This book studies the role of the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey in providing refuge and prosperity for Jews fleeing from persecution in Europe and Byzantium in medieval times and from Russian pogroms and the Nazi holocaust in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It studies the religiously-based communities of Ottoman and Turkish Jews as well as their economic, cultural and religious lives and their relations with the Muslims and Christians among whom they lived.
Remains of the Jews studies the rise of Christian Empire in late antiquity (300-550 C.E.) through the dense and complex manner in which Christian authors wrote about Jews in the charged space of the holy land. The book employs contemporary cultural studies, particularly postcolonial criticism, to read Christian writings about holy land Jews as colonial writings. These writings created a cultural context in which Christians viewed themselves as powerfuland in which, perhaps, Jews were able to construct a posture of resistance to this new Christian Empire. Remains of the Jews reexamines familiar types of literaturebiblical interpretation, histories, sermons, lettersfrom a new perspective in order to understand how power and resistance shaped religious identities in the later Roman Empire.
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. Devin E. Naar traveled the globe, from New York to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Moscow, to excavate archives once confiscated by the Nazis. Written in Ladino, Greek, French, and Hebrew, these archives, combined with local newspapers, reveal how Salonica's Jews fashioned a new hybrid identity as Hellenic Jews during a period marked by rising nationalism and economic crisis as well as unprecedented Jewish cultural and political vibrancy. Salonica's Jews—Zionists, assimilationists, and socialists—reinvigorated their connection to the city and claimed it as their own until the Holocaust. Through the case of Salonica's Jews, Naar recovers the diverse experiences of a lost religious, linguistic, and national minority at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.
This volume revisits issues of empire from the perspective of Jews, Christians, and other Romans in the third to sixth centuries. Through case studies, the contributors bring Jewish perspectives to bear on longstanding debates concerning Romanization, Christianization, and late antiquity.
Even though relations between the Jewish people and the Roman state were sometimes strained to the point of warfare and bloodshed, Jewish military service between the 1st century BCE to the 6th century CE is attested by multiple sources.
The lively essays collected here explore colonial history, culture, and thought as it intersects with Jewish studies. Connecting the Jewish experience with colonialism to mobility and exchange, diaspora, internationalism, racial discrimination, and Zionism, the volume presents the work of Jewish historians who recognize the challenge that colonialism brings to their work and sheds light on the diverse topics that reflect the myriad ways that Jews engaged with empire in modern times. Taken together, these essays reveal the interpretive power of the "Imperial Turn" and present a rethinking of the history of Jews in colonial societies in light of postcolonial critiques and destabilized categories of analysis. A provocative discussion forum about Zionism as colonialism is also included.
The scholarly quest to answer the question of Jewish origins The Jews have one of the longest continuously recorded histories of any people in the world, but what do we actually know about their origins? While many think the answer to this question can be found in the Bible, others look to archaeology or genetics. Some skeptics have even sought to debunk the very idea that the Jews have a common origin. Steven Weitzman takes a learned and lively look at what we know—or think we know—about where the Jews came from, when they arose, and how they came to be. He sheds new light on the assumptions and biases of those seeking answers—and the religious and political agendas that have made finding answers so elusive. Introducing many approaches and theories, The Origin of the Jews brings needed clarity and historical context to this enduring and divisive topic.
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 History of the Byzantine Jews explores the Jewish microcosmos in Byzantium. Under the Romans, Jews enjoyed the privileges of knighthood and nobility. Although these luxuries were significantly diminished under Theodosius II- whose wife, Eudoxia, was a judaizing Empress- and the Codex Justinianus, they remained a powerful entity in Byzantium. In comparison to the irredentist Samaritans and Paulicians, the Jews remained areligio licita (permitted religion) that tolerated and even protected by Imperial and Church authority. Their position in society even enabled the Jews to vie for increased power. The Byzantine Jews tried to play the game of power politics through their affiliation with Yemen's Jewish Himyarites, and ill-fated alliance with the Persian Sassanides, and finally through the colossal power of the Jewish Khazar Empire. In this living history of the Byzantine Jews, Author Elli Kohen attempts to revive the spirit of Moses of Crete, Procopius, Eusebius, Theophanes Continuatus, and medieval chroniclers such as Liutbrand, Villehardouin, and Benjamin of Tudela. Intended as a complementary text to other classics on Byzantine Jews, this new work emphasizes multicultural cooperation in the study of this time period. Some of the events and individuals profiled in The History of the Byzantine Jews include: -Byzantine and Jewish polemists- the "Hagiographic Bibliotheca" -Historiography of a Jewish family in Byzantine Apulia -The Jerusalem Karaites finding a safe haven in Byzantium -The rerouting of the fourth Crusade through the Juiverie of Constantinople -The return of the Paleologues -Byzantine-Jewish coexistence under Symeon, Archbishop of Salonica
This provocative new history of Palestinian Jewish society in antiquity marks the first comprehensive effort to gauge the effects of imperial domination on this people. Probing more than eight centuries of Persian, Greek, and Roman rule, Seth Schwartz reaches some startling conclusions--foremost among them that the Christianization of the Roman Empire generated the most fundamental features of medieval and modern Jewish life. Schwartz begins by arguing that the distinctiveness of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and early Roman periods was the product of generally prevailing imperial tolerance. From around 70 C.E. to the mid-fourth century, with failed revolts and the alluring cultural norms of the High Roman Empire, Judaism all but disintegrated. However, late in the Roman Empire, the Christianized state played a decisive role in ''re-Judaizing'' the Jews. The state gradually excluded them from society while supporting their leaders and recognizing their local communities. It was thus in Late Antiquity that the synagogue-centered community became prevalent among the Jews, that there re-emerged a distinctively Jewish art and literature--laying the foundations for Judaism as we know it today. Through masterful scholarship set in rich detail, this book challenges traditional views rooted in romantic notions about Jewish fortitude. Integrating material relics and literature while setting the Jews in their eastern Mediterranean context, it addresses the complex and varied consequences of imperialism on this vast period of Jewish history more ambitiously than ever before. Imperialism in Jewish Society will be widely read and much debated.
