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 The volume is based on a study of hundreds of yet unpublished legal texts and documentary material.

The lively essays collected here explore colonial history, culture, and thought as it intersects with Jewish studies. Connecting the Jewish experience with colonialism to mobility and exchange, diaspora, internationalism, racial discrimination, and Zionism, the volume presents the work of Jewish historians who recognize the challenge that colonialism brings to their work and sheds light on the diverse topics that reflect the myriad ways that Jews engaged with empire in modern times. Taken together, these essays reveal the interpretive power of the "Imperial Turn" and present a rethinking of the history of Jews in colonial societies in light of postcolonial critiques and destabilized categories of analysis. A provocative discussion forum about Zionism as colonialism is also included.

The distinguished historian of the Jewish people, Howard M. Sachar, gives us a comprehensive and enthralling chronicle of the achievements and traumas of the Jews over the last four hundred years. Tracking their fate from Western Europe’s age of mercantilism in the seventeenth century to the post-Soviet and post-imperialist Islamic upheavals of the twenty-first century, Sachar applies his renowned narrative skill to the central role of the Jews in many of the most impressive achievements of modern civilization: whether in the rise of economic capitalism or of political socialism; in the discoveries of theoretical physics or applied medicine; in “higher” literary criticism or mass communication and popular entertainment. As his account unfolds and moves from epoch to epoch, from continent to continent, from Europe to the Americas and the Middle East, Sachar evaluates communities that, until lately, have been underestimated in the perspective of Jewish and world history—among them, Jews of Sephardic provenance, of the Moslem regions, and of Africa. By the same token, Sachar applies a master’s hand in describing and deciphering the Jews’ unique exposure and functional usefulness to totalitarian movements—fascist, Nazi, and Stalinist. In the process, he shines an unsparing light on the often widely dissimilar behavior of separate European peoples, and on separate Jewish populations, during the Holocaust. A distillation of the author’s lifetime of scholarly research and teaching experience, A History of the Jews in the Modern World provides a source of unsurpassed intellectual richness for university students and educated laypersons alike.

This book examines new and fascinating archive material on the Jews of Yemen 1900-50. Oppressed by Islamic law and by new political resentments they were persuaded by push and pull factors to leave for Palestine/Israel. Three decades of setbacks culminated in their emigration to Israel 'on wings of eagles' in Operation Magic Carpet.

Based on the Mason Lectures delivered at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the winter of 1995, the ten essays in this volume demonstrate the function and dynamic effect Jewish mythologies in social, political, and psychological life. Eli Yassif's introduction illustrates the complex relationship between myth and ritual in modern Jewish culture. In a separate essay, he focuses on the ancient Jewish tale of the Golem, a myth that presents an exemplary test case for the exploration of cultural continuity. Using the testimonies of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe to Britain and the battle on the plain of Latrun in the Israeli War of Independence, David Cesarani and Anita Shapira demonstrate that the process of creating myth is related in one way or another to attempts by specific social and ethnic groups to shape their collective memory. Along these lines, Milton Shain and Sally Frankental interrogate the view that during the apartheid period in South African history, South African Jewry operated on a higher moral plane than most other white South Africans. And while Nurith Gertz examines the male superhero that dominated the early national Zionist cinema and reflected the center of gravity in the Zionist myth, Dan Urian analyzes two Israeli plays produced in the 1990s that examine the myth of the biblical Sarah, rewritten from a feminist perspective. Other essays examine widely held cultural beliefs of contemporary Western Jewry. Jonathan Webber questions whether memory is an essentially Jewish value and remembrance a Jewish moral duty. Tudor Parfitt explores Western and Israeli perceptions of the Yemenite Jews, and Sylvie Anne Goldberg, in examining the evolving role of the chevrah kaddisha in Prague, discusses changes in perceptions of communal institutions and traditional and modern Jewish attitudes with regard to death. Finally, Matthew Olshan offers an analysis of Kafka's animal fables as parables for the Jewish response to tradition.

This volume deals with one of the most peculiar Jewish communities in the Diaspora, the Jews of Yemen. Their history began a long time before the advent in 622 AD of Islam. Their political and social highpoint came during the last generations of the Judaized Yemenite Kingdom of Himyar (c. 400-525). This book contains 16 studies, encompassing various aspects of Jewish existence in Yemen as a dhimmi (protected) religious minority under Islam: history, social and cultural relations with the Muslim environment, culture, literature and language. Yemenite Jewish traditions are highly esteemed in the modern spiritual and artistic life of the Jewish people both in the State of Israel and in the Diaspora. All the studies in this volume (except one written in collaboration with 'Offer Livneh) are the work of one of the leading scholars of Yemenite Jewry.

In 1869, Hayyim Habshush, a Yemeni Jew, accompanied the European orientalist Joseph Halévy on his archaeological tour of Yemen. Twenty years later, Habshush wrote A Vision of Yemen, a memoir of their travels, that provides a vivid account of daily life, religion, and politics. More than a simple travelogue, it is a work of trickster-tales, thick anthropological descriptions, and reflections on Jewish–Muslim relations. At its heart lies the fractious and intimate relationship between the Yemeni coppersmith and the "enlightened" European scholar and the collision between the cultures each represents. The book thus offers a powerful indigenous response to European Orientalism. This edition is the first English translation of Habshush's writings from the original Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew and includes an accessible historical introduction to the work. The translation maintains Habshush's gripping style and rich portrayal of the diverse communities and cultures of Yemen, offering a potent mixture of artful storytelling and cultural criticism, suffused with humor and empathy. Habshush writes about the daily lives of men and women, rich and poor, Jewish and Muslim, during a turbulent period of war and both Ottoman and European imperialist encroachment. With this translation, Alan Verskin recovers the lost voice of a man passionately committed to his land and people.

May 1948: a dramatically reborn Israel put out the call for Jews to return to their new homeland. Between 1948 and 1951, over one million Jews from disparate nations across the world converge upon Israel, doubling its population and creating a unique, exhilarating socio-cultural quilt. But ramifications upon Israeli society and nationhood would be profound and long lasting. The new immigrants who were granted citizenship and the right to vote upon their arrival in Israel had an immense impact on Israeli politics. The relationship that developed then between immigrants and veteran Israelis left their mark on society and culture, creating fault lines that have deepened over the years: the ethnic rift between Jews of European extraction and those from Islamic countries, the rupture between religious and secular Jews, and the socio-economic polarization that ensued from these rifts. Most stunningly, Dvora Hacohen uncovers revelations about the inconsistency between grand ambitions to activate an "ingathering of exiles" and the nation's ability to handle such an event. She argues that the tidal wave of immigration in 1948 was not spontaneous as supposed, and Jewish agency executives and government officials favored gradual selective immigration over the open door policy that prevailed. She also explores the fate of Palestinian Jews and the roles played by various internal and global factions and adverse Arab neighbors.

In Jewish-Muslim Relations and Migration from Yemen to Palestine in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Ari Ariel analyzes the impact of local, regional and international events on ethnic and religious relations in Yemen and Yemeni Jewish migration patterns. Previous research has dealt with single episodes of Yemenite migration during limited spans of time. Ariel, instead, provides a broad sweep of the migratory flows over the 70 year time span during which most of Yemen’s Jews moved to Palestine and then Israel. He successfully avoids the polemic nature of much of the literature on Middle Eastern Jewry by focusing on the social, economic and political transformations that provoked and then sustained this migration.

In Traditional Society in Transition: The Yemeni Jewish Experience Bat-Zion Eraqi Klorman offers an account of the unique circumstances of Yemeni Jewish existence in the wake of major changes since the second half of the nineteenth century. It follows this community's transition from a traditional patriarchal society to a group adjusting to the challenges of a modern society. Unlike the perception of the Yemeni Jews as receptive to modernity only following immigration to Palestine and Israel, Eraqi Klorman convincingly shows that some modern ideas played a role in their lives while in Yemen. Once in Palestine, they appear here as adjusting to the new conditions by striving to participate in the Zionist enterprise, consenting to secular education, transforming family practices and the status of women. “The book is an important contribution to the study of Yemeni Jews in Yemen and abroad as well as for Jewish-Muslim relations, relations between Yemeni Jews and other Jews, and gender studies...Many of these issues have not been previously studied, and the use of private archives and interviews greatly increases the value of this study." -Rachel Simon, Princeton University. Princeton, NJ, Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews, November/December 2014.