Joel Kraemer, John Henry Barrows Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, is renowned for his work in two principal fields – the history of Islamic thought and culture, and the life of the leading Jewish philosopher of the medieval Islamic world, Moses Maimonides. The twenty articles presented in this excellent volume represent broadly these two particular areas of interest, being mainly concerned with the intersection of Jewish and Islamic ideas, with cross-pollination on a philosophical and literary level, and, to a lesser degree, with the approach taken by more recent Jewish scholarship of Islam.

Fittingly, given Kraemer's tremendous contribution to the field, a number of the studies focus upon Maimonides. These include Michael Schwarz on his use of the term al-fiqh, Sarah Pessin on his interpretation of the teacher's role, and an interesting piece by Miriam Galston on the modern relevance of Maimonides' legal writings. In tune with the theme of the volume, three studies deal specifically with Averroes and Maimonides: Alfred Ivry on ‘conjunction’ in both philosophers' works, Ralph Lerner on the call for philosophy, and Barry Kogan on the two philosophers' approaches to scripture. This last article, the longest in the volume, culminates in a convincing challenge to the traditional scholarly belief that Maimonides was unaware – at least before he wrote the Guide for the Perplexed – of Averroes' work.

The interaction of Islamic and Jewish thought is also dealt with by Binyamin Abrahamov, who shows Sa'adya's familiarity with Islamic theological literature, by Rémi Brague on the word talaṭṭuf, and by Gad Freudenthal and Mauro Zonta on the complex literary history of Ibn Bahrīz's translation of Nichomacus. On the scriptural front, Uri Rubin looks at the Islamicisation of biblical history in the early Muslim period, and Walid Saleh examines al-Biqā‘ī's burgeoning obsession with the Hebrew Bible.

Further studies deal with the philosophers Crescas (Tzvi Langermann) and al-Fārābī (Charles Butterworth), with religious tolerance in the Rasā'il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā' (Abbas Hamdani) and intolerance in the Manhaj al-Ṣawāb (Joseph Sadan), with al-Ḍāhirī's playful Sefer ha-Musar (Adena Tanenbaum) and the Queen of Sheba's purported riddles (Jacob Lassner), with the Islamic interpretation of the ‘Hamitic Myth’ in Genesis 9 (Reuven Firestone), with an interesting Genizah letter concerning Judah ha-Levi (Mordechai A. Friedman), and with two intellectual circles in interwar Jerusalem (Steven Wasserstrom). There is a short biography of Joel Kraemer by Joel Stern, along with Kraemer's essay ‘My teachers’, and useful indexes. The book contains a great number of interesting studies touching upon the shared intellectual history of Judaism and Islam, and is certainly a fine tribute to the work of Joel Kraemer.