In this book, Guy Darshan explores stories of origins that lie at the heart of Pentateuchal sources in the context of literature created in neighboring societies of the ancient Mediterranean world. A comparative study, his volume analyses the parallels between Biblical origin stories – the narrative traditions arranged in geneaological sequence that recount the beginnings of humanity and origins of peoples -- in tandem with ancient Greek genealogical writings from the 7–5th centuries BCE onwards. He also considers Phoenician and Anatolian sources from the first millennium, several of which have only been published in recent years. This is the first scholarly study to trace the origins of this genre of narrative and the circumstances that led to appearances in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Mediterranean literature. It sheds new light on our knowledge of the history of literature, as well as the interconnections and interrelations between civilizations of the pre-Hellenistic eastern Mediterranean and Near East.

This collection of essays examines an important and under-studied topic in early modern Jewish social history"--the family life of Sephardi Jewish families in the Ottoman Empire as well as in communities in Western Europe. At the height of its power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire spanned three continents, controlling much of southeastern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa. Thousands of Jewish families that had been expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century created communities in these far-flung locations. Later emigrants from Iberia, who converted to Christianity at the time of the expulsion or before, created communities in Western European cities such as Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Livorno. Sephardi communities were very different from those of Ashkenazi Jews in the same period. The authors of these essays use the lens of domestic life to illuminate the diversity of the post-Inquisition Sephardi Jewish experience, enabling readers to enter into little-known and little-studied Jewish historical episodes.
Contributors include: Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, Hannah Davidson, Cristina Galasso, David Graizbord, Ruth Lamdan, and Julia Lieberman