Fred Astren, Chair of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, holds degrees in Medieval History (Minnesota), Arabic (UC Berkeley), and Near Eastern Studies (UC Berkeley). His interests include minority/sectarian history and sacred history in the Mediterranean Middle Ages, with special focus on Jewish history under Islam, Jewish-Muslim relations, and the Karaite Jewish sect. Among his publications are Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding(U of South Carolina, 2004), which won an award from the Koret Foundation, and a co-edited volume, Judaism and Islam: Boundaries, Interaction, and Communication (Brill, 2000). The present talk is drawn from his book-in-progress on Jews in the early medieval Mediterranean.