Elisha Russ-Fishbane

Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, is a historian of Jewish life and culture in the Islamic world, including the religious and intellectual intersections of Judaism and Islam. He is the author of a book on the Jewish-Sufi movement of thirteenth-century Egypt, entitled Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt: A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Circle(Oxford University Press, 2015). He is currently working on a book on the experience and perception of aging in the medieval Jewish communities of the Mediterranean basin. Major topics the book explores include familial and communal support networks, divergent experiences of older men and women, physiological changes in light of medieval medicine, ethical and legal duties for the treatment of the old, and paradigms of aging in Jewish thought and Hebrew literature.