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In two waves of Islamic expansion the Christian and Jewish populations of the Mediterranean regions and Mesopotamia, who had developed the most prestigious civilizations of the time, were conquered by jihad. Millions of Christians from Spain, Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Armenia; Latins and Slavs from southern and central Europe; as well as Jews were henceforth governed by the shari'a (Islamic law).
Nineteenth-century Europe saw an unprecedented rise in the number of synagogues. Building a Public Judaism considers what their architecture and the circumstances surrounding their construction reveal about the social progress of modern European Jews. Looking at synagogues in four important centers of Jewish life—London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin—Saskia Coenen Snyder argues that the process of claiming a Jewish space in European cities was a marker of acculturation but not of full acceptance. Whether modest or spectacular, these new edifices most often revealed the limits of European Jewish integration. Debates over building initiatives provide Coenen Snyder with a vehicle for gauging...
An in-depth look at the lives of religious Jewish women in Jerusalem at a transitional moment in its history.
Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein show that, contrary to previous explanations, this transformation was driven not by anti-Jewish persecution and legal restrictions, but rather by changes within Judaism itself after 70 CE--most importantly, the rise of a new norm that required every Jewish male to read and study the Torah and to send his sons to school. Over the next six centuries, those Jews who found the norms of Judaism too costly to obey converted to other religions, making world Jewry shrink. Later, when urbanization and commercial expansion in the newly established Muslim Caliphates increased the demand for occupations in which literacy was an advantage, the Jews found themselves literate in a world of almost universal illiteracy. From then forward, almost all Jews entered crafts and trade, and many of them began moving in search of business opportunities, creating a worldwide Diaspora in the process.
The 1835 Municipal Reform Act is both a consequence and a continuation of the 1832 Reform Act. By dealing with those “citadels of Torysm” that were the municipal corporations, the Whigs not only wanted to confirm their electoral victory, but also to reform the local system that had been largely criticised for decades. Preceding the reform, a thorough investigation was conducted by a group of twenty commissioners – young liberal or radical lawyers – who visited 285 municipal corporations in England and Wales. After public hearings, they wrote, for each borough, a detailed report which provided an accurate picture of the municipal institutions and their functioning over the preceding d...
This book surveys what has been achieved in recent research on medieval Hebrew language and texts.
James Joyce's Leopold Bloom--the atheistic Everyman of Ulysses, son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Protestant mother--may have turned the world's literary eyes on Dublin, but those who look to him for history should think again. He could hardly have been a product of the city's bona fide Jewish community, where intermarriage with outsiders was rare and piety was pronounced. In Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, a leading economic historian tells the real story of how Jewish Ireland--and Dublin's Little Jerusalem in particular--made ends meet from the 1870s, when the first Lithuanian Jewish immigrants landed in Dublin, to the late 1940s, just before the community began its dramati...
Religion did much to shape contemporary British opinion and behaviour during the First and Second World Wars, but it featured rather less in the initial historiography of either conflict. The situation has changed considerably in the past half-century, with a steadily increasing number of academic and popular outputs on the religious aspects of the wars. As key milestones, in connection with the centenary of the First World War and the eightieth anniversary of the Second World War, have occurred or approach, it seems an appropriate time to take bibliographical stock. This volume is the first to offer an in-depth listing of modern literature, in English and other European languages, on Britis...