A Sephardi Sea

A Sephardi Sea tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories of and feelings for a Sephardi Jewish world in North Africa and Egypt that is lost forever but whose echoes many still hear. Surely, some of these Jewish migrants were already familiar with their new countries of residence because of colonial ties or of Zionism, and often spoke the language. Why, then, was the act of leaving so painful and why, more than fifty years afterward, is its memory still so tangible? Dario Miccoli examines how the memories of a bygone Sephardi Mediterranean world became preserved in three national contexts—Israel, France, and Italy—where the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa and their descendants migrated and nowadays live. A Sephardi Sea explores how practices of memory- and heritage-making—from the writing of novels and memoirs to the opening of museums and memorials, the activities of heritage associations and state-led celebrations—has filled an identity vacuum in the three countries and helps the Jews from North Africa and Egypt to define their Jewishness in Europe and Israel today but also reinforce their connection to a vanished world now remembered with nostalgia, affection, and sadness.

This collection explores nautical themes in a variety of literary contexts from multiple cultures. Including contributors from five continents, it emphasizes the universality of human experience with the sea, while focusing on literature that spans a millennium, stretching from medieval romance to the twenty-first-century reimagining of classic literary texts in film. These fresh essays engage in discussions of literature from the UK, the USA, India, Chile, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Colombia, and the Caribbean. Scholars of maritime literature will find the collection interesting for the unique insights it offers on individual literary texts, while general readers will be intrigued by the interconnectedness that it reveals in human experience with the sea.

Sephardim are the descendants of the Jews expelled from the lands of the Iberian Peninsula in the years 1492-1498, who settled down in the Mediterranean basin. The identifying sign of the Sephardim has been, until the middle of the twentieth century, the language known as Jewish-Spanish. The history, identity and memory of the Sephardim in their Mediterranean dispersal are analysed by the author with a special reference to the Sephardi community of Jerusalem and to the cultural and social changes that characterized the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. However, because of the crucial changes related to modernization and the political circumstances that came into being at the turn of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the Sephardim lost their unique identity.

This study investigates the nexus between giving, belonging and Jewishness in South Africa. Charitable interactions are as much manifestations of inequalities as an expression of the giving individual’s desire to alleviate them. Structuring aspects like class, race, economics, and post-apartheid politics are at the basis of this study. At the same time, though, it is individual agency reproducing inequalities and making sense of the ambiguity of the charitable interaction. In the context of the Jewish community in South Africa this analysis shows how the community’s organisations, practices and concepts are connected to charitable giving. The author carved out three dimensions, which are entangled, reinforced, or at times contradict each other: Belonging, diaspora and charitable giving. Along with shared values and practices it relates to, volunteering or charitable giving connects one individual to a group, while possibly excluding another from it. Expressing belonging to the Jewish collective as a diaspora community, relates individuals or collectives to the triadic relationship between local diaspora group, host society and homeland and other local communities of the same diaspora.

First Published in 1995. Throughout the nineteenth century the entire structure of the Ashkenazi world crumbled. What remains of Ashkenazi Jewry today is split into irreconcilable religious camps on the one hand, and a large body of secularized Jews of greater or lesser ethnicity on the other. The Sephardi and Oriental Jews, who form the other great branch of world Jewry, had a very different encounter with the forces of modernity. This book examines some of their responses to its challenges. The Sephardi religious leaders, who had been historically more open to general culture, reacted with neither the anti-traditionalism of Reform Judaism nor the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox 's uncompromising rejection of everything new. Their response was rather one of active and creative halakhic engagement coupled with a tolerant attitude toward the growing secularized elements of their communities. Much has been written on the social, economic, and political transformation of Sephardi and Oriental Jewry in the modem era. However, this is the first book in English devoted to the religious changes taking place in this important segment of Jewry which now constitutes the majority of Jews in the Jewish state.

Studies in the Text of the Old Testament offers to the English-speaking world the combined introductions to the first three volumes of Dominique Barthélemy’s Critique Textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. CTAT was the culmination of the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project, launched by the United Bible Societies in 1969 and carried out by an international team of Old Testament textual critics under the leadership of Eugene Nida. As Emanuel Tov has stated, these introductions form “an almost complete introduction” to the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. They hold an important place in Old Testament textual criticism and can stand alone, apart from the detailed discussions of the textual problems found in the volumes. Part one surveys the history of OT textual criticism “from its origins to J. D. Michaelis” and presents the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project and its goals. Part two describes in detail the background of the modern versions that the HOTTP took into account in its work. Part three, the most extensive section, discusses the textual witnesses—the different forms of the Hebrew text and the contribution of the ancient versions. As his concluding program for a critical edition makes clear, the groundbreaking work of Barthélemy and the HOTTP served as the basis for the new Biblia Hebraica Quinta, which began publication in 2004. UBS undertook the HOTTP to offer Bible translators help in applying the results of textual criticism to their work, but there is no doubt that many others will benefit from this work, as well as the other volumes in the series “Textual Criticism and the Translator.”