The most important Jewish center in the western hemisphere during the eighteenth century was "the great colony" - Surinam. There, Jews formed perhaps the most privileged Jewish community in the world. They were often plantation and slave owners, as well as a sizeable proportion of the white population. They had their own village, with extensive autonomous rights. This book is a study of the impact of environment on Jewish life in a colonial society. It analyzes the impact of environment upon migratory patterns, health and mortality, economic structures, intellectual life, and communal...

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966 and the undisputed master of the Hebrew novel, still remains largely an unknown or even misunderstood figure. Agnon's innovation was to construct an intricate dialectic between Hebrew tradition and the modern predicament, thereby producing a very distinctive mode of modernist narrative. Agnon deployed a technique of rich allusiveness drawn from traditional Hebrew lore and language using free-association, especially by means of imaginative dream-sequences designed to unveil the ambivalent but fateful meanings in...

This book deals with the intricate, and often uneasy relationship which developed between Jews and Venetians, as they struggled to cope with the changing realities of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean world.
The fruit of many years of research in the Venetian archives, this volume explores undiscovered aspects of Mediterranean history regarding the involvement of Venetians and Jews in the international maritime trade, Venetian attitudes towards Jews, the impact of Venetian-Ottoman contention on the relationship between Jews and Venetians, and more.
The unfolding of this relationship...

This volume focuses on the Jewish community of the British Crown Colony of Aden, a community which is mistakenly lumped with Yemenite Jewry. It provides a critical assessment of its history; salient dimensions of its sociopolitical, religious, socioeconomic, cultural and intellectual fabric; insights into the unique quintessential traits that determine the place of the Jewish community of Aden as a cultural and spiritual phenomenon within Yemenite and world Jewry. It also affords a glimpse into the relationship between Jews and Muslims in Aden.
The volume is based on a study of hundreds of...

Although Jews lacked a political locus standi for a communication system in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods, their involvement in trade and the close relations among Jewish communities fostered the development of effective channels of communication. This process responded primarily to security and socio-economic considerations but it has important implications for the development of communication systems as well. Written by some of the most outstanding researchers in the field of Jewish history, this collection offers a rich and consistent picture of the main developments in...

This is a seminal study of the economic history of the Jewish community of Aragon, covering a period of about 125 years from the beginning of the thirteenth century until 1327.
Among other topics, the book deals with the policy of the Crown towards moneylending and commerce in the Jewish community; the community's control over its members' economic activities; the Jews' loans to the king, and their taxes and subsidies to the Crown.
The book offers information on the Jews' contribution to economic history, that has been very little studied so far. It will be of interest to economic...

This volume brings together a rich interdisciplinary selection of some of the best and most up-to-date research in the field of Sephardic Studies by scholars from all over the world. Covering both pre-Expulsion Iberia and the far flung Sephardi diaspora, the essays deal with social and intellectual history, literature, folklore, linguistics, musicology and art history. The volume concludes with an important discussion on education and the future of Sephardic Studies as a field. Most of the contributions in this volume are in English, and a few in French and Spanish.

This exploration of the phenomenon of angelic vice regency in Late Antiquity compares figures from Judaism, Mandaeism, and Gnosticism. The first part of the book is devoted to the question of mediation in Late Antiquity and to the role of exegesis in the formation of vice regent myths. The second part of the book examines the Jewish figures Metatron and Akatriel, the Mandaean figure Abathur, and the Gnostic figure Sabaoth. After a final chapter on the types of communities which may have produced these myths, the volume concludes with appendices which briefly examine Christian, Muslim, and...

This study fills a major gap in the history of medicine, namely the history of medieval Hebrew medicine, in particular of Jewish women's medicine. A general introduction to the history of medieval Jewish medicine, its origins in Muslim countries, the main Arabic and Judeo-Arabic texts, and the renaissance of Hebrew as a language of science in the 12th-15th centuries is followed by a survey and analysis of the 15 extant medieval Jewish gynaecological texts (including translations from Greek, Latin and Arabic as well as original Hebrew treatises) and a comparison of the particular...

This work provides a vivid picture of the dichotomy between the ideology preached by the radical circle of the Brith Shalom Society and the nationalism of early twentieth-century Palestine. Many considered the Brith Shalom Society representative of the spiritual trend of Zionism.
This important book examines the aspirations and cultural sources of these men from Central Europe who met in Palestine as members of the Brith Shalom Society during the first half of the twentieth century, in the context of the political reality of a pre-independent Palestine and the new state of Israel.
The...