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This rich, interdisciplinary collection of articles offers fascinating new insights into the history and culture of Sephardic Jewry both in pre-Expulsion Iberia and throughout the far-flung diaspora.
This book challenges prevalent assumptions concerning the persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal in 1496-7. It pieces together the developments that led to the events of 1496-7 and presents a detailed reconstruction of the persecution itself.
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.
Diana Cooper-Clark has written a book that uncovers a ‘hidden’ history in the Holocaust narrative. The stories of seventeen Holocaust survivors who escaped to Jamaica and who are among the last eyewitnesses to the Shoah are inspiring. As well, she reveals the involvement of Jamaican Jews with the refugees and the Holocaust, and the virtually unknown story of the killing of Caribbean Jews in Nazi concentration camps. In addition, Dreams of Re-Creation in Jamaica has dozens of never before published photographs shared by the Jewish refugees. This book also sheds light on the Sephardim and their marginalization in the history of Hitler’s extermination policies. These compelling tales bring together World War II, Jewish refugees and Jamaican Jews, stories that have previously slipped through the cracks of history. As a child of six years old in Jamaica, Cooper-Clark read a book about the Nazi, Karl Eichmann, thus changing her life. She swore to spend the rest of her life bearing witness to the Holocaust. For everyone inspired by survival stories, and the triumph of life over death for both individuals and communities, this book is a must-read.
“In this epic examination, [a] celebrated historian explores the evolution of Judaism and Islam through a lens of Middle Eastern stability.” (Publishers Weekly) The relationship between Jews and Muslims has been a flashpoint that affects stability in the Middle East with global consequences. In this eloquent book, Martin Gilbert presents a fascinating account of the hope and fear that have characterized these two peoples through the 1,400 years of their intertwined history. Harking back to the Biblical story of Ishmael and Isaac, Gilbert takes the reader from the origins of the fraught relationship—the refusal of Medina’s Jews to accept Mohammed as a prophet—through the ages of the...
The Sonderkommando—the “special squad” of enslaved Jewish laborers who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau—comprise one of the most fascinating and troubling topics within Holocaust history. As eyewitnesses to and unwilling abettors of the murder of their fellow Jews, they are the object of fierce condemnation even today. Yet it was a group of these seemingly compromised men who carried out the revolt of October 7, 1944, one of the most celebrated acts of Holocaust resistance. This interdisciplinary collection assembles careful investigations into how the Sonderkommando have been represented—by themselves and by others—both during and after the Holocaust.
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. The failure among Ashkenazic Jews to recognize Sephardim and Mizrahim as fellow Jews continues today. More often than not, these Jewish communities are simply absent from portrayals of American Jewry. Drawing on primary sources such as the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) press, archival documents, and oral histories, Sephardic Jews in America offers the first book-length academic treatment of their history in the United States, from 1654 to the present, focusing on the age of mass immigration.
Of the 6,000,000 Jews who perished in the Holocaust, at least 160,000 were Sephardim: descendants of Jews exiled from Spain in 1492. Although the horror of the camps was recorded by members of the Sephardic community, their suffering at the hands of Nazi Germany remained virtually unknown to the rest of the world. With this collection, their long silence is broken. And the World Stood Silent gathers the Sephardim's French, Greek, Italian, and Judeo-Spanish poems, accompanied by English translations, about their long journey to the concentration and extermination camps. Isaac Jack Lévy also surveys the 2,000-year history of the Sephardim and discusses their poetry in relation to major religious, historical, and philosophical questions. Wrenchingly conveying the pathos and suffering of the Jewish community during World War II, And the World Stood Silent is invaluable as a historical account and as a documentary source.
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.