Pover­ty and Char­i­ty in the Jew­ish Com­mu­ni­ty of Medieval Egypt is an impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion that pro­vides a win­dow onto the dai­ly lives of the poor. Pre­vi­ous­ly this infor­ma­tion came only from the insti­tu­tions and indi­vid­u­als who gave relief to the less for­tu­nate, but here Cohen stud­ies pover­ty from the view­point of both the poor and those who pro­vid­ed for them. For this book Cohen has mined the rich­est body of doc­u­ments avail­able on the mat­ter: the papers of the Cairo Geniza of the medieval syn­a­gogue in Old Cairo. It has been over a cen­tu­ry since Solomon Schechter dis­cov­ered the Cairo Geniza, and its rich­es have not yet been exhaust­ed. Cohen is the Near East­ern Stud­ies Pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton University.