Effie Shoham is a historian at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev studying the social and religious history of medieval western European Jewry and the interaction between Jews and their surroundings. His research focuses on the social aspects of Jewish history with a special interest in social information that can be extracted from rabbinic source material from medieval Western Europe especially when read against the grain. He has a special interest in the margins of society and the special perspective they grant us in our attempts to understand social and religious structures and mechanisms inside and outside medieval Jewish society. His current research focuses on the medieval Jewish community in Cologne (Germany) expelled in the mid fifteenth century. This community had a lesser rabbinic “footprint” and most of our knowledge about it stems from documentation produced outside the community and from the fascinating archeological and material finds unearthed in recent excavations.