A Jewish Heart
A Jewish Heart

Author: Robert L. Green

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-08-08

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 166691181X

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A Jewish Heart: A Struggle for Status and Identity in Asia is at once the saga of a modest charitable grant in 1903, an unimagined windfall ninety years later, and a history of Progressive Judaism in Asia. Enriched with profiles of key players, the author rootsthe narratives in the entrepreneurial and philanthropic activities of two legendary Baghdadi families, the Sassoons and the Kadoories, beginning in mid-nineteenth century Bombay, Shanghai, and Hong Kong and unfolding against the backdrop of worldwide waves of Jewish arrivals. The story gains currency when challenges are raised over community funding, facilities, preserving or replacing the aging synagogue, and accommodating Reform Judaism. Robert L. Green provides a thorough and previously undocumented account of the decade-long religious, legal, and public relations battles that follow, engaging the attention of international media and top rabbinical and legal authorities in Hong Kong, Israel, Australia, United States, and United Kingdom. The author focuses on questionable legal gymnastics as trustees, facing China’s impending takeover of Hong Kong, undertake efforts to protect the funds from unknown perils. Concurrently, he chronicles the establishment of a vibrant Reform congregation, braided with Jewish lore, and the struggles of visionaries hoping to make Hong Kong an oasis of Jewish worship, learning, and recreation in Asia.

Extraterritorial Dreams
Extraterritorial Dreams

Author: Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-06-10

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 022636836X

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We tend to think of citizenship as something that is either offered or denied by a state. Modern history teaches otherwise. Reimagining citizenship as a legal spectrum along which individuals can travel, Extraterritorial Dreams explores the history of Ottoman Jews who sought, acquired, were denied or stripped of citizenship in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—as the Ottoman Empire retracted and new states were born—in order to ask larger questions about the nature of citizenship itself. Sarah Abrevaya Stein traces the experiences of Mediterranean Jewish women, men, and families who lived through a tumultuous series of wars, border changes, genocides, and mass migrations, all in the shadow of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendance of the modern passport regime. Moving across vast stretches of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, she tells the intimate stories of people struggling to find a legal place in a world ever more divided by political boundaries and competing nationalist sentiments. From a poor youth who reached France as a stowaway only to be hunted by the Parisian police as a spy to a wealthy Baghdadi-born man in Shanghai who willed his fortune to his Eurasian Buddhist wife, Stein tells stories that illuminate the intertwined nature of minority histories and global politics through the turbulence of the modern era.