Judaism is indigenous to the Middle East. There in antiquity the Israelite people formed its unique identity. There the Bible came into being, and there by late antiquity Israelite religion was transformed into normative rabbinic Judaism. The basic texts of rabbinic Judaism—the halakhic midrashim, the Mishnah (compiled c. 200 CE), the two Talmuds, that of Palestine and that of Babylonia (compiled in the fifth and sixth centuries), and the first compilations of rabbinic lore (aggadah)—were all written in the Middle East. In the formative period of rabbinic Judaism, sectarian groups such as the religious communities of Qumran (the Dead Sea sects) manifested other varieties of Judaism. An esoteric mystical trend within rabbinic Judaism itself also grew in the Middle East of late antiquity. In Egypt in the first century CE, the...