To the Editor:

Anthony Julius’s review of Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole’s “Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza” (May 29) properly appreciates the virtues of their absorbing account of that treasure-trove of manuscripts illustrating Jewish life under medieval Islam. But Julius misleads when he claims that the geniza documents portray Arab-Jewish relations as “not especially good.” The message of the geniza is, rather, that despite legal and social inferiority and payment of an annual poll tax, Jews enjoyed freedom of religion, communal autonomy and untrammeled economic opportunity. Moreover, Hoffman and Cole demonstrate in fascinating detail just how thoroughly Jews were immersed in Arab culture and, in fact, how Jews and Arabs lived together with less mutual hostility than they do in today’s Middle East.

MARK R. COHEN

New York

The writer is a professor of Jewish civilization in the Near East at Princeton University.