Author: I. Etkes
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584654223
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Now available in English, a provocative new biography of the founder of Hasidism

Author: Immanuel Etkes
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503637093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The Gaon of Vilna was the foremost intellectual leader of non-Hasidic Jewry in eighteenth-century Europe; his legacy is claimed by religious Jews, both Zionist and not. In the mid-twentieth century, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Rivlin wrote several books advancing the myth that the Gaon was an early progenitor of Zionism. Following the 1967 War in Israel, messianic sentiments spread in some circles of the national-religious public in Israel, who embraced this myth and made it a central component of the historical narrative they advanced. For those who identified with the religious Zionist enterprise, the myth of the Gaon and his disciples as the first Zionists was seen as proof of the righteousness of their path. In this book, Israeli scholar Immanuel Etkes explores how what he calls the "Rivlinian myth" took hold, and demonstrates that it has no basis in historical reality. Etkes argues that proponents of the Rivlinian myth seek to blur the distinction between Zionism as a modern national movement or a religious one—a distinction that underlies many of the central conflicts of contemporary Israeli politics. As historian David Biale suggests in his brief foreword to this English translation, "what is at stake here is not only historical truth but also the very identity of Zionism as a nationalist movement."

Author: Arie Morgenstern
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198041667
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Accounts of the history of Zionism usually trace its origins to the late nineteenth century. In this groundbreaking book, Arie Morgenstern argues that its roots go back even further. Morgenstern argues compellingly that the Jewish community in Israel may be traced back to a large-scale wave of immigration during the first half of the nineteenth century. Inspired by an expectation for the coming of the Messiah in the year 1840, thousands of Jews from throughout the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Eastern Europe relocated to Jerusalem. Morgenstern describes the messianic awakening in all these lands but focuses primarily on the concept of redemption through messianic activism that prevailed among the disciples of Rabbi Elijah, the Ga'on of Vilna. These immigrants believed that the Messiah's arrival would bring about the redemption of the Jews, but also that, in order for this redemption to come about, they needed to prepare the way for the Messiah by fulfilling the commandment to dwell in the land of Israel. Morgenstern offers a dramatic account of their relocation, their efforts to renew rabbinic ordination, their reestablishment of the Ashkenazi community, and the building of Jerusalem. He also explores the crisis of faith that followed the Messiah's failure to appear as expected, and its effects on the community. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, Morgenstern sheds important new light on the history of messianic Judaism and on the ideological trends that preceded, and eventually gave birth to, modern political Zionism.

Author: ChaeRan Y. Freeze
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1611687330
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
Jehuda Reinharz, born in Haifa in 1944, spent his childhood in Israel and his adolescence in Germany, and moved with his family to the United States when he was seventeen. These three diverse geographies and the experiences they engendered shaped his formative years and the future of a prolific scholar who devoted his life to the study of the central role of leadership as Jews faced the challenges of emancipation and integration in Germany, the rise of modern antisemitism, the formation of Zionist youth culture and politics, and the transformation of Jewish politics in Palestine and the State of Israel. In this volume, eminent scholars in their respective fields extend the lines of Reinharz's research interests and personal activism by focusing on the ideological, political, and scholarly contributions of a diverse range of individuals in Jewish history. Essays are clustered around five central themes: ideology and politics; statecraft; intellectual, social and cultural spheres; witnessing history; and in the academy. This volume offers a panoramic view of modern Jewish history through engaging essays that celebrate Reinharz's rich contribution as a path-breaking and prolific scholar, teacher, and leader in the academy and beyond.

Author: Roger W. Stump
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742581497
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
The only book of its kind, this balanced and accessibly written text explores the geographical study of religion. Roger W. Stump presents a clear and meticulous examination of the intersection of religious belief and practice with the concepts of place and space. He begins by analyzing the factors that have shaped the spatial distributions of religious groups, including the seminal events that have fostered the organization of religions in diverse hearths and the subsequent processes of migration and conversion that have spread religious beliefs. The author then assesses how major religions have diversified as they have become established in disparate places, producing a variety of religious systems from a common tradition. Stump explores the efforts of religious groups to control secular space at various scales, relating their own uses of particular spaces and the meanings they attribute to space beyond the boundaries of their own communities. Examining sacred space as a diverse but recurring theme in religious belief, the book considers its role in religious forms of spatial behavior and as a source of conflict within and between religious groups. Refreshingly jargon-free and impartial, this text provides a broad, comparative view of religion as a focus of geographical inquiry.

Author: Abigail Green
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674283147
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
“A rich gift to history—and not just Jewish history—for its account not just of what Moses Montefiore did or did not do, but also of what he was.” —New Republic Humanitarian, philanthropist, and campaigner for Jewish emancipation on a grand scale, Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885) was the preeminent Jewish figure of the nineteenth century. His story, told here in full for the first time, is a remarkable and illuminating tale of diplomacy and adventure. Abigail Green’s sweeping biography follows Montefiore through the realms of court and ghetto, tsar and sultan, synagogue and stock exchange. Interweaving the public triumph of Montefiore’s foreign missions with the private tragedy of his childless marriage, this book brings the diversity of nineteenth-century Jewry brilliantly to life. Here we see the origins of Zionism and the rise of international Jewish consciousness, the faltering birth of international human rights, and the making of the modern Middle East. Mining materials from eleven countries in nine languages, Green’s masterly biography bridges the East-West divide in modern Jewish history, presenting the transformation of Jewish life in Europe, the Middle East, and the New World as part of a single global phenomenon. As it reestablishes Montefiore’s status as a major historical player, it also restores a significant chapter to the history of our modern world. “A masterpiece of scholarship and historical imagination.” —Niall Ferguson, New York Times bestselling author of The Square and the Tower “Entertaining.” —The Economist “A perceptive, solidly researched biography with expressive period illustrations attesting to Montefiore's global celebrity.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Deeply impressive. . . . One of the essential works on modern Jewish history.” —Tablet Magazine “Fair and illuminating.” —The Wall Street Journal

Author: Yiśakhar Shelomoh Ṭaikhṭel
Publisher: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.
ISBN: 9780881254419
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Em Habanim Semeha, written in Hebrew while Rabbi Teichthal was in hiding in Budapest in 1943, and perhaps the last substantial work of Judaica published in Holocaust Europe, marks the author's break with the ultra-Orthodox theology he had espoused before the war. A well-known Hasidic rabbi who was murdered by the Nazis in 1945 he castigates his colleagues for rejecting all initiatives for redemption as represented by the Zionist enterprise. Based on an encyclopedic knowledge of the sources of Jewish law and thought Rabbi Teichthal argues for the legitimacy of such an involvement.

Author: Yehoshua Ben-Arieh
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110626403
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 730

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Book Description
Napoleon’s invasion of the Middle East marks the beginning of the modern era in the region. This book traces the developments that led to the making of a new and separate geographical-political entity in the Middle East known as Eretz Israel and the establishment of the State of Israel within its bounds. Thus, its time frame runs from Napoleon’s invasion of Eretz Israel / Palestine in 1799 to the establishment of Israel in 1948–1949. Eretz Israel as the formal name of a separate entity in the modern era first appeared in the early translations into Hebrew of the Balfour Declaration, while in the original document the country was referred to as “Palestine.” During the period of Ottoman rule the territory that would in time be called Eretz Israel / Palestine was not a separate political unit. Among Jews, use of “Eretz Israel” increased only after the beginning of Zionist aliyot. Had the Zionist movement not arisen, it is doubtful whether the development to which this study is devoted would have occurred. The motivating force behind that process is without doubt the Zionist element. That is why Jews are the major protagonists in this book.

Author: Marion Lecoquierre
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351369784
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict gravitates constantly around the question of territorial control due to the settler-colonial principle present at the core of the Zionist project. Acknowledging space as a central tool of domination used by the Israeli authorities, this volume sheds light on the way space can become both a resource for and an outcome of protest, with an emphasis placed on the way it is used and produced through practices of resistance by subaltern groups. The research relies on a comparative approach, relying on data collected in the course of fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2015 in Palestine and Israel. It focuses on three "sites of contention", which include the H2 area in Hebron (the occupied Old City, under Israeli authority), the "core" neighbourhoods of Silwan (Wadi Hilwe and al-Bustan) and the unrecognized Bedouin village of al-Araqib, in the Negev desert. Through these three case studies, the book tackles different strategies that engage with the materiality of space, place, sense of place, territory, landscape, network and scale, showing the mobilization of a real "spatial repertoire" of contention. The different regimes of control give rise to strategies that are first and foremost emplaced, i.e. rooted in the local. Providing an original comparison between flashpoints of the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli politics of dispossession and expulsion, the book is a key resource for scholars and readers interested in political geography, political science, sociology, and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Author: Abraham David
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817356436
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
To Come to the Land makes available in English a vast body of research, previously available only in Hebrew, on the early history of the land now known as Israel. Abraham David here focuses on the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who fled the Iberian Peninsula during the 16th century, tracing the beginnings of Sephardic influence in the land of Israel. After the Ottoman Turks conquered Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in 1516, the Ottoman regime, unlike their Mamluk predecessors, encouraged economic development and settlement throughout the region. This openness to immigration offered a solution to the crisis Iberian Jews were undergoing as a result of their expulsion from Spain and the forced conversions in Portugal. Within a few years of the Ottoman conquest, Jews of Spanish extraction, many of them clustered in urban areas, dominated the Jewish communities of Eretz-Israel. In this carefully researched study, David examines the lasting impression made by these enterprising Jewish settlers on the commercial, social, and intellectual life of the area under early Ottoman rule. Of particular interest is his examination of the cities of Jerusalem and Safed and David's succinct biographies of leading Jewish personalities throughout the region. This first English translation of a ground-breaking Hebrew work provides a comprehensive overview of a significant chapter in the history of Israel and explores some of the factors that brought to it the best minds of the age. Essential for scholars of late Medieval Jewish history, To Come to the Land will also be an important resource for scholars of intellectual history, as it provides background crucial to an understanding of the intellectual flourishing of the period.