Despite considerable research on the Jewish diaspora in the Middle East and North Africa since 1800, there has until now been no comprehensive synthesis that illuminates both the differences and commonalities in Jewish experience across a range of countries and cultures. This lacuna in both Jewish and Middle Eastern studies is due partly to the fact that in general histories of the region, Jews have been omitted from the standard narrative. As part of the religious and ethnic mosaic that was traditional Islamic society, Jews were but one among numerous minorities and so have lacked a systematic treatment. Addressing this important oversight, this volume documents the variety and diversity of Jewish life in the region over the last two hundred years. It explains the changes that affected the communities under Islamic rule during its "golden age" and describes the processes of modernization that enabled the Jews to play a pivotal role in their respective countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first half of the book is thematic, covering topics ranging from languages to economic life and from religion and music to the world of women. The second half is a country-by-country survey that covers Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, the Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.

Incorporating published and archival material, this volume fills an important gap in the history of the Jewish experience during World War II, describing how the war affected Jews living along the southern rim of the Mediterranean and the Levant, from Morocco to Iran. Surviving the Nazi slaughter did not mean that Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa were unaffected by the war: there was constant anti-Semitic propaganda and general economic deprivation; communities were bombed; and Jews suffered because of the anti-Semitic Vichy regulations that left them unemployed, homeless, and subject to forced labor and deportation to labor camps. Nevertheless, they fought for the Allies and assisted the Americans and the British in the invasion of North Africa. These men and women were community leaders and average people who, despite their dire economic circumstances, worked with the refugees attempting to escape the Nazis via North Africa, Turkey, or Iran and connected with international aid agencies during and after the war. By 1945, no Jewish community had been left untouched, and many were financially decimated, a situation that would have serious repercussions on the future of Jews in the region. Covering the entire Middle East and North Africa region, this book on World War II is a key resource for students, scholars, and general readers interested in Jewish history, World War II, and Middle East history.

This book traces the history of conflict and contact between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Ottoman Middle East prior to 1914.

A history of the French schools that pioneered female education in Ottoman Iraq’s Jewish communities. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), a Paris-based Jewish organization, founded dozens of primary schools throughout the Middle East. Many were the first formal educational institutions for local Jewish children. In addition to providing secular education, the schools attempted to change local customs and “regenerate” or “uplift” communities. Educational Oases in the Desert explores the largely forgotten history of the AIU’s schools for girls in Ottoman Iraq. Drawing on extensive archival research, Jonathan Sciarcon argues that teachers viewed female education through a gendered lens linked to their understanding of an ideal modern society. As the primary educators of children, women were seen as society’s key agents of socialization. The AIU thus concluded that its boys’ schools would never succeed in creating polished, westernized men so long as women remained uneducated, leading to the creation of schools for girls. Sciarcon shows how headmistresses acted not just as educators but also as models of modernity, trying to impart new moral and aesthetic norms onto students.

The momentous events of modern Jewish history have led to a proliferation of books and articles on Jewish life over the last 350 years. Placing modern Jewish history into both universal and local contexts, this selected, annotated bibliography organizes and categorizes the best of this vast array of written material. The authors have included all English-language books of major importance on world Jewry and on individual Jewish communities, plus books most readily available to researchers and readers, and a select number of pamphlets and articles. The resulting bibliography is also a guide to recent Jewish historiography and research methods.

This innovative volume offers fresh perspectives and directions on the intersection of Hispanic and Jewish studies. It shows how 'Jewishness' has played a crucial role in Spanish political, social, and cultural developments in the modern era, exploring the effects of the multiple material and symbolic absences of Jews and Judaism from modern Spanish society. The book considers the haunting presence that this absence has entailed. Contributors analyze the different and contradictory ways in which Spain as a nation has tried to come to terms with its Jewish memory and with Jews from the nineteenth century to the present: José Amador de los Ríos’ efforts to incorporate 'Jewishness' into the canon of Spanish national literature and history; the emergence in the mid-nineteenth century of the figure of the Jewish conspirator who seeks to foment revolutionary unrest in novels from Spain, Italy and France; the development of philosephardism and its interconnections with anti-Semitism, Spanish fascism and colonial ambitions at the turn of the twentieth century; the instrumentalization of the Spanish Jewish past during the Second Republic; the role of philosemitism in the development of Catalan nationalism; and the relationship between the memory of Sepharad and Holocaust commemoration in contemporary Spain. This book is based on a special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Muslim-Jewish Relations invites readers to deepen their understanding of the historical, social, cultural, and political themes that impact modern-day perceptions of interfaith dialogue. The volume is designed to illuminate positive encounters between Muslims and Jews, as well as points of conflict, within a historical framework. Among other goals, the volume seeks to correct common misperceptions about the history of Muslim-Jewish relations by complicating familiar political narratives to include dynamics such as the cross-influence of literary and intellectual traditions. Reflecting unique and original collaborations between internationally-renowned contributors, the book is intended to spark further collaborative and constructive conversation and scholarship in the academy and beyond.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean brings together the fascinating personal stories of Jewish writers, scholars, and intellectuals who came of age in lands where Islam was the dominant religion and everyday life was infused with the politics of the French imperial project. Prompted by novelist Leïla Sebbar to reflect on their childhoods, these writers offer literary portraits that gesture to a universal condition while also shedding light on the exceptional nature of certain experiences. The childhoods captured here are undeniably Jewish, but they are also Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Turkish; each essay thus testifies to the multicultural, multilingual, and multi-faith community into which its author was born. The present translation makes this unique collection available to an English-speaking public for the first time. The original version, published in French in 2012, was awarded the Prix Haïm Zafrani, a prize given by the Elie Wiesel Institute of Jewish Studies to a literary project that valorizes Jewish civilization in the Muslim world.

Moroccan Jews can trace their heritage in Morocco back 2000 years. In French Protectorate Morocco (1912-56) there was a community of over 200,000 Jews, but today only a small minority remains. This book writes Morocco's rich Jewish heritage back into the protectorate period. The book explains why, in the years leading to independence, the country came to construct a national identity that centered on the Arab-Islamic notions of its past and present at the expense of its Jewish history and community. The book provides analysis of the competing nationalist narratives that played such a large part in the making of Morocco's identity at this time: French cultural-linguistic assimilation, Political Zionism, and Moroccan nationalism. It then explains why the small Jewish community now living in Morocco has become a source of national pride. At the heart of the book are the interviews with Moroccan Jews who lived during the French Protectorate, remain in Morocco, and who can reflect personally on everyday Jewish life during this era. Combing the analysis of the interviews, archived periodicals, colonial documents and the existing literature on Jews in Morocco, Kristin Hissong's book illuminates the reality of this multi-ethnic nation-state and the vital role memory plays in its identity.

Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East provides a window for readers of English around the world into hitherto almost inaccessible halakhic and ideational writings expressing major aspects of the cultural intellectual creativity of Sephardic-Oriental rabbis in modern times. The text has three sections: Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, and each section discusses a range of original sources that reflect and represent the creativity of major rabbinic figures in these countries. The contents of the writings of these Sephardic rabbis challenge many commonly held views regarding Judaism's responses to modern challenges. By bringing an additional, non-Western voice into the intellectual arena, this book enriches the field of contemporary discussions regarding the present and future of Judaism. In addition, it focuses attention on the fact that not only was Judaism a Middle Eastern phenomenon for most of its existence but that also in recent centuries important and interesting aspects of Judaism developed in the Middle East. Both Jews and non-Jews will be enriched and challenged by this non-Eurocentric view of modern Judaic creativity.