Download or read book The Beauty of Sephardic Life written by Sam Bension Maimon and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Foundations of Sephardic Spirituality written by Rabbi Marc D. Angel, PhD and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2011-09-26 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who were the Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire? What lasting lessons does their spiritual life provide for future generations? “How did the Judeo-Spanish-speaking Jews of the Ottoman Empire manage to achieve spiritual triumph? To answer this question, we need to have a firm understanding of their historical experience.... We need to be aware of the dark, unpleasant elements in their environments; but we also need to see the spiritual, cultural light in their dwellings that imbued their lives with meaning and honor.” —from Chapter 1, “The Inner Life of the Sephardim” In this groundbreaking work, Rabbi Marc Angel explores the teachings, values, attitudes, and cultural patterns that characterized Judeo-Spanish life over the generations and how the Sephardim maintained a strong sense of pride and dignity, even when they lived in difficult political, economic, and social conditions. Along with presenting the historical framework and folklore of Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire, Rabbi Angel focuses on what you can learn from the Sephardic sages and from their folk wisdom that can help you live a stronger, deeper spiritual life.
Download or read book The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem written by Sarit Yishai-Levi and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Book Club category of the 2016 National Jewish Book Awards. The #1 International Best Seller, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem is a dazzling novel of mothers and daughters, stories told and untold, and the ties that bind four generations of women. Gabriela's mother Luna is the most beautiful woman in all of Jerusalem, though her famed beauty and charm seem to be reserved for everyone but her daughter. Ever since Gabriela can remember, she and Luna have struggled to connect. But when tragedy strikes, Gabriela senses there's more to her mother than painted nails and lips. Desperate to understand their relationship, Gabriela pieces together the stories of her family's previous generations—from Great-Grandmother Mercada the renowned healer, to Grandma Rosa who cleaned houses for the English, to Luna who had the nicest legs in Jerusalem. But as she uncovers shocking secrets, forbidden romances, and the family curse that links the women together, Gabriela must face a past and present far more complex than she ever imagined. Set against the Golden Age of Hollywood, the dark days of World War II, and the swinging '70s, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem follows generations of unforgettable women as they forge their own paths through times of dramatic change. With great humor and heart, Sarit Yishai-Levi has given us a powerful story of love and forgiveness—and the unexpected and enchanting places we find each.
Download or read book Jewish Questions written by Matt Goldish and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-21 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Jewish Questions, Matt Goldish introduces English readers to the history and culture of the Sephardic dispersion through an exploration of forty-three responsa--questions about Jewish law that Jews asked leading rabbis, and the rabbis' responses. The questions along with their rabbinical decisions examine all aspects of Jewish life, including business, family, religious issues, and relations between Jews and non-Jews. Taken together, the responsa constitute an extremely rich source of information about the everyday lives of Sephardic Jews. The book looks at questions asked between 1492--when the Jews were expelled from Spain--and 1750. Originating from all over the Sephardic world, the responsa discuss such diverse topics as the rules of conduct for Ottoman Jewish sea traders, the trials of an ex-husband accused of a robbery, and the rights of a sexually abused wife. Goldish provides a sizeable introduction to the history of the Sephardic diaspora and the nature of responsa literature, as well as a bibliography, historical background for each question, and short biographies of the rabbis involved. Including cases from well-known communities such as Venice, Istanbul, and Saloniki, and lesser-known Jewish enclaves such as Kastoria, Ragusa, and Nablus, Jewish Questions provides a sense of how Sephardic communities were organized, how Jews related to their neighbors, what problems threatened them and their families, and how they understood their relationship to God and the Jewish people.
Download or read book Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women written by Isaac Jack Lévy and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Ellii Kongas-Maranda Prize from the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society, 2003. Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women preserves the precious remnants of a rich culture on the verge of extinction while affirming women's pivotal role in the health of their communities. Centered around extensive interviews with elders of the Sephardic communities of the former Ottoman Empire, this volume illuminates a fascinating complex of preventive and curative rituals conducted by women at home--rituals that ensured the physical and spiritual well-being of the community and functioned as a vital counterpart to the public rites conducted by men in the synagogues. Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt take us into the homes and families of Sephardim in Turkey, Israel, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States to unravel the ancient practices of domestic healing: the network of blessings and curses tailored to every occasion of daily life; the beliefs and customs surrounding mal ojo (evil eye), espanto (fright), and echizo (witchcraft); and cures involving everything from herbs, oil, and sugar to the powerful mumia (mummy) made from dried bones of corpses. For the Sephardim, curing an illness required discovering its spiritual cause, which might be unintentional thought or speech, accident, or magical incantation. The healing rituals of domesticated medicine provided a way of making sense of illness and a way of shaping behavior to fit the narrow constraints of a tightly structured community. Tapping a rich and irreplaceable vein of oral testimony, Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women offers fascinating insight into a culture where profound spirituality permeated every aspect of daily life.
Download or read book Exploring Sephardic Customs and Traditions written by Marc Angel and published by KTAV Publishing House, Inc.. This book was released on 2000 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the centuries, Jewish communities throughout the world adopted customs that enhanced and deepened their religious observances. These customs, or minhagim, became powerful elements in the religious consciousness of the Jewish people. It is important to recognize that minhagim are manifestations of a religious worldview, a philosophy of life. They are not merely quaint or picturesque practices, but expressions of a community's way of enhancing the religious experience. A valuable resource for Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike.
Download or read book Sephardic Jews in America written by Aviva Ben-Ur and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant number of Sephardic Jews, tracing their remote origins to Spain and Portugal, immigrated to the United States from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans from 1880 through the 1920s, joined by a smaller number of Mizrahi Jews arriving from Arab lands. Most Sephardim settled in New York, establishing the leading Judeo-Spanish community outside the Ottoman Empire. With their distinct languages, cultures, and rituals, Sephardim and Arab-speaking Mizrahim were not readily recognized as Jews by their Ashkenazic coreligionists. At the same time, they forged alliances outside Jewish circles with Hispanics and Arabs, with whom they shared significant cultural and linguistic ties. The failure among Ashkenazic Jews to recognize Sephardim and Mizrahim as fellow Jews continues today. More often than not, these Jewish communities are simply absent from portrayals of American Jewry. Drawing on primary sources such as the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) press, archival documents, and oral histories, Sephardic Jews in America offers the first book-length academic treatment of their history in the United States, from 1654 to the present, focusing on the age of mass immigration.
Download or read book Sephardi Lives written by Julia Cohen and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking documentary history contains over 150 primary sources originally written in 15 languages by or about Sephardi Jews—descendants of Jews who fled medieval Spain and Portugal settling in the western portions of the Ottoman Empire, including the Balkans, Anatolia, and Palestine. Reflecting Sephardi history in all its diversity, from the courtyard to the courthouse, spheres intimate, political, commercial, familial, and religious, these documents show life within these distinctive Jewish communities as well as between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Sephardi Lives offer readers an intimate view of how Sephardim experienced the major regional and world events of the modern era—natural disasters, violence and wars, the transition from empire to nation-states, and the Holocaust. This collection also provides a vivid exploration of the day-to-day lives of Sephardi women, men, boys, and girls in the Judeo-Spanish heartland of the Ottoman Balkans and Middle East, as well as the émigré centers Sephardim settled throughout the twentieth century, including North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The selections are of a vast range, including private letters from family collections, rabbinical writings, documents of state, memoirs and diaries, court records, selections from the popular press, and scholarship. In a single volume, Sephardi Lives preserves the cultural richness and historical complexity of a Sephardi world that is no more.
Download or read book Sephardi Jewry written by Esther Benbassa and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-04-13 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Modified and updated version of a book that first appeared in Paris in 1993 under the title Juifs des Balkans ... (Editions La Decouverte)"--Acknowledgments, p. [xi].
Download or read book Sephardic Genealogy written by Jeffrey S. Malka and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Drizzle of Honey written by David M. Gitlitz and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2000-09-25 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Iberian Jews were converted to Catholicism under duress during the Inquisition, many struggled to retain their Jewish identity in private while projecting Christian conformity in the public sphere. To root out these heretics, the courts of the Inquisition published checklists of koshering practices and "grilled" the servants, neighbors, and even the children of those suspected of practicing their religion at home. From these testimonies and other primary sources, Gitlitz & Davidson have drawn a fascinating, award-winning picture of this precarious sense of Jewish identity and have re-created these recipes, which combine Christian & Islamic traditions in cooking lamb, beef, fish, eggplant, chickpeas, and greens and use seasonings such as saffron, mace, ginger, and cinnamon. The recipes, and the accompanying stories of the people who created them, promise to delight the adventurous palate and give insights into the foundations of modern Sephardic cuisine.
Download or read book Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry written by Zion Zohar and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2005-06 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sephardic Jews have contributed some of the most important Jewish philosophers, poets, biblical commentators, Talmudic and Halachic scholars, and scientists, and have had a significant impact on the development of Jewish mysticism. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry brings together original work from the world's leading scholars to present a deep introductory overview of their history and culture over the past 1500 years.
Download or read book German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic written by John M. Efron and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as German Jews struggled for legal emancipation and social acceptance, they also embarked on a program of cultural renewal, two key dimensions of which were distancing themselves from their fellow Ashkenazim in Poland and giving a special place to the Sephardim of medieval Spain. Where they saw Ashkenazic Jewry as insular and backward, a result of Christian persecution, they depicted the Sephardim as worldly, morally and intellectually superior, and beautiful, products of the tolerant Muslim environment in which they lived. In this elegantly written book, John Efron looks in depth at the special allure Sephardic aesthetics held for German Jewry. Efron examines how German Jews idealized the sound of Sephardic Hebrew and the Sephardim's physical and moral beauty, and shows how the allure of the Sephardic found expression in neo-Moorish synagogue architecture, historical novels, and romanticized depictions of Sephardic history. He argues that the shapers of German-Jewish culture imagined medieval Iberian Jewry as an exemplary Jewish community, bound by tradition yet fully at home in the dominant culture of Muslim Spain. Efron argues that the myth of Sephardic superiority was actually an expression of withering self-critique by German Jews who, by seeking to transform Ashkenazic culture and win the acceptance of German society, hoped to enter their own golden age. Stimulating and provocative, this book demonstrates how the goal of this aesthetic self-refashioning was not assimilation but rather the creation of a new form of German-Jewish identity inspired by Sephardic beauty.
Download or read book Family Papers written by Sarah Abrevaya Stein and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the best books of 2019 by The Economist and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. A National Jewish Book Award finalist. "A superb and touching book about the frailty of ties that hold together places and people." --The New York Times Book Review An award-winning historian shares the true story of a frayed and diasporic Sephardic Jewish family preserved in thousands of letters 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. In Family Papers, the prizewinning Sephardic historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family’s correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe. They wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. They wrote because they were family. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers. With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys' letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Last Century of a Sephardic Community written by Mark Cohen and published by Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture. This book was released on 2003 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the history of the final century of the Jewish community of Monastir (now Bitola) in Macedonia, which originated in the Ottoman Empire and ended its days under occupation by Nazi-allied Bulgaria. Ch. 9 (pp. 169-189), "The Holocaust", recounts the nazification of policies toward the Jews in Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia, where Nuremberg-like laws and ghettoization were introduced, followed by Aryanization of businesses and robbery by taxation. Registration of all Jewish adults in Bulgaria facilitated deportation which, due to protests by prominent Bulgarian non-Jews, was limited to stateless residents of Bulgarian-occupied territories. Almost all of Monastir's Jews were deported to Treblinka, where 3,276 of them were gassed. The small number who escaped deportation were spared as doctors or foreign nationals. Some Jews managed to flee and join partisan groups. Pp. 203-250 contain a list of names (with addresses, ages, and occupations) of the Jews from Monastir who were killed in Treblinka.
Download or read book A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica written by Aron Rodrigue and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-11 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents for the first time the complete text of the earliest known Ladino-language memoir, transliterated from the original script, translated into English, and introduced and explicated by the editors. The memoirist, Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi (1820–1903), wrote about Ottoman Jews' daily life at a time when the finely wrought fabric of Ottoman society was just beginning to unravel. His vivid portrayal of life in Salonica, a major port in the Ottoman Levant with a majority Jewish population, thus provides a unique window into a way of life before it disappeared as a result of profound political and social changes and the World Wars. Sa'adi was a prominent journalist and publisher, one of the most significant creators of modern Sephardic print culture. He was also a rebel who accused the Jewish leadership of Salonica of being corrupt, abusive, and fanatical; that leadership, in turn, excommunicated him from the Jewish community. The experience of excommunication pervades Sa'adi's memoir, which documents a world that its author was himself actively involved in changing.
Download or read book The Familiarity of Strangers written by Francesca Trivellato and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a new approach to the study of cross-cultural trade, this book blends archival research with historical narrative and economic analysis to understand how the Sephardic Jews of Livorno, Tuscany, traded in regions near and far in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Francesca Trivellato tests assumptions about ethnic and religious trading diasporas and networks of exchange and trust. Her extensive research in international archives--including a vast cache of merchants' letters written between 1704 and 1746--reveals a more nuanced view of the business relations between Jews and non-Jews across the Mediterranean, Atlantic Europe, and the Indian Ocean than ever before. The book argues that cross-cultural trade was predicated on and generated familiarity among strangers, but could coexist easily with religious prejudice. It analyzes instances in which business cooperation among coreligionists and between strangers relied on language, customary norms, and social networks more than the progressive rise of state and legal institutions.
