Brill's Series in Jewish Studies

When Jews literate in Hebrew (a group that until recently was mostly men) wanted to learn from traditional Jewish sources how to behave in their conjugal bed, what did they find? Did the guidance differ between generations, places, or cultural contexts? How did thinkers in a tradition based on supposedly binding texts deal with changing sensibilities, needs, and realities in this intimate domain? This study explores sources from the Bible to contemporary publications, showing both stability and change in what Jews were instructed to do, or to avoid doing, when having sex with their spouse.

Can translations fuel intractable conflicts or contribute to calming them? To what extent do translators belonging to conflicting cultures find themselves committed to their ethnic identity and its narratives? How do translators on the seam line between the two cultures behave? Does colonial supremacy encourage translators to strengthen cultural and linguistic hegemony or rather undermine it? Mahmoud Kayyal tries to answer these questions and others in this book by examining mutual translations in the shadow of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the hegemony relations between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Jew in Czech and Slovak Imagination,1938-89 is the first critical inquiry into the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices in both main parts of former Czechoslovakia. The authors identify anti-Jewish prejudices over almost fifty years of the twentieth century, focusing primarily on the post-Munich period and the Second World War (1938–45), the post-war reconstruction (1945–48), as well as the Communist rule with both its thaws and returns to hardline rule (1948–89). It is a provocative examination of the construction of the image of ‘the Jew’ in the Czech and Slovak majority societies, the assigning of character and other traits – real or imaginary – to individuals or groups. The book analyses the impact of these constructed images on the attitudes of the majority societies towards the Jews, and on Holocaust memory in the country.

"This meticulously researched study covers the late 1930s to the 1960s in Czechoslovakia, then when Slovakia became a separate country under Nazi domination during WW II and much of the Czech Republic was a German 'protectorate.'...Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, professionals." - R.M. Seltzer, emeritus, Hunter College, CUNY, in: CHOICE 55.12 (2018)

Hasidic Art and the Kabbalah presents eight case studies of manuscripts, ritual objects, and folk art developed by Hasidic masters in the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, whose form and decoration relate to sources in the Zohar, German Pietism, and Safed Kabbalah. Examined at the delicate and difficult to define interface between seemingly simple, folk art and complex ideological and conceptual outlooks which contain deep, abstract symbols, the study touches on aspects of object history, intellectual history, the decorative arts, and the history of religion. Based on original texts, the focus of this volume is on the subjective experience of the user at the moment of ritual, applying tenets of process philosophy and literary theory – Wolfgang Iser, Gaston Bachelard, and Walter Benjamin – to the analysis of objects.

In The Religious Cultures of Dutch Jewry an international group of scholars examines aspects of religious belief and practice of pre-emancipation Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Amsterdam, Curaçao and Surinam, ceremonial dimensions, artistic representations of religious life, and religious life after the Shoa. The origins of Dutch Jewry trace back to diverse locations and ancestries: Marranos from Spain and Portugal and Ashkenazi refugees from Germany, Poland and Lithuania. In the new setting and with the passing of time and developments in Dutch society at large, the religious life of Dutch Jews took on new forms. Dutch Jewish society was thus a microcosm of essential changes in Jewish history.

In his book Selected Issues in the Modern Intercultural Contacts between Arabic and Hebrew Cultures, Mahmoud Kayyal examines the modern intercultural contacts between Arabic and Hebrew cultures from postcolonial perspectives. An aggressive relationship exists between the two cultures that stems from the combination of Hebrew culture’s representation of neo-colonial Western culture and the majority-minority relations between Jews and Arabs within Israel. By focusing on specific issues in these intercultural contacts, especially translation activity between the two languages, Hebrew linguistic interference in the Palestinian literature, and Hebrew writings of Palestinian authors, Kayyal reveals the ongoing struggle between the Zionist orientation and the subversive forces that attempt to undermine the Zionist narrative, and to preserve the Palestinian narrative.

The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities synthesizes much of the original research on modern French Jewish history published over the last decade. Themes include Jewish self-representation and discursive frameworks, cultural continuity and rupture from the eve of emancipation to the contemporary period, and the impact of France's role as a colonial power. This volume also explores the overlapping boundaries between the very categories of "Jewish" and "French."

As a whole, this volume focuses on the shifting boundaries between inner-directed and outer-directed Jewish concerns, behaviors, and attitudes in France over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors highlight the fluidity of French Jewish identity, demonstrating that there is no fine line between communal insider and outsider or between an internal and external Jewish concern.

The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands presented to Norman (Noam) Stillman offers a coherent and thought-provoking discussion by eminent scholars in the field of both the history and culture of the Jews in the Islamic World from pre-modern to modern times. Based on primary sources the book speaks to the resilience, flexibility, and creativity of Jewish culture in Arab lands.

The volume clearly addresses the areas of research Norman Stillman himself has considerably contributed to. Research foci of the book are on the flexibility of Jewish law in real life, Jewish cultural life particularly on material and musical culture, the role of women in these different societies, antisemitism and Jewish responses to hatred against the Jews, and antisemitism from ancient martyrdom to modern political Zionism.

A Political and Economic History of the Jews of Afghanistan by Sara Koplik describes the situation of Jews in that country during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly 1839-1952. It examines the political, economic and social conditions they faced as religious minorities. The work focuses upon harsh governmental economic policies of the 1930s and 1940s spearheaded by 'Abd al-Majid Khan Zabuli which caused the impoverishment and suffering of both the local community and refugees from Soviet Central Asia. The question of Nazi influence in Afghanistan is addressed, with the author arguing that it was mainly limited to the economic sphere. An examination of the appeal of Zionism and the community's immigration to Israel is included.

In Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity?: Interpellation, Exclusion, and Inessential Solidarities, Professor Reuven Snir, Dean of Humanities at Haifa University, presents a new approach to the study of Arab-Jewish identity and the subjectivities of Arabized Jews. Against the historical background of Arab-Jewish culture and in light of identity theory, Snir shows how the exclusion that the Arabized Jews had experienced, both in their mother countries and then in Israel, led to the fragmentation of their original identities and encouraged them to find refuge in inessential solidarities. Following double exclusion, intense globalization, and contemporary fluidity of identities, singularity, not identity, has become the major war cry among Arabized Jews during the last decade in our present liquid society.

"In Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity? Reuven Snir brings out an important contribution to studies of the history, literature and identity of Arabized Jews, showing the significant shifts these communities have undergone in the ways their identities have been defined and constructed in the modern period." - Lisa Bernasek, University of Southampton, in: Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 18.2 (2019)

The history of the Jews in Italy is the longest continuous one of European Jewry and lasted for more than two millennia. It started in the days of the Roman Republic and continued through the Middle Ages to Modern Times. Jewish Italy served as melting pot throughout its history, first for migrants from East to West and eventually from all over the Mediterranean littoral and beyond. Some of them moved on from Italy to other countries, while the majority stayed on in the country for generations. This volume of their history covers the first seven centuries of Jewish presence on the peninsula from the days of the Maccabees to Pope Gregory the Great. It is based on archaeological finds in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, on relevant literary and legal sources and on other records.

In The Comfort of Kin Monika Schreiber presents a study of the social and religious life of the Samaritans, a minority in modern Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Utilizing approaches ranging from anthropological theory and method to comparative history and religion, she approaches this community from diverse empirical and epistemic angles. Her account of the Samaritans, usually studied for their Bible and their role in ancient history, is enriched by a thorough treatment of the Samaritan family, a powerful institution rooted in notions of patrilineal descent and perpetuated in part by consanguineous marriage (which differs from incest in degree rather than in kind). Schreiber also discusses how the tiny community is affected by its demographic predicament, intermarriage, and identity issues.

In Jewish-Muslim Relations and Migration from Yemen to Palestine in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Ari Ariel analyzes the impact of local, regional and international events on ethnic and religious relations in Yemen and Yemeni Jewish migration patterns. Previous research has dealt with single episodes of Yemenite migration during limited spans of time. Ariel, instead, provides a broad sweep of the migratory flows over the 70 year time span during which most of Yemen’s Jews moved to Palestine and then Israel. He successfully avoids the polemic nature of much of the literature on Middle Eastern Jewry by focusing on the social, economic and political transformations that provoked and then sustained this migration.

In Revising Dreyfus, contributors from a wide variety of disciplines (art history, film, media, theater, sociology, history) offer new ways of understanding the ever-evolving meanings of the Dreyfus Affair. Although the Dreyfusards led the way in explicating the nuances of the Affair in lengthy treatises, the anti-Dreyfusards far outstripped their opponents on the graphic front, particularly through print media, photographs,
postcards, broadsides, films, illustrated journal covers, and the plastic arts. Revising Dreyfus traces the dominant modes of “seeing” the Dreyfus Affair, often in opposition to “reading” the Affair in three major contexts: French, Zionist, and American.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Italia Judaica Jubilee Conference, held at Tel Aviv University 3-5 January, 2010, on the occasion of the jubilee celebration of outstanding scholarship on the history of Italian Jewry. Established in 1960 by Professor Shlomo Simonsohn and scholars from Israel and other countries, the Italia Judaica Project has sponsored documentation and research and organized international conferences, including some as part of the Israeli-Italian cultural agreement.

The conference records the success of the project, exploring a broad range of topics related to the culture and history of the Jews in Italy in the Middle Ages and early modern times, such as: Jewish community, economy, literature, medicine and science, and the Arts. This volume contains nineteen of the twenty-seven lectures presented at the conference, including such topics as “International Trade and Italian Jews at the Turn of the Middle Ages,” “The Angevins of Naples and the Jews,” and “Dante and the Literary Identity of Jews in Italy.”

The conference was organized by the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Centre at Tel Aviv University, in cooperation with the Fred W. Lessing Institute for European History and Civilization, the Cymbalista Jewish Heritage Centre, the Faculty of Jewish Studies and the Golda and Israel Koschitzky Department of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University, and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura.

Winner of the 2015 Victor Adler State Prize (Förderpreis) from the Austrian Ministry of Science and Education!

The Grace of Misery. Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile 1919–1939 confronts the life and intellectual heritage of the Galician-Jewish exiled journalist and writer Joseph Roth (1894–1939). Through the quandaries that occupied his mature writings—nostalgia, suffering, European culture, Judaism, exile, self-narration—the book analyses the greater Central European literary culture of the interwar European years through the lens of modern displacement and Jewish identity.

Moving between his journalism, novels and correspondence, Lazaroms follows Roth's life as it rapidly disintegrated alongside radicalized politics, exile, the rise of Nazism, and Europe’s descent into another world war. Despite these tragedies, which forced him into homelessness, Roth confronted his predicament with an ever-growing political intensity. The Grace of Misery is an intellectual portrait of a profoundly modern writer whose works have gained a renewed readership in the last decade.

Jewish theater practitioners, playwrights, critics, financiers and audiences have played an enormous role in the development of the European and American theater. Jews and Theater in an Intercultural Context, a collection of essays by an international cadre of theater scholars, addresses this subject. Focusing on the role of Jews and Jewishness in the theatrical field it discusses the representation of Jews on the American, European, and South American stage, with a strong emphasis on twentieth century theater and the contemporary theatrical scene.

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.

The martyrdom in 1834 of Sol Hatchuel, a Jewish girl from Tangier, traumatized the Jewish community and inspired a literary response in Morocco and beyond. This study focuses on works written in the first century after her death in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Spanish, Spanish and French that tell her story and interpret its meaning. The author places both the event and the texts that narrate it in their historical context and show how its significance changed in each language and literary setting. The texts, prose and poetic laments by North African rabbis and a romantic feuilleton from the Judeo-Spanish press, and their historical settings reveal the complex relations between Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century and the intersection between religious polemics and gender discourse.

The history of the Jews in Sicily covers a period of over a thousand years, from Antiquity to the Expulsion, based on some 40,000 archival records, most of them hitherto unpublished. It illustrates the political, legal, economic, social and religious vicissitudes of the Jewish minority and its relations with the surrounding majority of Romans, Moslems and Christians. While the antecedents of the Jewish presence on the island are shrouded in mystery, more and more historical records surface with the passage of time. Those become abundant toward the later Middle Ages.
At that time the Jews in Sicily were citizens and suffered from relatively few disabilities. This was true in particular in the economic sphere. No discriminatory legislation forced them into moneylending and trade in old clothes. They engaged in agriculture and industry, trade and commerce, including international trade and shipping, and in most professions, which in turn enhanced their social status. There was as an unusually large number of craftsmen and physicians among them. The majority, however, were labourers, on the land and in town. In the fifteenth century the Jewish population reached 25,000 or thereabouts, over half of contemporary Italian Jewry. All this came to a sudden end with the expulsion order issued by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492. Some 80% of the Jews went into exile, while the remainder converted to Catholicism, only to be caught in the net of the Spanish inquisition.

"This final volume of Simonsohn’s series provides readers with an excellent opportunity to obtain the gist of
the scholarship in the previous volumes. Replete with tables detailing commodity prices, wages and salaries,
marriage contracts, and demographics this work is an extremely informative and very readable description of
the interaction between Jews and non-Jews in a not-so-closed society in the Middle Ages."
Randall C. Belinfante, Librarian/Archivist, American Sephardi Federation, New York (AJL Reviews, Nov/Dec 2011)

Using cutting-edge theory regarding trade networks and diaspora, this study challenges the historiographical argument that the Sephardim, and indeed, a variety of religio-ethnic groups, achieved their commercial success by relying on geographically dispersed family members and fellow ethnics. The book’s findings challenge the reigning understanding that commercial success stemmed from endogamous business relationships and socio-cultural insularity. The book demonstrates that the most successful Sephardic merchants of early seventeenth century Amsterdam built their fortunes not thanks to familial or diasporic connections, but through “loose ties,” economic networks comprised of non-Sephardim. Focusing on three of the most prominent Sephardic merchants in Amsterdam, and a random sampling of other Sephardi merchants, the book reveals a multi-ethnic and multi-religious trade network of non-Jewish merchants.

The Seventeenth Century Hebrew Book is an encyclopedic, bibliographic work describing books printed with Hebrew letters in that century. It records and describes the authors, publishers, and printers of Hebrew books, as well as the books themselves. Similar to the author’s other work, The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book, it covers the gamut of Hebrew literature, encompassing liturgical works, Bibles, commentaries, Talmud, Mishnah, halakhic codes, kabbalistic works, and fables. There are 691 entries comprised of a descriptive text page, background on the author, a description of the book’s contents and physical makeup, all of which are accompanied by reproductions of the title or sample pages. There is an extensive introduction with an overview of Hebrew printing in the seventeenth century, as well as detailed back matter. It is a necessary work for bibliographers, historians, and students of Jewish literature.

The history of Iranian Jews after the establishment of the Safavid State in Iran in 1501 C.E. has formed the subject of growing academic and broader interest over the last few decades. However, despite the significant increase in the quantity and quality of the publications in this area, some of the main aspects and periods in the history of Iranian Jews have received little or no systematic treatment. Dealing with some broad but closely related areas of history, community, society, and culture among the Jews of nineteenth-century Iran, the present book provides sources of information as well as discussions and explanations related to some of the main conditions and realities that shaped the lives of the Iranian Jews prior to their accelerated transformation in the course of the twentieth-century. Included among the eight sections and over forty annotated and analyzed sources in the book are those that shed light on some of the major areas of Jewish life in nineteenth-century Iran.

This collection of historical studies deals with the multiple connections between the history and culture of the Jews of the Netherlands from the beginning of the seventeenth century until the period after the Holocaust, and phenomena and processes that distinguish the history of the Jewish people in the modern period. The Jews of the Netherlands were not only nourished by the cultural creativity of the great Sephardi and Ashkenazi centers, East and West, but also at various stages they served as a source of inspiration for Jews elsewhere in the Jewish Diaspora. The articles of this volume examin the influence of general Jewish history on that of the Jews of the Netherlands and focus on events and processes that highlight the significance of of Dutch Jewry for modern Jewish culture.

In thirteen essays by leading art historians, and a critical introduction by the editor, Beyond the Yellow Badge seeks to reframe the relationship between European visual culture and the changing aspect of the Christian majority’s negative conceptions of Jews and Judaism during the Middle Ages and early modern periods. By situating their subjects within a broad continuum of historical and critical issues, the authors inquire into such questions as the shifting politics of toleration and intoleration; the role played by anti-Judaic legends in the formation of Christian cults; the role of positive evaluations of Hebrew, Jewish learning and Christian hopes for Jewish conversion; and the transformation of religious anti-Judaism into its modern racial and nationalistic counterparts. The book will be of special interest to art historians, cultural historians, students of Christian theology and Jewish history, and to educated general readers.