Mark R. Cohen is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His books include Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt (1980); The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah (1988); Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (1994), which has been translated into Hebrew, Turkish, and German and will soon appear in French; Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community in Medieval Egypt (2005) and The Voice of the Poor in the Middle Ages: An Anthology of Documents from the Cairo Geniza (2005). He has held research fellowships in the United States, Germany and Israel and is a member of the American Academy for Jewish Research.