The Spanish "conversos" were Jews who converted to Christianity both before and after the expulsion of 1492, many clandestinely maintaining ties to Judaism despite outward conformity to Catholicism. Through the lens of the Inquisition's own records, this ground-breaking study focuses on the crypto-Jewish women of Castile, demonstrating their central role in the perpetuation of crypto-Jewish society in the absence of any traditional male leaders. Renée Melammed shows how many "conversas" acted with great courage and commitment to perpetuate their religious heritage, seeing themselves as true daughters of Israel. Her fascinating book sheds new light on women in the transmission of Jewish tradition.

A narrative complement to Eyes Toward Zion, Volume II (Praeger, 1986), this important new volume presents a comparative analysis of the influence of the Holy Land on Western Societies. Researched and written by a distinguished team of international scholars, Eyes III illuminates both parallelisms and unique elements in the idea of the Holy Land in the United States, Canada, Iberoamerica, Great Britain, France, and Germany. The pervasive Holy Land influence in these countries and the unique elements inherent in each culture are perceived through four constructs: diplomatic policy, Christian devotion, Jewish attachments, and cultural ties. The editors and contributors provide a detailed examination of the political and economic interests of the Western societies in the Holy Land, the role of Zion in Christian denominations, the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition and communal life, and the effect of the Holy Land on Western literature, art, and pilgrimage. Part I analyzes North America's early involvement with Palestine, focusing particularly on the writings of early Christian travellers from the U.S. and the role these visitors played in forming America's concept of the Holy Land. A separate chapter compares and contrasts the U.S. and Canadian experience. Parts II and III examine the Iberoamerican and European experience. The long, wide ranging, and significant relationships between the Holy Land and France, Germany, and the Latin American Republics are fully explored. Focusing primarily on the nineteenth century, Part IV documents the sturdy Biblical-Holy Land-British bond. The chapters in this volume are replete with references to the writings of archaeologists, historians, scientists, biblical scholars, novelists, consuls, missionaries, tourists and, above all, settlers and builders of the Land - all attesting to the intrinsic place of the Holy Land in the world imagination.

"Imagining Creation" is a collection of views on creation by noted authors from different disciplines. Topics include creation accounts and iconography from Mesopotamia and Egypt, and cosmologies from India and Africa. Special attention is devoted to creation in the Scriptures (Bible and Koran) and related oral traditions on Genesis from Slavonic Europe, as well as Kabbalah. Some of the creations myths are earlier and some later than the Bible, while a number of the discussed texts offer alternative approaches to the beginnings of the universe. The contributions provide many new perspectives on the origins of man and his world from diverse cultures. The volume is the proceedings of a symposium on creation stories held at University College London.

The promotion and vernacularization of Hebrew, traditionally a language of Jewish liturgy and study, was a central accomplishment of the Zionist movement in Palestine. Viewing twentieth-century history through the lens of language, author Liora Halperin questions the accepted scholarly narrative of a Zionist move away from multilingualism during the years following World War I, demonstrating how Jews in Palestine remained connected linguistically by both preference and necessity to a world outside the boundaries of the pro-Hebrew community even as it promoted Hebrew and achieved that language's dominance. The story of language encounters in Jewish Palestine is a fascinating tale of shifting power relationships, both locally and globally. Halperin's absorbing study explores how a young national community was compelled to modify the dictates of Hebrew exclusivity as it negotiated its relationships with its Jewish population, Palestinian Arabs, the British, and others outside the margins of the national project and ultimately came to terms with the limitations of its hegemony in an interconnected world.

More than 150,000 American Jews served in the air war during World War II. Despite acts of heroism and commendations, they were subject to bigotry and scorn by their fellow servicemen. Jews were considered disloyal and cowardly, malingering in the slanderous (and non-existent) ""Jewish Quartermaster Corps"" or sitting out the war in easy assignments. Based on interviews with more than 100 Jewish air veterans, this oral history features the recollections of pilots, crew members and support personnel in all theaters of combat and all branches of the service, including Jewish women of the Women Airforce Service Pilots. The subjects recall their combat experiences, lives as POWs and anti-Semitism in the ranks, as well as human interest stories such as encounters with the Tuskegee airmen.

This book discusses the economics of the Talmud in the light of modern economics. Its focus is on the intricate debates, statements and principles that were forged by the great minds of the Talmudic Rabbis. This ancient storehouse of learning includes a wealth of economic knowledge of modern sophistication. The book taps those "economic treasures" by way of analytic inquiry.

Tracing their origins to medieval Portugal and Spain, the Sephardic Jews consider themselves 'the nobility of Jewry,' in contrast to their pushier and more aggressive German counterparts. They were also the first Jews to inhabit the new world-first exiled from Spain and Portugal, and then forced out of Brazil, a ship bearing 23 Sephardic Jews was blown off its course to Holland, beset by pirates, and then captured by a French captain before being ransomed for the 'payment of their freight' in the City of New Amsterdam. And so the American Sephardic Jewish story begins. Here Stephen Birmingham tells the rich and varied history of this insular group of bewilderingly interrelated families, spiced with gossip and the gentle rattling of family skeletons. We find tales of fortunes made in the fur trade long before the Astors, revolutionary heroes and heroines, and poetic spinster Rebecca Gratz, thought to be Scott's model for Rebecca in Ivanhoe. Through it all emerges a picture of a proud haughty people, who have chosen to remain aloof from the later-arriving Jews from Europe, and have staunchly refused to be swept up in the movement of Reform Judaism, preferring to adhere to their Orthodox rituals. Stephen Birmingham weaves a vibrant tapestry of the Sephardic experience in America, working in threads of their history in medieval Europe as he depicts the lives of these extraordinary Americans.

In the last half century, ways of thinking about the Holocaust have changed somewhat dramatically. In this volume, noted scholars reflect on how their own thinking about the Holocaust has changed over the years. In their personal stories they confront the questions that the Holocaust has raised for them and explore how these questions have been evolving. Contributors include John T. Pawlikowski, Richard L. Rubenstein, Michael Berenbaum, and Eva Fleischner.

Jewish Cultural Studies charts the contours and boundaries of Jewish cultural studies and the issues of Jewish culture that make it so intriguing-and necessary-not only for Jews but also for students of identity, ethnicity, and diversity generally. In addition to framing the distinguishing features of Jewish culture and the ways it has been studied, and often misrepresented and maligned, Simon J. Bronner presents several case studies using ethnography, folkloristic interpretation, and rhetorical analysis. Bronner, building on many years of global cultural exploration, locates patterns, processes, frames, and themes of events and actions identified as Jewish to discern what makes them appear Jewish and why. Jewish Cultural Studies is divided into three parts. Part 1 deals with the conceptualization of how Jews in complex, heterogenous societies identify themselves as a cultural group to non-Jews and vice versa-such as how the Jewish home is socially and materially constructed. Part 2 delves into ritualization as a strategic Jewish practice for perpetuating peoplehood and the values that it suggests-for example, the rising popularity of naming ceremonies for newborn girls, simhat bat or zeved habat, in the twenty-first century. Part 3 explores narration, including the global transformation of Jewish joking in online settings and the role of Jews in American political culture. Bronner reflects that a reason to separate Jewish cultural studies from the fields of Jewish studies and cultural studies is the distinctiveness of Jewish culture among other ethnic experiences. As a diasporic group with religious ties and varying local customs, Jews present difficulties of categorization. He encourages a multiperspectival approach that considers the Jewish double consciousness as being aware of both insider and outsider perspectives, participation in ancient tradition and recent modernization, and the great variety and stigmatization of Jewish experience and cultural expression. Students and scholars in Jewish studies, cultural studies, ethnic-religious studies, folklore, sociology, psychology, and ethnology are the intended audience for this book.

Europe is in the midst of a rapid political and economic unification. What does this mean for the Jewish minority - numbering less than 2 million people and still suffering from the aftermath of the Shoah? Will the Jewish communities participate in Europe's bold venture without risking total assimilation? Are they vibrant enough to form a new Jewish center alongside Israel and the American Jewish community, or are they hopelessly divided and on a "Road to Nowhere"? Different perspectives are predicted, relating to demographical, cultural and sociological aspects. This volume provides exciting, thorough and controversial answers by renowned scholars from Europe, Israel, North- and Latin America - many of them also committed to local Jewish community building.

Throughout history, the study of sacred texts has focused almost exclusively on the content and meaning of these writings. Such a focus obscures the fact that sacred texts are always embodied in particular material forms-from ancient scrolls to contemporary electronic devices. Using the digital turn as a starting point, this volume highlights material dimensions of the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The essays in this collection investigate how material aspects have shaped the production and use of these texts within and between the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, from antiquity to the present day. Contributors also reflect on the implications of transitions between varied material forms and media cultures. Taken together, the essays suggests that materiality is significant for the academic study of sacred texts, as well as for reflection on developments within and between these religious traditions. This volume offers insightful analysis on key issues related to the materiality of sacred texts in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, while also highlighting the significance of transitions between various material forms, including the current shift to digital culture.

This book addresses a lacuna in the study of Jewish and Israeli history - that of journeys taken by Jews in the 20th century towards Israel - which is also a neglected subject in the more general fields of migration and refugee studies. Dr. Gadi BenEzer, a psychologist and anthropologist, eloquently shows how such journeys are life changing events that affect individuals, families, and communities in a variety of ways. Based on narrative research of Jewish people who have undergone journeys on their way to Israel from around the world, the author is able to pose original questions and give initial convincing answers. The powerful personal accounts are followed by a thought-provoking analysis.

"[A] rich, engaging, scholarly, and nuanced chronicle of an . . . often-tormented interethnic, interreligious, interracial relationship."
"--MultiCultural Review"

"Bold and uncompromising. Cleverly, he turns a lot of revisionist race history on its head."
-- "Patterns of Prejudice"

"Insight, authority and scrupulousness are among the virtues of Seth Forman's account of the interaction of two conspicuous minorities in the postwar era. In its clarity and its wisdom, "Blacks in the Jewish Mind" constitutes a marvelous advance over previous scholarship; and in showing how frequently Jews misunderstood their own communal interests, this book offers a challenge to the present even as the past is illuminated."
"--Stephen Whitfield, Brandeis University"

Since the 1960s the relationship between Blacks and Jews has been a contentious one. While others have attempted to explain or repair the break-up of the Jewish alliance on civil rights, Seth Forman here sets out to determine what Jewish thinking on the subject of Black Americans reveals about Jewish identity in the U.S. Why did American Jews get involved in Black causes in the first place? What did they have to gain from it? And what does that tell us about American Jews?

In an extremely provocative analysis, Forman argues that the commitment of American Jews to liberalism, and their historic definition of themselves as victims, has caused them to behave in ways that were defined as good for Blacks, but which in essence were contrary to Jewish interests. They have not been able to dissociate their needs--religious, spiritual, communal, political--from those of African Americans, and have therefore acted in ways whichhave threatened their own cultural vitality.

Avoiding the focus on Black victimization and white racism that often infuses work on Blacks and Jews, Forman emphasizes the complexities inherent in one distinct white ethnic group's involvement in America's racial dilemma.

The first book-length study of the survival of Polish Jews in Stalin's Soviet Union. About 1.5 million East European Jews-mostly from Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia-survived the Second World War behind the lines in the unoccupied parts of the Soviet Union. Some of these survivors, following the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, were evacuated as part of an organized effort by the Soviet state, while others became refugees who organized their own escape from the Germans, only to be deported to Siberia and other remote regions under Stalin's regime. This complicated history of survival from the Holocaust has fallen between the cracks of the established historiographical traditions as neither historians of the Soviet Union nor Holocaust scholars felt responsible for the conservation of this history. With Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, the editors have compiled essays that are at the forefront of developing this entirely new field of transnational study, which seeks to integrate scholarship from the areas of the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the history of Poland and the Soviet Union, and the study of refugees and displaced persons.

Given the dearth of non-messianic interpretations of Psalm 110:1 in non-Christian Second Temple Jewish texts, why did it become such a widely used messianic prooftext in the New Testament and early Christianity? Previous attempts to answer this question have focused on why the earliest Christians first began to use Ps 110:1. The result is that these proposals do not provide an adequate explanation for why first century Christians living in the Greek East employed the verse and also applied it to Jesus's exaltation. I contend that two Greco-Roman politico-religious practices, royal and imperial temple and throne sharing-which were cross-cultural rewards that Greco-Roman communities bestowed on beneficent, pious, and divinely approved rulers-contributed to the widespread use of Ps 110:1 in earliest Christianity. This means that the earliest Christians interpreted Jesus's heavenly session as messianic and thus political, as well as religious, in nature.

The significance of religion for the development of modern racist antisemitism is a much debated topic in the study of Jewish-Christian relations. This book, the first study on antisemitism in nineteenth-century Sweden, provides new insights into the debate from the specific case of a country in which religious homogeneity was the considered ideal long into the modern era. Between 1800 and 1900, approximately 150 books and pamphlets were printed in Sweden on the subject of Judaism and Jews. About one third comprised of translations mostly from German, but to a lesser extent also from French and English. Two thirds were Swedish originals, covering all genres and topics, but with a majority on religious topics: conversion, supersessionism, and accusations of deicide and bloodlust. The latter stem from the vastly popular medieval legends of Ahasverus, Pilate, and Judas which were printed in only slightly adapted forms and accompanied by medieval texts connecting these apocryphal figures to contemporary Jews, ascribing them a physical, essential, and biological coherence and continuity - a specific Jewish temporality shaped in medieval passion piety, which remained functional and intelligible in the modern period. Relying on medieval models and their combination of religious and racist imagery, nineteenth-century debates were informed by a comprehensive and mostly negative "knowledge" about Jews.

Christian Hebraism came to its full fruition in the seventeenth century. However, interest in Jewish and Hebraic sources had already increased during the early Renaissance, as an integral part of the renewed attention to ancient cultures, mostly Greek and Roman, as well as eastern cultures - from Egypt to India. This volume presents a selection of papers from the international conference Hebraic Aspects of the Renaissance (University of Haifa, May, 2009), that trace the humanist encounter with Hebrew and Jewish sources during that period. The chapters included in this volume not only illuminate the ways in which Christian scholars encountered Hebraic sources and integrated them into their general worldview, but also present the encounters of Jewish scholars with humanist culture.

A literary memoir of exile and survival in Soviet prison camps during the Holocaust. Most Polish Jews who survived the Second World War did not go to concentration camps, but were banished by Stalin to the remote prison settlements and Gulags of the Soviet Union. Less than ten percent of Polish Jews came out of the war alive-the largest population of East European Jews who endured-for whom Soviet exile was the main chance for survival. Ellen G. Friedman's The Seven, A Family HolocaustStory is an account of this displacement. Friedman always knew that she was born to Polish-Jewish parents on the run from Hitler, but her family did not describe themselves as Holocaust survivors since that label seemed only to apply only to those who came out of the concentration camps with numbers tattooed on their arms. The title of the book comes from the closeness that set seven individuals apart from the hundreds of thousands of other refugees in the Gulags of the USSR. The Seven-a name given to them by their fellow refugees-were Polish Jews from Warsaw, most of them related. The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story brings together the very different perspectives of the survivors and others who came to be linked to them, providing a glimpse into the repercussions of the Holocaust in one extended family who survived because they were loyal to one another, lucky, and endlessly enterprising. Interwoven into the survivors' accounts of their experiences before, during, and after the war are their own and the author's reflections on the themes of exile, memory, love, and resentment. Based on primary interviews and told in a blending of past and present experiences, Friedman gives a new voice to Holocaust memory-one that is sure to resonate with today's exiles and refugees. Those with an interest in World War II memoir and genocide studies will welcome this unique perspective.