Providing an unparalleled overview of Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewish communities in world history, this authoritative, stimulating work, superbly edited and clearly written, also suggests new approaches to assessing their cultural practices and relation to the wider societies of which they formed, and in many cases continue to form, a part. Dale F. Eickelman, Dartmouth College Historians, anthropologists, and linguists from Israel, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States provide a comprehensive picture of Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries in modern times. The volume touches on such themes as the impact of modernization upon Sephardi communities in North Africa, the Balkans, and other areas of the Ottoman Empire; responses to cultural change in Sephardi communities of Iraq and North Africa; issues relating to contemporary Jewish languages and literatures; and conceptions of ethnicity and gender in Sephardi communities.

Farewell, Babylon

Naim Kattan

HB £12.99

Farewell, Babylon is a story of roots and exile, of a teenager's thirst for life and experience, an engaging record of a youth's artistics development. It is a memoir of a lost world, Baghdad, the magical city in which Iraq's Kurds, Bedouins, Muslims, Jews and Christian lived togehther in a rought sort of harmony. The Iraqi Jewish community dates back 2,500 years, to Biblical Babylon, but by Kattan's childhood in the 1940s anti-semitism was on the rise and Nazi-symapthisers were threatening Baghdad's Jewish community. Kattan takes the readers into the heart of Baghdad's then-teeming Jewish community, his Baghdad is a hot, quarrelsome city beset in equal parts by fear and desire. Its politics are frantic, its street life a mystery. 

The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot: Marranos and Other Secret Jews

Trudi Alexy

PB £10.99

These thrilling and harrowing first-hand stories of fellow-survivors and their Spanish rescuers vividly reveal the unknown history of the Jews who found asylum from Hitler's Final Solution under Franco's Fascist regime. Originally published in hard cover by Simon and Schuster and by Harper/San Francisco in paperback, it was acclaimed as one of The Progressive's "BEST READING OF 1993" and won an award from the Jewish Book Council in the category of Memoir and Biography.

A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe

Autobiography of Gabriel Arie, ed. Esther Benbassa and Aaron Rodrigue

PB £21.50

Gabriel Arie's writings provide a special perspective on the political, economic, and cultural changes undergone by the Eastern Sephardi community in the decades before its dissolution, in regions where it had been constituted since the expulsion from Spain in 1492. For his entire life, Arie -- teacher, historian, community leader, and businessman -- was caught between East and West. Born in a small provincial town in Ottoman Bulgaria in 1863, he witnessed the disappearance of a social and political order that had lasted for centuries and its replacement by new ideas and new ways of life, which would irreversibly transform Jewish existence. A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe publishes in full the autobiography (covering the years 1863-1906) and journal (1906-39) of Gabriel Arie, along with selections from his letters to the Alliance Israelite Universelle. An introduction analyzes his life and examines the general and the Jewish contexts of the Levant at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.

Hebrew Poems from Spain

ed. David Goldstein

PB £16.45

The years 950-1200 are often called the Golden Age of the Jews in Spain. During this period, the Jews reached a peak of achievement in all aspects of their life-political, spiritual and cultural. They produced great works of literature and philosophy; their poetry represents a peak of literary achievement unparalleled in Hebrew until the twentieth century. The poets of the Golden Age forged the language of the Hebrew Bible into a magnificent instrument for the expression of every facet of their experience--love and friendship, war and exile, philosophy and prayer. Their poems reflect their overarching consciousness of Israel's relationship with God and their deep concern with the fate of the Jewish people in exile. Not until modern times did the Hebrew poetic genius flourish again with such freedom and with such intensity. This volume conveys in modern English something of the greatness of that literature while as far as possible preserving the poetic values and beauty of the Hebrew original. Brief notes on the work of each of the thirteen poets represented put the poems in their proper perspective and do much to elucidate their meaning.The poets included are Dunash Halevi ben Labrat, Joseph ibn Abithur, Isaac ibn Kalpon, Samuel Hanagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Isaac ibn Gi'at, Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Abraham ibn Ezra, Joseph ibn Zabara, Judah al-Harizi, Shem Tob ben Palquera, Todros ben Judah Abulafia.