Travail In An Arab Land

A first-hand account of Romanelli's adventures during the four years he was stranded in Sharifan Morocco between 1787 and 1790. His story makes engaging reading and has been recognized as a significant primary source on Morocco and Moroccan Jews.

Moses Elias Levy (1782–1854) was one of the antebellum South’s most influential and interesting Jewish citizens. Only recently, however, have historians begun to appreciate his role as a social activist. C. S. Monaco discovered Levy’s Plan for the Abolition of Slavery in the late 1990s, and now, in the first full-scale biography of Levy, Monaco completes the picture of his life and work. Long known only as the father of David L. Yulee, the first Jew elected to the U.S. Senate, Levy appears here in all his many, sometimes contradictory roles: abolitionist and slave owner, utopian colonizer and former arms-dealer, religious reformer and biblical conservative. Each aspect of Levy’s life and character comes into sharp relief as Monaco follows him from his affluent upbringing in a Sephardic Jewish household in Morocco—where his father was a courtier to the sultan—through his career as a successful merchant shipper, to his radical reform activities in Florida. With his many residences abroad—in Morocco, Gibraltar, Danish Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Curacao, England—Levy virtually epitomized the Atlantic world, and Monaco escorts readers from country to country, considering Levy’s accomplishments in each. The sole Jewish voice during the British abolitionist crusade, Levy was so extraordinary in his activism in London that some Protestants believed he heralded the millennium. In his search for equilibrium between Enlightenment thinking and pre-modern religion, Levy founded the United States’ first Jewish communitarian settlement in the wilds of the East Florida frontier. As one of the region’s largest landowners, he also reintroduced sugarcane as a viable crop, organized the first Florida development corporation, helped establish the earliest free public school, and served as the territory’s first education commissioner. In Moses Levy of Florida, C. S. Monaco offers a radical reappraisal of this complex and formerly underestimated figure, bringing to light for the first time the full and fascinating extent of his remarkable contributions to nineteenth-century America.

This richly illustrated volume is a historical and ethnographic study of one important aspect of Arab and Islamic material culture - clothing. While in part descriptive, its principal focus is on the evolution and transformations of modes of dress over the past 1400 years throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and for the Middle Ages, Islamic Spain. Arab clothing is treated as part of an Islamic vestimentary system and is discussed within the context of the social, religious, esthetic, and political trends of each age. In addition to the five historical chapters, three chapters are devoted to major themes of Arab costume history - the dress code for non-Muslims, the important socio-economic and political institution of luxury fabrics and garments of honor, and the most well-known and frequently misunderstood institution of veiling.

For Jews in every corner of the world, the Holy Land has always been central. But that conviction was put to the test in the eighteenth century when Jewish leaders in Palestine and their allies in Istanbul sent rabbinic emissaries on global fundraising missions. From the shores of the Mediterranean to the port cities of the Atlantic seaboard, from the Caribbean to India, these emmissaries solicited donations for the impoverished of Israel's homeland. Emissaries from the Holy Land explores how this eighteenth century philanthropic network was organized and how relations of trust and solidarity were built across vast geographic differences. It looks at how the emissaries and their supporters understood the relationship between the Jewish Diaspora and the Land of Israel, and it shows how cross-cultural encounters and competing claims for financial support involving Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and North African emissaries and communities contributed to the transformation of Jewish identity from 1720 to 1820. Solidarity among Jews and the centrality of the Holy Land in traditional Jewish society are often taken for granted. Lehmann challenges such assumptions and provides a critical, historical perspective on the question of how Jews in the early modern period encountered one another, how they related to Jerusalem and the land of Israel, and how the early modern period changed perceptions of Jewish unity and solidarity. Based on original archival research as well as multiple little-known and rarely studied sources, Emissaries from the Holy Land offers a fresh perspective on early modern Jewish society and culture and the relationship between the Jewish Diaspora and Palestine in the eighteenth century.

Haskalah and Beyond deals with the Hebrew Haskalah (Enlightenment) — the literary, cultural, and social movement in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. It represents the emergence of modernism and perhaps the budding of some aspects of secularism in Jewish society, following the efforts of the Hebrew and Jewish enlighteners to introduce changes into Jewish culture and Jewish life, and to revitalize the Hebrew language and literature. The author classifies these activities as a 'cultural revolution.' In effect, the Haskalah was a counter-culture intended to modify or replace some of the contemporary rabbinic cultural framework, institutions, and practices and adopt them for its own envisioned 'Judaism of the Haskalah.' The pioneering work of the 'founding fathers' of the early Haskalah had greatly impacted the later developments of the Haskalah in the 19th century. Its reception in that century is studied as is the reception of one of the major figures of the early Haskalah, Isaac Euchel, and of one of the important German Enlightenment poets and philosophers, Johann Gottfried Herder, in the 19th-century Haskalah. The study of reception continues on the language of the sublime and the poetic imagery used in Haskalah, melitzah, as well as on the three major journals of Haskalah as instruments of change and of disseminating the Haskalah ideology. Finally, the aftermath of the Haskalah is addressed.

This volume of essays presents a compelling and comprehensive analysis of the intriguing issue of the gift of the land of Israel and the fate of the Canaanites as presented in diverse biblical sources. Jewish thought has long grappled with the moral and theological implications and challenges of this issue. Innovative interpretive strategies and philosophical reflections were offered, modified, and sometimes rejected over the centuries. Leading contemporary scholars follow these threads of interpretation offered by Jewish thinkersfrom antiquity to modern times.