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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
James William Nelson Novoa's new book Being the Nação in the Eternal City explores, in a set of case studies focusing on seven carefully chosen figures, the presence of Portuguese individuals of Jewish origin in Rome after the initial creation of a tribunal of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1531. The book delves into the varied ways in which the protagonists, representing a cross-section of Portuguese society, went about grappling with the complexities of a New Christian identity, and tracks them through their interactions with Roman society and its institutions. Some chose to flaunt Jewish origins. They espoused a sense of being part of a distinctive group, the Portuguese New Christian na...
The Religious Polemics of the Muslims of Late Medieval Christian Iberia examines the corpus of polemical literature against the Christians and the Jews of the protected Muslims (Mudejars). Commonly portrayed as communities in cultural and religious decay, Mònica Colominas convincingly proves that the discourses against the Christians and the Jews in Mudejar treatises provided authoritative frameworks of Islamic normativity which helped to legitimize the residence of their communities in the Christian territories. Colominas argues that, while the primary aim of the polemics was to refute the views of their religious opponents, Mudejar treatises were also a tool used to advance Islamic knowledge and to strengthen the government and social cohesion of their communities.
This Handbook of Jewish Languages is an introduction to the many languages used by Jews throughout history, including Yiddish, Judezmo (Ladino) , and Jewish varieties of Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Berber, English, French, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Iranian, Italian, Latin American Spanish, Malayalam, Occitan (Provençal), Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Syriac, Turkic (Karaim and Krymchak), Turkish, and more. Chapters include historical and linguistic descriptions of each language, an overview of primary and secondary literature, and comprehensive bibliographies to aid further research. Many chapters also contain sample texts and images. This book is an unparalleled resource for anyone interested in Jewish languages, and will also be very useful for historical linguists, dialectologists, and scholars and students of minority or endangered languages. This paperback edition has been updated to include dozens of additional bibliographic references.
This collection takes a new approach to understanding religious plurality in the Iberian Peninsula and its Mediterranean and northern European contexts. Focusing on polemics—works that attack or refute the beliefs of religious Others—this volume aims to challenge the problematic characterization of Iberian Jews, Muslims, and Christians as homogeneous groups. From the high Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, Christian efforts to convert groups of Jews and Muslims, Muslim efforts to convert Christians and Jews, and the defensive efforts of these communities to keep their members within the faiths led to the production of numerous polemics. This volume brings together a wide ...
The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain: Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts investigates the relationship between the Bible and the cultural production of Iberian societies between the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 and the Expulsion of 1492. During this turbulent and transformative period, the Bible intersected with virtually all aspects of late medieval Iberian culture: its languages of expression, its material and artistic production, and its intellectual output in literary, philosophical, exegetic, and polemical spheres. The articles in this cross-cultural and interdisciplinary volume present instantiations of the Hebrew Bible’s deployment in textual and visual forms on diverse subjects (messianic exegesis, polemics, converso liturgy, Bible translation, conversion narrative, etc.) and utilize a broad range of methodological approaches (from classical philology to Derridian analysis).
This book consists of a previously unidentified corpus of literature that contains an edition of eighty-four testimonies of the sixteenth-century responsa. An overview of the responsa literature in the relevant context and aspects of Ottoman Jewish life are discussed. The author describes the merit of the Judeo-Spanish testimonies in terms of the insight they offer into the society, economy, religion and responsa literature of sixteenth-century Ottoman Jewry. The study of these texts from a linguistic perspective constitutes the main aim of the book yet the result is a valuable and intriguing source of texts that should generate further study in fields of linguistics, Sephardic Studies, Hispanic Studies, and Jewish Studies whether cultural, historical or legal. "...this book is an important resource for linguists, social scientists, scholars of Jewish culture and law, women studies and obviously for Sephardic studies, with special reference to the Ottoman period." Rachel Simon, Princeton University
This volume assembles multidisciplinary research on the Judaeo-Islamic tradition in medieval and modern contexts. The introduction discusses the nature of this tradition and proposes the more fluid and inclusive designation of “Jewish-Muslim Relations.” Contributions highlight diverse aspects of Jewish-Muslim relations in medieval and modern contexts, including the academic study of Jewish history, the Qur’anic notion of the “upright community” referring to the “People of the Book,” Jews in medieval fatwas, use of Arabic and Hebrew script, Jewish prayer in Christian Europe and the Islamic world, the permissibility of Arabic music in modern Jewish thought, Jewish and Muslim feminist exegesis, modern Sephardic and Morisco identity, popular Tunisian song, Jewish-Muslim relations in cinema and A.S. Yehuda’s study of an 11th-century Jewish mystic.
This book explores Queen Esther as an idealized woman in Iberia, as well as a Jewish heroine for conversos in the Sephardic Diaspora in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The biblical Esther --the Jewish woman who marries the King of Persia and saves her people -- was contested in the cultures of early modern Europe, authored as a symbol of conformity as well as resistance. At once a queen and minority figure under threat, for a changing Iberian and broader European landscape, Esther was compelling and relatable precisely because of her hybridity. She was an early modern globetrotter and border transgressor. Emily Colbert Cairns analyzes the many retellings of the biblical heroine that were composed in a turbulent early modern Europe. These narratives reveal national undercurrents where religious identity was transitional and fluid, thus problematizing the fixed notion of national identity within a particular geographic location. This volume instead proposes a model of a Sephardic nationality that existed beyond geographical borders.
A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome investigates the lives and stories of the many groups and individuals in Rome, between 1500 and approximately 1750, who were not Roman (Latin) Catholic. It shows how early modern Catholic people and institutions in Rome were directly influenced by their interactions with other religious traditions. This collection reveals the significant impact of Protestants, Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Rite Christians; the influence of the many transient groups and individual travelers who passed through the city; the unique contributions of converts to Catholicism, who drew on the religion of their birth; and the importance of intermediaries, fluent in more than one culture and religion. Contributors include: Olivia Adankpo-Labadie, Robert John Clines, Matthew Coneys Wainwright, Serena Di Nepi, Irene Fosi, Mayu Fujikawa, Sam Kennerley, Emily Michelson, James Nelson Novoa, Cesare Santus, Piet van Boxel, and Justine A. Walden.