rabbanite and Qaraite Jews is a commonplace of modern scholarship. Through a detailed analysis of documentary sources from the Cairo Genizah, Marina Rustow brilliantly challenges this view. She proposes fresh insights into intellectually diversified Jewish life in Fatimid times.

Relying on meticulous research of Genizah documents, Marina Rustow rewrites the history of the Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Her nuanced assessment of the tripartite communal structure of the Jews of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria places the Qaraites at the very center of Jewish life and redefines the frequently shifting relationship among Babylonian, Palestinian, and Qaraite congregations and communities of that time and place. Heresy and the Politics of Community is a rich and brilliant study of the complex power relations within a minority religious community.