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Cohen, “Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era”

This month, Oxford published Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial 9780199340408Citizenship in the Modern Era, by Julia Phillips Cohen (Vanderbilt University). The publisher’s description follows.

The Ottoman-Jewish story has long been told as a romance between Jews and the empire. The prevailing view is that Ottoman Jews were protected and privileged by imperial policies and in return offered their unflagging devotion to the imperial government over many centuries. In this book, Julia Phillips Cohen offers a corrective, arguing that Jewish leaders who promoted this vision were doing so in response to a series of reforms enacted by the nineteenth-century Ottoman state: the new equality they gained came with a new set of expectations. Ottoman subjects were suddenly to become imperial citizens, to consider their neighbors as brothers and their empire as a homeland.

Becoming Ottomans is the first book to tell the story of Jewish political integration into a modern Islamic empire. It begins with the process set in motion by the imperial state reforms known as the Tanzimat, which spanned the years 1839-1876 and legally emancipated the non-Muslims of the empire. Four decades later the situation was difficult to recognize. By the close of the nineteenth century, Ottoman Muslims and Jews alike regularly referred to Jews as a model community, or millet-as a group whose leaders and members knew how to serve their state and were deeply engaged in Ottoman politics. The struggles of different Jewish individuals and groups to define the public face of their communities is underscored in their responses to a series of important historical events.

Charting the dramatic reversal of Jews in the empire over a half-century, Becoming Ottomans offers new perspectives for understanding Jewish encounters with modernity and citizenship in a centralizing, modernizing Islamic state in an imperial, multi-faith landscape.

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Arkin, “Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France”

Next month, Stanford University will publish Rhinestones, Religion, and the 0804786003Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France, by Kimberly A. Arkin (Boston University). The publisher’s description follows.

During the course of her fieldwork in Paris, anthropologist Kimberly Arkin heard what she thought was a surprising admission. A French-born, North African Jewish (Sephardi) teenage girl laughingly told Arkin she was a racist. When asked what she meant by that, the girl responded, “It means I hate Arabs.”

This girl was not unique. She and other Sephardi youth in Paris insisted, again and again, that they were not French, though born in France, and that they could not imagine their Jewish future in France. Fueled by her candid and compelling informants, Arkin’s analysis delves into the connections and disjunctures between Jews and Muslims, religion and secular Republicanism, race and national community, and identity and culture in post-colonial France. Rhinestones argues that Sephardi youth, as both “Arabs” and “Jews,” fall between categories of class, religion, and culture. Many reacted to this liminality by going beyond religion and culture to categorize their Jewishness as race, distinguishing Sephardi Jews from “Arab” Muslims, regardless of similarities they shared, while linking them to “European” Jews (Ashkenazim), regardless of their differences. But while racializing Jewishness might have made Sephardi Frenchness possible, it produced the opposite result: it re-grounded national community in religion-as-race, thereby making pluri-religious community appear threatening. Rhinestones thus sheds light on the production of race, alienation, and intolerance within marginalized French and European populations.

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Wachtel, “The Faith of Remembrance”

The Faith of RemembranceThis past January, University of Pennsylvania Press published The Faith of Remembrance by Nathan Wachtel (Collège de France). The publisher’s description follows.

In a series of intimate and searing portraits, Nathan Wachtel traces the journeys of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Marranos—Spanish and Portuguese Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism but secretly retained their own faith. Fleeing persecution in their Iberian homeland, some sought refuge in the Americas, where they established transcontinental networks linking the New World to the Old. The Marranos—at once Jewish and Christian, outsiders and insiders—nurtured their hidden beliefs within their new communities, participating in the economic development of the early Americas while still adhering to some of the rituals and customs of their ancestors. In a testament to the partial assimilation of these new arrivals, their faith became ever more syncretic, mixing elements of Judaism with Christian practice and theology.

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Lloyd, “Race and Political Theology”

From Stanford University Press, a new collection of essays, Race and Political Theology, on how the experiences of Jews and African-Americans inform discussions about religion and politics. Vincent W. Lloyd (Syracuse) is the editor. The publisher’s description follows.

In this volume, senior scholars come together to explore how Jewish and African American experiences can make us think differently about the nexus of religion and politics, or political theology. Some wrestle with historical figures, such as William Shakespeare, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nazi journalist Wilhelm Stapel, and Austrian historian Otto Brunner. Others ponder what political theology can contribute to contemporary politics, particularly relating to Israel’s complicated religious/racial/national identity and to the religious currents in African American politics. Race and Political Theology opens novel avenues for research in intellectual history, religious studies, political theory, and cultural studies, showing how timely questions about religion and politics must be reframed when race is taken into account.

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NYC Bar Association Event on Religious Minorities in the Middle East

The New York City Bar Association sponsored an interesting panel this week on “Religious and Ethnic Minorities in the Middle East.”  The panel discussed the current plight of minority groups like Copts, Kurds, Baha’is, and Jews.  Ashraf Ramelah, Founder and President of the Human Rights organization “Voice of the Copts,” began by discussing the Coptic community in Egypt.  Ramelah highlighted recent attacks on the Copts and expressed concern for their future during this period of transition.  He stressed the importance of fair and unbiased news regarding Copts, something he said has been lacking in Egypt for some time.

Anthony Vance, Director of U.S. Baha’i Office of External Affairs for the National Spiritual Assembly, highlighted the dangers faced by the Baha’i community in Iran.  Vance insisted that much of the Iranian population has been desensitized by media propaganda and the lack of a free press.  He discussed ways that the United States, and the international community as a whole, could help Baha’is and other oppressed minorities in the Middle East, the most important being use of the media and internet to stop the spread of misinformation.

Abe Greenwald, Senior Editor of Commentary, discussed the Kurdish population in Iraq.  He explained that although the overwhelming majority of Kurds are Muslim, there are Christian and Jewish Kurds as well.  He spoke of Iraq’s long history of exploiting Kurds.  Although the Kurdish community is relatively safe now, they face serious threats once the American military leaves Iraq. Read more