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This volume deals with one of the most peculiar Jewish communities in the Diaspora, the Jews of Yemen. Their history began a long time before the advent in 622 AD of Islam. This book contains 16 studies, encompassing various aspects of Jewish existence in Yemen as a dhimmi (protected) religious minority under Islam: history, social and cultural relations with the Muslim environment, culture, literature and language, Yemenite Jewish traditions are highly esteemed in the modern spiritual and artistic life of the Jewish people both in the State of Israel and in the Diaspora.
The central feature of this book is an innovative critical approach, which understands medieval Hebrew poetry not only by revealing its ties with Arabic poetry but also by determining the specific characteristics by which it stubbornly distinguished itself from Arabic poetry.
1. Criminal law. 2. Criminal procedure
This volume investigates the emergence and spread of maritime commerce and interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World—the world’s first “global economy”—from a longue durée perspective. Spanning from antiquity to the nineteenth century, these essays move beyond the usual focus on geographical sub-regions or thematic aspects to foreground inter- and trans-regional connections. Analyzing multi-lingual records and recent archaeological findings, volume I examines mercantile networks, the role of merchants, routes, and commodities, as well as diasporas and port cities.
Sephardim are the descendants of the Jews expelled from the lands of the Iberian Peninsula in the years 1492-1498, who settled down in the Mediterranean basin. The identifying sign of the Sephardim has been, until the middle of the twentieth century, the language known as Jewish-Spanish. The history, identity and memory of the Sephardim in their Mediterranean dispersal are analysed by the author with a special reference to the Sephardi community of Jerusalem and to the cultural and social changes that characterized the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. However, because of the crucial changes related to modernization and the political circumstances that came into being at the turn of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the Sephardim lost their unique identity.
The martyrdom of a young Jewish girl from Tangier in 1834 sparked a literary response that continues today. This book translates and analyzes printed and manuscript versions of her story in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Spanish, Spanish and French written in the first century after her death.
This book re-thinks the relationship between the world of the traditional Jewish study hall (the Beit Midrash) and the academy: Can these two institutions overcome their vast differences? Should they attempt to do so? If not, what could two methods of study seen as diametrically opposed possibly learn from one another? How might they help each other reconceive their interrelationship, themselves, and the broader study of Jews and Judaism? This book begins with three distinct approaches to these challenges. The chapters then follow the approaches through an interdisciplinary series of pioneering case studies that reassess a range of topics including religion and pluralism in Jewish education;...
Beginning in 1172, Judah ibn Tibbon, who was called the father of Hebrew translators, wrote a letter to his son that was full of personal and professional guidance. The detailed letter, described as an ethical will, was revised through the years and offered a vivid picture of intellectual life among Andalusi elites exiled in the south of France after 1148. S. J. Pearce sets this letter into broader context and reads it as a document of literary practice and intellectual values. She reveals how ibn Tibbon, as a translator of philosophical and religious texts, explains how his son should make his way in the family business and how to operate, textually, within Arabic literary models even when writing for a non-Arabic audience. While the letter is also full of personal criticism and admonitions, Pearce shows ibn Tibbon making a powerful argument in favor of the continuation of Arabic as a prestige language for Andalusi Jewish readers and writers, even in exile outside of the Islamic world.
The fourteenth to sixteenth centuries were the most vibrant period in the intellectual history of the Yemeni Jews. By rooting themselves firmly in the tradition of the great philosopher Maimonides, they found that the Hebrew Bible contained philosophical truths that are at the core of humanity's highest goal. In this anthology of midrashim, eight Yemeni authors explore the means of ethical and intellectual achievement, the structure of the universe, the natural world, human existence, prophecy, miracles, Jewish law and practices, and the essence of allegory, parable, and symbol. The result is an extraordinary glimpse into the heart and mind of medieval Yemenite Judaism.