Here are 100 books that The Jews of Ottoman Izmir fans have personally recommended if you like
The Jews of Ottoman Izmir.
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I am a history professor who is drawn to history out of a love of recovering and making accessible otherwise forgotten voices and stories of the past. I’m especially interested in relationships between Jews and Muslims and how they’ve dealt with minorityhood, displacement, colonialism, and modernization. I’ve written four books, two focusing on Muslims and two on Jews, as well as numerous articles. Among my greatest pleasures as a scholar is seeing my readers begin with an interest in the stories of one religious group (either Muslims or Jews) and then become so curious about the drama, joy, and conflicts of the era that they become interested in the stories of the other as well.
A true academic page-turner, Family Papers is an intimate, intergenerational portrait of an Ottoman Jewish family from Salonica, a city that a young David Ben Gurion once dubbed “the most Jewish city on earth.” Sara Abrevaya Stein describes their transformation as they are buffeted by the events of the twentieth century that nearly extinguish them and see them dispersed and living under “Greek, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Indian and Brazilian rule.” Stein’s book is simultaneously a powerful lesson in the historian’s craft and a compelling introduction to an era that saw borders redrawn, nations invented, and Jewish identity reimagined.
For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am a history professor who is drawn to history out of a love of recovering and making accessible otherwise forgotten voices and stories of the past. I’m especially interested in relationships between Jews and Muslims and how they’ve dealt with minorityhood, displacement, colonialism, and modernization. I’ve written four books, two focusing on Muslims and two on Jews, as well as numerous articles. Among my greatest pleasures as a scholar is seeing my readers begin with an interest in the stories of one religious group (either Muslims or Jews) and then become so curious about the drama, joy, and conflicts of the era that they become interested in the stories of the other as well.
Drawing on memoirs, Jews and Islamic Law in Early 20th-Century Yemenprovides an engaging portrait of Yemeni Jews in the decades before their mass migration to Israel. Wagner chronicles the vast social and political challenges that Yemenis faced and how these impacted the intimate ties and sometimes formidable tensions between Jews and Muslims. His book is one of the most entertaining in Jewish studies. Like the memoir writers upon whom he draws, Wagner has an eye for a good story. We learn about Jews from all walks of life – upstanding rabbis and merchants, but also practitioners of magic, bootleggers, swindlers, and ruffians who are unafraid to brawl with Muslims. All of these stories are carefully analyzed and contextualized by Wagner, who is deeply learned in both Jewish and Islamic literature.
In early 20th-century Yemen, a sizable Jewish population was subject to sumptuary laws and social restrictions. Jews regularly came into contact with Islamic courts and Muslim jurists, by choice and by necessity, became embroiled in the most intimate details of their Jewish neighbors' lives. Mark S. Wagner draws on autobiographical writings to study the careers of three Jewish intermediaries who used their knowledge of Islamic law to manipulate the shari'a for their own benefit and for the good of their community. The result is a fresh perspective on the place of religious minorities in Muslim societies.
I am a history professor who is drawn to history out of a love of recovering and making accessible otherwise forgotten voices and stories of the past. I’m especially interested in relationships between Jews and Muslims and how they’ve dealt with minorityhood, displacement, colonialism, and modernization. I’ve written four books, two focusing on Muslims and two on Jews, as well as numerous articles. Among my greatest pleasures as a scholar is seeing my readers begin with an interest in the stories of one religious group (either Muslims or Jews) and then become so curious about the drama, joy, and conflicts of the era that they become interested in the stories of the other as well.
Alma Heckman’sThe Sultan’s Communistsuses the life stories of five prominent Moroccan Jewish communists to paint a complex picture of Jewish identity in twentieth-century Morocco. By documenting their struggles, Heckman details the often surprising ways in which Moroccan Jews negotiated their political environment and mediated between Moroccan patriotism, French colonialism, radical politics, Arab and Jewish identity, and Zionism. She also describes the ways in which the Moroccan sultan reimagined his relationship with the country’s Jews and the surprising history of how and why he ultimately came to embrace Jewish communists, who, to begin with, had been the subject of severe repression, including imprisonment and exile.
The Sultan's Communists uncovers the history of Jewish radical involvement in Morocco's national liberation project and examines how Moroccan Jews envisioned themselves participating as citizens in a newly-independent Morocco. Closely following the lives of five prominent Moroccan Jewish Communists (Leon Rene Sultan, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Abraham Serfaty, Simon Levy, and Sion Assidon), Alma Rachel Heckman describes how Moroccan Communist Jews fit within the story of mass Jewish exodus from Morocco in the 1950s and '60s, and how they survived oppressive post-independence authoritarian rule under the Moroccan monarchy to ultimately become heroic emblems of state-sponsored Muslim-Jewish tolerance.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I am a history professor who is drawn to history out of a love of recovering and making accessible otherwise forgotten voices and stories of the past. I’m especially interested in relationships between Jews and Muslims and how they’ve dealt with minorityhood, displacement, colonialism, and modernization. I’ve written four books, two focusing on Muslims and two on Jews, as well as numerous articles. Among my greatest pleasures as a scholar is seeing my readers begin with an interest in the stories of one religious group (either Muslims or Jews) and then become so curious about the drama, joy, and conflicts of the era that they become interested in the stories of the other as well.
Daniel Schroeter’s The Sultan’s Jewfocuses on the colorful life of Me'ir Macnin (d. 1835), an ambassador-at-large for two successive Moroccan sultans. Schroeter uses Macnin’s life to discuss three main topics: the relationship between Jews and Muslims in Morocco; the relationship between Moroccan Jews and the Sephardic world beyond; and Morocco’s relationship with Europe. Macnin’s ambassadorial stint in London, which eventually saw him become the president of the city’s main synagogue, also allows Schroeter to talk about the complexities of Jewish life in Britain and of Sephardic/Ashkenazic rivalries. The power of Schroeter’s work is in presenting a sophisticated political and socio-economic study through the lens of a gripping biography.
This pathbreaking study uses the extraordinary life of Meir Macnin, a prosperous Jewish merchant, as a lens for examining the Jewish community of Morocco and its relationship to the Sephardi world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Macnin, a member of one of the most prominent Jewish families in Marrakesh, became the most important merchant for the sultans who ruled Morocco, and was their chief intermediary between Morocco and Europe. He lived in London for about twenty years, and then shuttled between Morocco and England for fifteen years until his death in 1835.
I am a historian of the early English Atlantic who began studying New England but soon turned to the Atlantic more generally and the Caribbean in particular. All the aspects of 17th century Atlantic history that most intrigue me played out in the Caribbean. A fascinating and complicated place, the West Indies—although claimed by the Spanish as their exclusive purview—became diverse, witness to a variety of interactions. I’m particularly interested in works that allow us to see these changes in the period when the region was a global meeting place undergoing vast shifts. Much excellent scholarship explores the later era of sugar and slaves, of major imperial wars, of movements for independence and emancipation. What interests me most is the period before that, when the region was being transformed into a crucible of global transformation.
The Dutch were a force to be reckoned with in the early modern Caribbean, trading with everyone and insinuating themselves everywhere. Rupert’s book shows how the small desert island of Curaçao became a trading entrepôt and in particular how Dutch suppliers, enslaved Africans, and Spanish consumers became entangled. One amazing aspect of this history that Rupert uncovered is the fact that the Protestant Dutch on Curaçao allowed the slaves there to be catechized by Spanish priests from the mainland (today’s Venezuela), working across not only imperial boundaries but also those of religion.
When Curacao came under Dutch control in 1634, the small island off South America's northern coast was isolated and sleepy. The introduction of increased trade (both legal and illegal) led to a dramatic transformation, and Curacao emerged as a major hub within Caribbean and wider Atlantic networks. It would also become the commercial and administrative seat of the Dutch West India Company in the Americas.
The island's main city, Willemstad, had a non-Dutch majority composed largely of free blacks, urban slaves, and Sephardic Jews, who communicated across ethnic divisions in a new creole language called Papiamentu. For Linda M. Rupert,…
I was a stubborn teenager, and growing up, I vocally declared I would never set foot in Spain. The Spanish Empire was oppressive! It was full of religious fanatics! Yet… in college I took a course on Spain’s Golden Age, and for the first time I saw a different side of history, full of paradoxes and contradictions, Inquisitors and female mystics, bumbling priests and powerful nuns, decadence and poverty, emperors, tricksters, artists, pirates, scientists, and everything in between. Spain of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries was extraordinarily complex and far from one-dimensional. Now, years later, I have travelled to Spain over twenty times, lived in Pamplona, and I am a historian of early modern Spain at Penn State University.
No list of books about early modern Spain would be complete without something on the infamous Spanish Inquisition. Historians are well aware that Inquisition trials were complex, full of coercion and secrecy, but also sometimes appropriated by individuals for their own purposes. This is an extremely accessible introduction to the Spanish Inquisition, told through “autobiographies” of six prisoners, such as Islamic and Jewish converts, a prophet, and a transgender individual. The collection includes transcriptions of the actual trials, plus brief analyses that guide readers through religious, social, gender, and political themes.
On the first day of Francisco de San Antonio's trial before the Spanish Inquisition in Toledo in 1625, his interrogators asked him about his parentage. His real name, he stated, was Abram Ruben, and he had been born in Fez of Jewish parents. How then, Inquisitors wanted to know, had he become a Christian convert? Why had a Hebrew alphabet been found in his possession? And what was his business at the Court in Madrid? "He was asked," according to his dossier, "for the story of his life." His response, more than ten folios long, is one of the many…
A fake date, romance, and a conniving co-worker you'd love to shut down. Fun summer reading!
Liza loves helping people and creating designer shoes that feel as good as they look. Financially overextended and recovering from a divorce, her last-ditch opportunity to pitch her firm for investment falls flat. Then…
I am an aficionado of lost objects, lost time, afterlives; of writing which never “fitted” its era. Examples would be that of John Aubrey, Herman Melville, Fernando Pessoa, Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Hardwick, Ralph Ellison… the list goes on. I look for writing that has stood the test of time, not celebrated for the fame and bling of the moment. I look for the futile products of those who possessed genius, but who never earned enough readers until decades or centuries later, once they were released from the prison-house of genre. I look for the posthumous brilliance of language; the phosphoric glow of its offerings and of the buried treasures found therein.
Someone once said that novels were for light summer reading by bourgeois ladies. W.G. Sebald may have shared this opinion. The latter preferred letters, notes, fragments and diaries. Similarly, Elias Canetti, Bulgarian-born, of Sephardi ancestry, German-speaking and winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for literature, only ever wrote one novel. But his aphorisms, both long and short, are remarkable. He unearths forgotten writers, important ones that he had met, and he meditates on literary gossip and the remaining time in his life. Here’s an example: Klaus Mann’s last proposal: a mass suicide of writers (of the great names).
From one of the preeminent intellectual figures of the twentieth century, a highly personal testimonial of what Canetti himself chooses to term "notations," bits and pieces: notes, aphorisms, fragments. Taken together, they present an awesomely tender, guiltily gloomy meditation on death and aging.
" A mosaical portrait of an old body's mind determined to do its exercises and not lose a step--and fascinating for that." - Kirkus Reviews
I have led many seders using a traditional Haggadah. We would just recite the Haggadah at the seder and put the books away until Passover of the following year. And then one year, after Passover, I read the Haggadah in earnest. I realized that the traditional Haggadah didn’t tell the Passover story very well, that big chunks of the story were missing, that much of the time we had no understanding of what we were reading, and that, for literally decades, we had been doing a rote recitation with little meaning. It was because of that realization that I decided to write my Haggadah.
The Scholar’s Haggadah provides Ashkenazik, Sephardic, and Yemenite versions of the Haggadah. The versions for the three groups are shown together for easy comparison. And then more than half of the book is devoted to the examination of these differences. This is a complete Haggadah, but it’s not really suitable for a seder. It is, primarily, an academic work. But it’s fascinating. I did not know, until I read The Scholar’s Haggadah, that the rituals and texts for seders are different between these groups. I used this in my book by including beautiful and highly relevant Yemenite Haggadah text that none of my readers will have ever seen.
In this unprecedented masterwork, The Scholar's Haggadah: Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Oriental Versions, Heinrich Guggenheimer presents the first Haggadah to treat the texts of all Jewish groups on an equal footing and to use their divergences and concurrences as a key to the history of the text and an understanding of its development. The Seder (the ceremony of the Passover night) is one of the most universally celebrated rituals among Jewish families, for what it commemorates-Jewish freedom from bondage-is the glue that bonds all Jews together, traditional and modern, Ashkenazic and Sephardic alike. In the Book of Exodus the Jewish people…
I am a Scottish Ottoman historian who has lived half my life in Istanbul. Realising that the archive-based research of my PhD and after was read by too few, I wrote Osman's Dream, which has been translated into several languages and is read generally, as well as by students. I am fascinated by the 'where' of history, and follow historical routes the slow way, by foot or on horseback, to reach the sites where events occurred. That's the thing about living where the history you study happened: its traces and artefacts are all around, every day. I hope I have brought a sense of Ottoman place to Osman's Dream.
The workings of the state and the actions of state functionaries have long supplied the essential narrative informing our understanding of Ottoman history. This new volume by University of Chicago partner scholars is the first to give a platform to a wide spectrum of voices hailing from across the sultan's multilingual realm. Women and men, Muslims, Jews and Christians, prisoners and prostitutes, mystics and scholars, and a host of others, reach across the centuries to beguile us with their dreams and legends, anecdotes and jokes, biographies, and hagiographies. Although billed also as a textbook, as is customary these days in order to reach the widest readership, this book is for anyone who seeks affinity with the people of the early modern Ottoman world.
The Ottoman lands, which extended from modern Hungary to the Arabian peninsula, were home to a vast population with a rich variety of cultures. The Ottoman World is the first primary source reader to bring a wide and diverse set of voices across Ottoman society into the classroom. Written in many languages-not only Ottoman Turkish but also Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and Persian-these texts, here translated, span the extent of the early modern Ottoman empire, from the 1450s to 1700.
Instructors are supplied with narratives conveying the lived experiences of individuals through texts that highlight human variety and accelerate…
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse…
I am a Scottish Ottoman historian who has lived half my life in Istanbul. Realising that the archive-based research of my PhD and after was read by too few, I wrote Osman's Dream, which has been translated into several languages and is read generally, as well as by students. I am fascinated by the 'where' of history, and follow historical routes the slow way, by foot or on horseback, to reach the sites where events occurred. That's the thing about living where the history you study happened: its traces and artefacts are all around, every day. I hope I have brought a sense of Ottoman place to Osman's Dream.
This lavishly-illustrated volume takes a broad look at Ottoman culinary culture, holding up a mirror to the empire as reflected in the food and foodways of its people, from sultans to commoners. It offers a sweeping panorama of the evolution of culinary traditions that drew on the practices of the many societies inhabiting the Ottoman lands. The author lives in and travels widely in Turkey, encountering dishes that have ancient roots and finding food-related customs that survive until the present day. This is no book of recipes, but a compendium of richer food for thought.
The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest and longest-lasting empires in history. In this powerful and complex empire, the production and consumption of food reflected the lives of people from sultans to soldiers. Food bound people of different classes and background together, defining identity and serving symbolic functions in the social, religious, political and military spheres. Bountiful Empire: A History of Ottoman Cuisine examines the foodways of the Ottoman Empire as they changed and evolved over more than five centuries. The book starts with an overview of the earlier culinary traditions in which Ottoman cuisine was rooted, such as…
