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Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. ―
 | Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (5 Vols.) | Norman Stillman | The goal of the "Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World" is to cover an area of Jewish history, religion, and culture which until now has lacked its own cohesive/discrete reference work. The Encyclopedia aims to fill the gap in academic reference literature on the Jews of Muslim lands particularly in the late medieval, early modern and modern periods. The Encyclopedia is planned as a four-volume bound edition containing approximately 2,250 entries and 1.5 million words with an additional index volume. Entries will be organized alphabetically by lemma title (headword) for general ease of access and cross-referenced where appropriate. Additionally the "Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World" will contain a special edition of the Index Islamicus with a sole focus on the Jews of Muslim lands. An online edition will follow after the publication of the print edition. If you require further information, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. To access the contributor website (user-id and password required), please click here. |
 | Jews and Muslims in the Islamic World | Zvi Zohar; Bernard Dov Cooperman | Essays on the symbiotic relation ship between Jews and Muslims, including their history, social life, architecture, religion, music, and literature. |
 | Jews and Muslims: Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Modern Times | Aron Rodrigue | Following the rise of Islam, many Jewish communities lived in predominantly Muslim lands. Muslim-Jewish co-existence was not seriously challenged until the modern period when European colonialism and the emergence of Zionism and Arab nationalism led to growing friction and conflict, resulting in the mass departures of Jews from these lands in the middle of the twentieth century. |
 | The Jews of the Ottoman Empire | Avigdor Levy | Offers a contribution to Jewish as well as to Ottoman, Balkan, Middle Eastern, and North African history. These twenty-eight essays deal with the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire, from the Balkans and Anatolia to Arabia, from Mesopotamia to North Africa. These essays grew out of an international conference at Brandeis University. |
 | Esther’s Children: A portrait of Iranian Jews | Houman Sarshar | This magnificent volume makes available for the first time a comprehensive history of the Jews of Iran -- from their earliest documented settlement in that land in 722 B.C.E. through the end of the 20th century. |
 | New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq | Orit Bashkin | Although Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi patriots, their community―which had existed in Iraq for more than 2,500 years―was displaced following the establishment of the state of Israel. New Babylonians chronicles the lives of these Jews, their urban Arab culture, and their hopes for a democratic nation-state. It studies their ideas about Judaism, Islam, secularism, modernity, and reform, focusing on Iraqi Jews who internalized narratives of Arab and Iraqi nationalisms and on those who turned to communism in the 1940s As the book reveals, the ultimate displacement of this community was not the result of a perpetual persecution on the part of their Iraqi compatriots, but rather the outcome of misguided state policies during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sadly, from a dominant mood of coexistence, friendship, and partnership, the impossibility of Arab-Jewish coexistence became the prevailing narrative in the region―and the dominant narrative we have come to know today. |
 | Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era | Julia Phillips Cohen | Becoming Ottomans is the first book to tell the story of Jewish political integration into a modern Islamic empire. It begins with the process set in motion by the imperial state reforms known as the Tanzimat, which spanned the years 1839-1876 and legally emancipated the non-Muslims of the empire. Four decades later the situation was difficult to recognize. By the close of the nineteenth century, Ottoman Muslims and Jews alike regularly referred to Jews as a model community, or millet-as a group whose leaders and members knew how to serve their state and were deeply engaged in Ottoman politics. The struggles of different Jewish individuals and groups to define the public face of their communities is underscored in their responses to a series of important historical events. |
 | Sephardim in 20th Century America: In Search of Unity | Joseph M. Papo | |
 | Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History | Aviva Ben-Ur | A significant number of Sephardic Jews, tracing their remote origins to Spain and Portugal, immigrated to the United States from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans from 1880 through the 1920s, joined by a smaller number of Mizrahi Jews arriving from Arab lands. Most Sephardim settled in New York, establishing the leading Judeo-Spanish community outside the Ottoman Empire. With their distinct languages, cultures, and rituals, Sephardim and Arab-speaking Mizrahim were not readily recognized as Jews by their Ashkenazic coreligionists. At the same time, they forged alliances outside Jewish circles with Hispanics and Arabs, with whom they shared significant cultural and linguistic ties |
 | Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects, and the Ottoman Jewish Past | Kerem Tinaz and Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano | Sephardic Trajectories brings together scholars of Ottoman history and Jewish studies to discuss how family heirlooms, papers, and memorabilia help us conceptualize the complex process of migration from the Ottoman Empire to the United States. To consider the shared significance of family archives in both the United States and in Ottoman lands, the volume takes as starting point the formation of the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection at the University of Washington, a community-led archive and the world’s first major digital repository of archival documents and recordings related to the Sephardic Jews of the Mediterranean world. Contributors reflect on the role of private collections and material objects in studying the Sephardi past, presenting case studies of Sephardic music and literature alongside discussions of the role of new media, digitization projects, investigative podcasts, and family memorabilia in preserving Ottoman Sephardic culture. |
 | The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature | Ilan Stavans | The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 gave rise to a series of rich, diverse diasporas that were interconnected through a common vision and joie de vivre. The exodus took these Sephardim to other European countries; to North Africa, Asia Minor, and South America; and, eventually, to the American colonies. In each community new literary and artistic forms grew out of the melding of their Judeo-Spanish legacy with the cultures of their host countries, and that process has continued to the present day. This multilingual tradition brought with it both opportunities and challenges that will resonate within any contemporary culture: the status of minorities within the larger society; the tension between a civil, democratic tradition and the anti-Semitism ready to undermine it; and the opposing forces of religion and secularism. |
 | Jewish Life in Muslim Libya: Rivals and Relatives | Harvey Goldber | In 1949 more than 35,000 Jews lived in Libya, but close to ninety percent had left before Libya attained its independence in 1952. Jewish Life in Muslim Libya combines historical and anthropological perspectives in depicting the changing relations between Muslims and Jews in Libya from the early nineteenth century up to the middle of the twentieth century. |
 | The Jews of Beirut: The Rise of a Levantine Community, 1860s-1930s | Tomer Levi | he Jews of Beirut: The Rise of a Levantine Community, 1860s-1930s is the first study to investigate the emergence of an organized and vibrant Jewish community in Beirut in the late Ottoman and French period. Viewed in the context of port city revival, the author explores how and why the Jewish community changed during this time in its social cohesion, organizational structure, and ideological affiliations. Tomer Levi defines the Jewish community as a «Levantine» creation of late-nineteenth-century port city revival, characterized by cultural and social diversity, centralized administration, efficient organization, and a merchant class engaged in commerce and philanthropy. In addition, the author shows how the position of the Jewish community in the unique multi-community structure of Lebanese society affected internal developments within the Jewish community. |
 | Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century | Sarah Abrevaya Stein | For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree. |
 | Jews in an Arab Land: Libya, 1835–1970 | Renzo De Felice | The author’s broad-ranging and meticulous research has enabled him to reconstruct the contemporary history of the Jews in Libya with an incredible richness of detail, bringing into vivid relief the social, religious, cultural, and political lives of a people caught between centuries of tradition and a series of governments bent on plunging them headfirst into the modern world. This story―fraught with the passion, drama, tragicomedy, and conflict of a society in transition―will be an invaluable resource for scholars in Middle Eastern studies, Jewish studies, and contemporary European history. The wealth of documentation, much of it previously unknown or unpublished, makes this a particularly useful book. |
 | The Women of Israel: Characters and Sketches from the Holy Scriptures and Jewish History | Grace Aguilar | The book is divided into three parts: (1) First Period, Wives of the Patriarchs. (2) Second Period, The Exodus and the Law. (3) Third Period, Between the Delivery of the Law and the Monarchy. Grace Aguilar was the oldest child of a merchant descended from the Jews of Spain, who fled from persecution in that country and sought and found asylum in England. |
 | The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture | Robert Brody | Having gained ascendancy over the Palestinian center of Judaism, the Geonim who headed the ancient talmudic academies of Babylonia came to be recognized by most of the world`s Jews as the leading religious and spiritual authorities from the late sixth to mid-eleventh centuries. This book-the only survey in English of the crucial Geonic period-focuses on the cultural and historical milieu of the Geonim as well as their intellectual and literary creativity. |
 | From the Shahs to Los Angeles: Three Generations of Iranian Jewish Women Between Religion and Culture | Saba Soomekh | Saba Soomekh offers a fascinating portrait of three generations of women in an ethnically distinctive and little-known American Jewish community, Jews of Iranian origin living in Los Angeles. Most of Iran's Jewish community immigrated to the United States and settled in Los Angeles in the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the government-sponsored discrimination that followed. Based on interviews with women raised during the constitutional monarchy of the earlier part of the twentieth century, those raised during the modernizing Pahlavi regime of mid-century, and those who have grown up in Los Angeles, the book presents an ethnographic portrait of what life was and is like for Iranian Jewish women. Featuring the voices of all generations, the book concentrates on religiosity and ritual observance, the relationship between men and women, and women's self-concept as Iranian Jewish women. Mother-daughter relationships, double standards for sons and daughters, marriage customs, the appeal of American forms of Jewish practices, social customs and pressures, and the alternate attraction to and critique of materialism and attention to outward appearance are discussed by the author and through the voices of her informants. |
 | Sephardic Women’s Voices: Out of North Africa | Nina B. Lichtenstein | Sephardic women's writings present invaluable information about the marginalization and silencing of the Jewish experience in France and North Africa. These stories offer testaments of a generally excluded human experience that belongs in the diverse and hybrid collection of post-colonial stories of displaced peoples. Once their narratives are located and appreciated for their literary and historical value, it becomes clear that they need to be incorporated into a larger movement within the Jewish historical and cultural trajectory. These stories by seven different women afford an opportunity to (re-)discover the voices and experiences of the North African Jews. |
 | The Jews of Moslem Spain | Eliyahu Ashtor | |
 | The Jews of Iran: The History, Religion and Culture of a Community in the Islamic World | Houman M. Sarshar | |
 | The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book | Norman A. Stillman | Norman Stillman has produced a comprehensive and articulate history of the turbulent and complex relationships in the Middle East that brilliantly captures the people and the history. |
 | Jews and Arabs: A Concise History of Their Social and Cultural Relations | S.D. Goitein | This fascinating history by an eminent scholar explores the relationship between Jews and Arabs, from their beginnings 3,000 years ago into the 1970s. Although originally written in 1954, it was revised in 1974 to extend its reach in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The account remains current in its outlook because of the focus on social and cultural contacts as opposed to political and military issues. Its long-range examination of the reciprocal influence between these two peoples provides many valuable insights into the present-day impasse in their relations. |
 | A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza | by S.D. Goitein | It is a rich, panoramic view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. The first and second volumes describe the economic foundations of the society and the institutions and social and political structures that characterized the community. The remaining material, intended for a single volume describing the particulars of the way people lived, blossomed into three volumes, devoted respectively to the family, daily life, and the individual. The divisions are arbitrary but helpful because of the wealth of information. The author refers throughout to other passages in his monumental work that amplify what is discussed in any particular section. The result is an incomparably clear and immediate impression of how it was in the Mediterranean world of the tenth through the thirteenth century. |
 | Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy (Volumes I and II) | Haim Beinart | Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy sets out to summarize the monumental legacy of a Jewish community that resided within the historical boundaries of Spain for some fifteen hundred years. Many chapters evaluate the contribution of Sephardi Jewry to the renaissance of Hebrew Language and science. These as well as many issues in Jewish communal life, have been analyzed and evaluated both in the context of Spain prior to the Expulsion and in the various settings where the exiles settled and formed new social patterns. The thirty-eight chapters which make up the work provide guidelines which the student or interested reader may utilize to gain a deeper understanding of the essence of Sephardi Jewry in the basis of its glorious past and heritage. |
 | The Woman Who Defied Kings: The Life and Times of Dona Gracia Nasi | Andrée Aelion Brooks | The Woman Who Defied Kings is the first modern, comprehensive biography of Doña Gracia Nasi, an outstanding Jewish international banker during the Renaissance. A courageous leader, she used her wealth and connections to operate an underground railroad that saved hundreds of her fellow Spanish and Portuguese conversos (Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism) from the horrors of the Inquisition. Born in Lisbon in 1510, she later moved onto Antwerp, Venice, and Ferrara where she was constantly negotiating with kings and emperors for better conditions for her people. Doña Gracia Nasi helped lead a boycott of the Italian port of Ancona in retaliation for the burning of 23 of her people by the Inquisition - an outrageous act in an era when Jews were more accustomed to appeasement. Finally settling in Constantinople, she persuaded Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent to grant her a long-term lease on the Tiberias region of Palestine, where she spearheaded one of the earliest attempts to start an independent state for Jews in Israel. Doña Gracia Nasi is equally important to history because she shatters the stereotype of how women, especially Jewish women, conducted their lives during the Renaissance period. Some historians have called her the most important Jewish woman since Biblical times. |
 | Voices in Exile: A Study in Sephardic Intellectual History | Marc D. Angel | Examines the intellectual life of Sephardic Jewry from the Spanish expulsion in 1492 through the first half of the 20th century. Discusses the background to the expulsion from Spain, the Jews' tribulations, and their reactions - the effort to understand the meaning of their suffering. Deals with the Converso phenomenon and the problems they encountered. Describes rationalist and anti-rationalist thought following the expulsion, and the messianic movements which arose. Pp. 144-149 discuss the blood libels in Damascus and Rhodes in 1840 and the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara in 1858, and the Jewish organizations which were established to aid persecuted Jews (e.g. B'nai B'rith, Alliance Israélite Universelle). |
 | Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages | Hyam Maccoby | Hyam Maccoby's now classic study focuses on the major Jewish-Christian disputations of medieval Europe: those of Paris (1240), Barcelona (1263), and Tortosa (1413-14). It examines the content of these theological confrontations with a sense of present-day relevance, while also discussing the use made of scriptural proof-texts. Part I provides a general thematic consideration of the three disputations and their social and historical background. Part II is a complete translation of the account of the Barcelona Disputation written by Nahmanides, one of the greatest figures in the history of Jewish learning, and was Jewish spokesman at the disputation. Part III contains Jewish and Christian accounts of the Paris and Tortosa disputations. A new introduction reviews the relevant literature that has been published since the original edition appeared. |
 | Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th-20th Centuries | Esther Benbassa, Aron Rodrigue | Until the publication of this remarkably comprehensive history of the Sephardi diaspora, only limited attention had been given to the distinctive Judeo-Spanish cultural entity that flourished in the Balkans and Asia Minor for more than four centuries. Yet the great majority of Sephardi Jews, after their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and subsequently from Portugal, found their way to this region, drawn by the political stability and relatively tolerant rule of the Ottoman Empire, as well as by promising socioeconomic conditions. Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue show how Sephardi society and culture developed in the Levant, sharing language, religion, customs, and communal life as they did nowhere else, both during prosperous times and during the declining fortunes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The impact of westernization, the end of Ottoman power, and the rise of fragmenting nation-states transformed this vital community in the modern era. And, like many other Jewish communities, the unique Judeo-Spanish culture was dispersed and destroyed by the Holocaust and the migrations of the twentieth century. Sephardi Jewry presents its vivid history in a readable, well-documented narrative. |
 | In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity | Jose Faur | This book focuses on the Iberian Jews and conversos, Jews who converted to Christianity. It explores the idea of the “other” in both Jewish and Christian traditions, the differences between the perspectives of the “persecuted” and “persecutors,” and the vision of modernity among some of the Iberian Jews of the period. Special attention is devoted to da Costa and Spinoza, offering a new perspective on the Jewish history of ideas. |
 | Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World (1391-1648) | Benjamin Gampel | |
 | The Mellah Society: Jewish Community Life in Sherifian Morocco | Shlomo Deshen | The Mellah Society is a compact yet detailed and fascinating account of Jewish life in precolonial Morocco, based on the voluminous but rarely studied writings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Judeo-Moroccan sages. |
 | Change within Tradition among Jewish Women in Libya | Rachel Simon | In the first major study of women in an Arab country's Jewish community, Rachel Simon examines the changing status of Jewish women in Libya from the second half of the nineteenth century until 1967, when most Jews left the country. Simon shows how social, economic, and political changes in Libyan society as a whole affected its Jewish minority and analyzes the developments in women's social position, family life, work, education, and participation in public life. |
 | The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952 | Gudrun Kramer | |
 | Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight | Lyn Julius | |
 | Jewish Identities in Iran: Resistance and Conversion to Islam and the Baha’i Faith | Mehrdad Amanat | The nineteenth century was a time of significant global socioeconomic change, and Persian Jews, like other Iranians, were deeply affected by its challenges. For minority faith groups living in nineteenth-century Iran, religious conversion to Islam - both voluntary and involuntary - was the primary means of social integration and assimilation. However, why was it that some Persian Jews, who had for centuries resisted the relative security of Islam, instead embraced the Baha'i Faith - which was subject to harsher persecution that Judaism? Baha'ism emerged from the messianic Babi movement in the mid-nineteenth century and attracted large numbers of mostly Muslim converts, and its ecumenical message appealed to many Iranian Jews. Many converts adopted fluid, multiple religious identities, revealing an alternative to the widely accepted notion of religious experience as an oppressive, rigidly dogmatic and consistently divisive social force. Mehrdad Amanat explores the conversion experiences of Jewish families during this time. Many converted sporadically to Islam, although not always voluntarily. |
 | The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History | Dina Danon | By the turn of the twentieth century, the eastern Mediterranean port city of Izmir had been home to a vibrant and substantial Sephardi Jewish community for over four hundred years, and had emerged as a major center of Jewish life. The Jews of Ottoman Izmir tells the story of this long overlooked Jewish community, drawing on previously untapped Ladino archival material. |
 | The Road to Redemption: The Jews of the Yemen 1900-1950 | Tudor Parfitt | This book examines new and fascinating archive material on the Jews of Yemen 1900-50. Oppressed by Islamic law and by new political resentments they were persuaded by push and pull factors to leave for Palestine/Israel. Three decades of setbacks culminated in their emigration to Israel 'on wings of eagles' in Operation Magic Carpet. |
 | Syrian Jewry in Transition, 1840-1880 | Yaron Harel | This pioneering study offers a comprehensive account of Syria's key Jewish communities at an important juncture in their history that also throws light on the broader effects of modernization in the Ottoman empire. |
 | Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece | Devin Naar | Touted as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," the Mediterranean port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the city's incorporation into Greece in 1912 provoked a major upheaval that compelled Salonica's Jews to reimagine their community and status as citizens of a nation-state. Jewish Salonica is the first book to tell the story of this tumultuous transition through the voices and perspectives of Salonican Jews as they forged a new place for themselves in Greek society. |
 | Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas: An Interdisciplinary Approach | Margalit Bejarano | Offers a wide overview of the Sephardic presence in North and South America through eleven essays discussing culture, history, literature, language, religion and music. |
 | Sephardic Genealogy: Discovering Your Sephardic Ancestors and Their World | Jeffrey S. Malka | This book brings together information to help anyone researching Sephardic genealogy, serving as both a reference and a tutorial. |
 | Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950 | Sarah Abrevaya Stein | This ground-breaking documentary history contains over 150 primary sources originally written in 15 languages by or about Sephardi Jews―descendants of Jews who fled medieval Spain and Portugal settling in the western portions of the Ottoman Empire, including the Balkans, Anatolia, and Palestine. Reflecting Sephardi history in all its diversity, from the courtyard to the courthouse, spheres intimate, political, commercial, familial, and religious, these documents show life within these distinctive Jewish communities as well as between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. |
 | The Jews of North Africa during the Second World War Hardcover – July 1, 1989 | Michel Abitbol | Michel Abitbol, in this definitive study of the Vichy government's treatment of Jews in North Africa, documents the anti-Semitic measures the French authorities vigorously and independently enacted. Never had persecution in North Africa been prepared and carried out with such great ideological mobilization, nor with so much juridical care. Remarkably, all these policies were implemented by the regular French administration of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia who were, by and large, upstanding civil servants, more republican and anti-German than avowed "collaborateurs" or unprincipled opportunists. Leaving nothing to chance or to emotion, they were primarily concerned with work well done, looking with equal disdain on those whose humanitarian leanings made them want to soften the blows of the racial laws as well as on those who wanted to engage in "spontaneous" actions against Jews. |
 | The Jews of Iraq: 3000 Years of History and Culture | Nissim Rejwan | An overview of the long tenure of the Jewish community in Iraq, this fascinating history details the comfortable, centuries-long coexistence between Jews and Muslims under an Islamic majority government. Opening with the Babylonian captivity in 731 BC, this account chronicles a time when the Jews were pushed out of Israel and Judea and deported to Babylon. Tracing the growth of Jewish towns in this new setting, the discussion points to a long period when Babylon was the center of Jewish life in exile and Talmudic study flourished. Continuing thought the centuries, the material covers the Mongol massacres of the Middle Ages, the Arab and Ottoman domination of Iraq, and the horrors of World War II, during which time the Rashid Ali regime carried out a Nazi-inspired pogrom in which Jews were murdered in the streets of Baghdad. The final chapters detail the exodus in 1951 of 100,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel. |
 | Between Foreigners and Shi‘is: Nineteenth-Century Iran and its Jewish Minority | Daniel Tsadik | Based on archival and primary sources in Persian, Hebrew, Judeo-Persian, Arabic, and European languages, Between Foreigners and Shi'is examines the Jews' religious, social, and political status in nineteenth-century Iran. This book, which focuses on Nasir al-Din Shah's reign (1848-1896), is the first comprehensive scholarly attempt to weave all these threads into a single tapestry. This case study of the Jewish minority illuminates broader processes pertaining to other religious minorities and Iranian society in general, and the interaction among intervening foreigners, the Shi'i majority, and local Jews helps us understand Iranian dilemmas that have persisted well beyond the second half of the nineteenth century. |
 | A History of the Jews in Christian Spain | Yitzhak Baer | |
 | Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213-1327 | Yom Tov Assis | The medieval Crown of Aragon reached the peak of its power and influence in the thirteenth century, and Jews took an active part in this expansion. In this detailed and meticulously researched study, Yom Tov Assis deals with many important aspects of this period, which was truly a 'Golden Age' |
 | Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture | Matthias B. Lehmann | In this pathbreaking book, Matthias B. Lehmann explores Ottoman Sephardic culture in an era of change through a close study of popularized rabbinic texts written in Ladino, the vernacular language of the Ottoman Jews. This vernacular literature, standing at the crossroads of rabbinic elite and popular cultures and of Hebrew and Ladino discourses, sheds valuable light on the modernization of Sephardic Jewry in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th century. By helping to form a Ladino reading public and imparting shape to its values, the authors of this literature negotiated between perpetuating rabbinic tradition and addressing the challenges of modernity. The book offers close readings of works that examine issues such as social inequality, exile and diaspora, gender, secularization, and the clash between scientific and rabbinic knowledge. Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture will be welcomed by scholars of Sephardic as well as European Jewish history, culture, and religion. |
 | The Jews of Islam | Bernard Lewis | This landmark book probes Muslims' attitudes toward Jews and Judaism as a special case of their view of other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim societies. With authority, sympathy and wit, Bernard Lewis demolishes two competing stereotypes: the Islamophobic picture of the fanatical Muslim warrior, sword in one hand and Qur'ān in the other, and the overly romanticized depiction of Muslim societies as interfaith utopias. |
 | Foundations of Sephardic Spirituality: The Inner Life of Jews of the Ottoman Empire | Rabbi Marc D. Angel | In this groundbreaking work, Rabbi Marc Angel explores the teachings, values, attitudes and cultural patterns that characterized Judeo-Spanish life over the generations and how the Sephardim maintained a strong sense of pride and dignity, even when they lived in difficult political, economic and social conditions. Along with presenting the historical framework and folklore of Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire, Rabbi Angel focuses on what you can learn from the Sephardic sages and from their folk wisdom that can help you live a stronger, deeper spiritual life. |
| Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora | Devi Mays | Forging Ties, Forging Passports is a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states. Devi Mays traces the histories of Ottoman Sephardi Jews who emigrated to the Americas―and especially to Mexico―in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation as they migrated and settled into new homes. | |
| Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa | Gottreich and Schroeter | With only a small remnant of Jews still living in the Maghrib at the beginning of the 21st century, the vast majority of today's inhabitants of North Africa have never met a Jew. Yet as this volume reveals, Jews were an integral part of the North African landscape from antiquity. Scholars from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Israel, and the United States shed new light on Jewish life and Muslim-Jewish relations in North Africa through the lenses of history, anthropology, language, and literature. The history and life stories told in this book illuminate the close cultural affinities and poignant relationships between Muslims and Jews, and the uneasy coexistence that both united and divided them throughout the history of the Maghrib. | |
| Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire | Olga Borovaya | The product of meticulous research and innovative methodology, Modern Ladino Culture offers a new perspective on the history of the Ladino press, a novel approach to the study of belles lettres in Ladino and their relationship to their European sources, and a fine-grained critique of Sephardic plays as venues for moral education and politicization. | |
| The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco, 1862-1962 by Michael M. Laskier | Michael Laskier | The Alliance Israélite Universelle―an international organization representing a community of over 240,000 Jews―was founded in France in 1860. Its goal was to achieve the intellectual regeneration and social and political elevation of the Jewish people. This book examines the impact of the AIU on Moroccan Jewry. It answers such questions as: How did the AIU establish itself in Morocco’s communities? How did it go on to become a power not to be underestimated by either the Moroccan government or the Europeans? And more importantly, how did the AIU improve the conditions of the Jews in Morocco, creating an important French-speaking urban elite? Also discussed are such topics as Zionism and Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco. | |
| Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East by Zvi Zohar | Zvi Zohar | Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East provides a window for readers of English around the world into hitherto almost inaccessible halakhic and ideational writings expressing major aspects of the cultural intellectual creativity of Sephardic-Oriental rabbis in modern times. The text has three sections: Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, and each section discusses a range of original sources that reflect and represent the creativity of major rabbinic figures in these countries. | |
| Jacob’s Children in the Land of Mahdi: Jews of the Sudan by Eli S. Malka | Eli S. Malka | This work details the development of a prosperous Jewish community in the Sudan. The author chronicles the history of the original group of eight families, providing family histories and tracing the families to their new homelands as well as providing an autobigraphical account. | |
| Jewish Communities of Iran by Houman Sarshar | Houmann Sarshar | A collection of entries from Encyclopaedia Iranica on Judeo-Persian Communities. | |
| La America: The Sephardic Experience in the United States by Marc D. Angel | Marc D. Angel | The story of the Jewish immigration to the United States in the early years of the century has been fully described in a variety of publications. Less well known is the story of the more than 25,000 Levantine Sephardim who entered the United States between 1899 and 1925. La America, the Judaeo-Spanish-language national weekly newspaper founded in 1910 is a welcome contribution to an understanding of this long neglected aspect of the American Jewish experience. Rabbi Angel discovers in the newspaper reports and editorials and brings to the readers attention the fascinating heritage of American Sephardic Jews. | |
| Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women: Sweetening the Spirits, Healing the Sick by Isaac Jack Levy, Rosemary Zumwalt | Isaac Jack Levy, Rosemary Zumwalt | Centered around extensive interviews with elders of the Sephardic communities of the former Ottoman Empire, this volume illuminates a fascinating complex of preventive and curative rituals conducted by women at home--rituals that ensured the physical and spiritual well-being of the community and functioned as a vital counterpart to the public rites conducted by men in the synagogues. | |
| An Ode to Salonika: The Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty | Renée Levine Melammed | Through the poetry of Bouena Sarfatty (1916-1997), An Ode to Salonika sketches the life and demise of the Sephardi Jewish community that once flourished in this Greek crossroads city. A resident of Salonika who survived the Holocaust as a partisan and later settled in Canada, Sarfatty preserved the traditions and memories of this diverse and thriving Sephardi community in some 500 Ladino poems known as coplas. The coplas also describe the traumas the community faced under German occupation before the Nazis deported its Jewish residents to Auschwitz | |
| Ladino reveries: Tales of the Sephardic experience in America by Hank Halio | Hank Halio | LADINO REVERIES relates with warmth and poignancy the assimilation of the Sephardic immigrants into American culture, from Ellis Island to the Lower East Side, through Harlem, the Bronx, and beyond. Proud to be Americans after 500 years of exile from Spain and modest prosperity in Ottoman Turkey, their cultural and linguistic challenges are conveyed with light-hearted candor and a strong sensitivity to their plight. | |
| Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era | Harvey E. Goldberg | Historians, anthropologists, and linguists from Israel, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States provide a comprehensive picture of Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries in modern times. The volume touches on such themes as the impact of modernization upon Sephardi communities in North Africa, the Balkans, and other areas of the Ottoman Empire; responses to cultural change in Sephardi communities of Iraq and North Africa; issues relating to contemporary Jewish languages and literatures; and conceptions of ethnicity and gender in Sephardi communities. | |
| Conversos on Trial: The Inquisition in Ciudad Real | Haim Beinart | ||
| The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times | Simon, Laskier, and Reguer | Despite considerable research on the Jewish diaspora in the Middle East and North Africa since 1800, there has until now been no comprehensive synthesis that illuminates both the differences and commonalities in Jewish experience across a range of countries and cultures. This lacuna in both Jewish and Middle Eastern studies is due partly to the fact that in general histories of the region, Jews have been omitted from the standard narrative. As part of the religious and ethnic mosaic that was traditional Islamic society, Jews were but one among numerous minorities and so have lacked a systematic treatment. | |
| Studies in Sephardic Culture: The David N. Barocas Memorial Volume by David N. Barocas and Marc D. Angel | Studies in Sephardic Culture: The David N. Barocas Memorial Volume | Memorial volume dedicated in memory of David N. Barocas. Foreward by Louis N. Levy. Contents include: Angel, M: David Barocas, The Man and His Ideas; Kaplan, A: Mr. Barocas and the Me'am Lo'ez; Besso, H. V: Judeo-Spanish Proverbs; Romey, D. & Angel, M: The Ubiquitous Sephardic Proverb; Papo, J: The Sephardic Jewish Community of New York; Halio-Torres, J: Writing the Spanish-Jewish Dialect; Maimon, S.: Ladino-English Dictionary. | |
| French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey 1860-1925 | Aron Rodrigue | ||
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