Author: Hilda Nissimi
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1782847294
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
This book tells the little-known story of a fascinating crypto-Jewish community through two centuries and three continents. Beginning as a precarious settlement of a few families in mid-18th-century Mashhad, an Islamic holy city in northern Iran, the community grew into a closely-knit group in response to their forced conversion to Islam in 1839. Muslim hostility and a culture of memory sustained by intra-communal marriages reinforced their separate religious identity, vesting it in strong family and communal loyalty. Mashhadi women became the main agents of the cultural transmission of communal identity and achieved social roles and high status uncharacteristic for contemporary Jewish and Muslim communities. The Mashhadis maintained a double identity, upholding Islam in public while tenaciously holding onto their Jewish identity in secret. The exodus from Mashhad after 1946 relocated the communal center to Tehran, later to Israel, and, after the Khomeini revolution, to New York. The relationship between the formation and retention of communal identity and memory practices - with interconnected issues of religion and gender - draws upon existing research on other crypto-faith communities, such as the Judeoconversos, the Moriscos, and the French Protestants, who, through the special blend of memory-faith and ethnicity, emerged strengthened from their underground period. For the immigration period, the author challenges the old paradigm that "modernity and religion are mutually exclusive." The book also explores the sometimes uncomfortable yet intimate relationships that exist between seemingly incompatible ways of seeing the past, both secular and religious.
Author: Hilda Nissimi
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800858329
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
This book tells the little-known story of a fascinating crypto-Jewish community through two centuries and three continents. Beginning as a precarious settlement of a few families in mid-18th-century Mashhad, an Islamic holy city in northern Iran, the community grew into a closely-knit group in response to their forced conversion to Islam in 1839. Muslim hostility and a culture of memory sustained by intra-communal marriages reinforced their separate religious identity, vesting it in strong family and communal loyalty. Mashhadi women became the main agents of the cultural transmission of communal identity and achieved social roles and high status uncharacteristic for contemporary Jewish and Muslim communities. The Mashhadis maintained a double identity, upholding Islam in public while tenaciously holding onto their Jewish identity in secret. The exodus from Mashhad after 1946 relocated the communal center to Tehran, later to Israel, and, after the Khomeini revolution, to New York. The relationship between the formation and retention of communal identity and memory practices - with interconnected issues of religion and gender - draws upon existing research on other crypto-faith communities, such as the Judeoconversos, the Moriscos, and the French Protestants, who, through the special blend of memory-faith and ethnicity, emerged strengthened from their underground period. For the immigration period, the author challenges the old paradigm that "modernity and religion are mutually exclusive." The book also explores the sometimes uncomfortable yet intimate relationships that exist between seemingly incompatible ways of seeing the past, both secular and religious.
Author: Seth D. Kunin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231512570
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Juggling Identities is an extensive ethnography of the crypto-Jews who live deep within the Hispanic communities of the American Southwest. Critiquing scholars who challenge the cultural authenticity of these individuals, Seth D. Kunin builds a solid link between the crypto-Jews of New Mexico and their Spanish ancestors who secretly maintained their Jewish identity after converting to Catholicism, offering the strongest evidence yet of their ethnic and religious origins. Kunin adopts a unique approach to the lives of modern crypto-Jews, concentrating primarily on their understanding of Jewish tradition and the meaning they ascribe to ritual. He illuminates the complexity of this community, in which individuals and groups perform the same practice in diverse ways. Kunin supplements his ethnographic research with broader theories concerning the nature of identity and memory, which is especially applicable to crypto-Jews, whose culture resides mainly in memory. Kunin's work has wider implications, not only for other forms of crypto-Judaism (such as that found in the former Soviet Union) but also for the study of Judaism's fluid nature, which helps adherents adapt to new circumstances and knowledge. Kunin draws fascinating comparisons between the intricate ancestry of crypto-Jews and those of other ethnic communities living in the United States.
Author: David N. Myers
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1611684870
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
From his first book, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, to his well-known volume on Jewish memory, Zakhor, to his treatment of Sigmund Freud in Freud's Moses, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932-2009) earned recognition as perhaps the greatest Jewish historian of his day, whose scholarship blended vast erudition, unfettered creativity, and lyrical beauty. This volume charts his intellectual trajectory by bringing together a mix of classic and lesser-known essays from the whole of his career. The essays in this collection, representative of the range of his writing, acquaint the reader with his research on early modern Spanish Jewry and the experience of crypto-Jews, varied reflections on Jewish history and memory, and Yerushalmi-s enduring interest in the political history of the Jews. Also included are a number of little-known autobiographical recollections, as well as his only published work of fiction.
Author: Library of Congress
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Subject headings, Library of Congress
Languages : en
Pages : 1640
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Book Description
Author: Library of Congress. Cataloging Policy and Support Office
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Subject headings, Library of Congress
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Marc Baer
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804768676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
This is the first study of the modern history, experience, and ethno-religious identity of the Dönme, the descendants of seventeenth-century Jewish converts to Islam, in Ottoman and Greek Salonica and in Turkish Istanbul.
Author: Sara Koplik
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004292381
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
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.
Author: Glenda Abramson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317751604
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
This book brings together a collection of 16 essays, first published in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, that explore Jewish communities in North Africa, Turkey and Iraq. The discussions are located primarily in the 20th century but essays also examine the Jewish community in 16th-century Istanbul, and in early modern Morocco. Topics include traumatic departures of communities from countries of centuries-old Jewish residence, and relocations; pilgrimages to holy sites by Mizrahi Jews in Israel; resonances of Shabbetai Zevi in Turkey and Morocco; "otherness" and the nature of homeland; the Sephardi culinary heritage as realised in the cookbooks of Claudia Roden; sites of memory, such as Kuzguncuk in Turkey; and a controversial view of the exclusions and erasures that Arabized Jews have undergone. In this unique collection a major, but not exclusive, theme is that of the instability of memory, and the attempt to understand the interactions between memory and history as Jews recount their experiences of living in, and often leaving, their past homelands. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies.
Author: Melanie J. Wright
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472538889
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
This volume in the Studying World Religions series is an essential guide to the study of Judaism. Clearly structured to cover all the major areas of study, including historical foundations, scripture, worship, society, material culture, thought and ethics, this is the ideal study aid for those approaching Judaism for the first time. Studying Judaism offers readers the chance to engage with a religious tradition as a diverse, living phenomenon. Its approach is 'critical' in two major respects: its use of the dimensional approach to the study of religions as an interpretive framework, and its focus on matters perceived as problematic by insider and/or outsider commentators, such as gender, demography, geo-politics, the 'museumization' of Jewish cultures and its impact on religion and identity. This book is the perfect companion for the fledgling student of Judaism.
