In September, Stanford University Press releases Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece by Devin E. Naar. The publisher’s description follows:
Touted as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans,” the Mediterranean port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the city’s incorporation into Greece in 1912 provoked a major upheaval that compelled Salonica’s Jews to reimagine their community and status as citizens of a nation-state. Jewish Salonica is the first book to tell the story of this tumultuous transition through the voices and perspectives of Salonican Jews as they forged a new place for themselves in Greek society.
Devin E. Naar traveled the globe, from New York to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Moscow, to excavate archives once confiscated by the Nazis. Written in Ladino, Greek, French, and Hebrew, these archives, combined with local newspapers, reveal how Salonica’s Jews fashioned a new hybrid identity as Hellenic Jews during a period marked by rising nationalism and economic crisis as well as unprecedented Jewish cultural and political vibrancy. Salonica’s Jews—Zionists, assimilationists, and socialists—reinvigorated their connection to the city and claimed it as their own until the Holocaust. Through the case of Salonica’s Jews, Naar recovers the diverse experiences of a lost religious, linguistic, and national minority at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.
campaign that created a lasting rupture between these two faiths. Nevertheless, is such a characterisation borne out by the sources? Engagingly written and supported by a wealth of evidence, Encountering Islam on the First Crusade offers a major reinterpretation of the crusaders’ attitudes towards the Arabic and Turkic peoples they encountered on their journey to Jerusalem. Nicholas Morton considers how they interpreted the new peoples, civilizations and landscapes they encountered; sights for which their former lives in Western Christendom had provided little preparation. Morton offers a varied picture of cross cultural relations, depicting the Near East as an arena in which multiple protagonists were pitted against each other. Some were fighting for supremacy, others for their religion, many simply for survival.
the European context, whereas in reality Christian Churches are central players in European identity formation at the national and continental level. Christian Churches in European Integration challenges this tendency, highlighting the position of churches as important identity formers and actors in civil society. Analysing the role of Churches in engaging with two specific EU issues—that of EU treaty reform and ongoing debates about immigration and asylum policy—the author argues that Churches are unique participants in European integration. Establishing a comprehensive view of Christian Churches as having a vital role to play in European integration, this book offers a substantial and provocative contribution both to our understanding of the European Union and the broader question of how religious and state institutions interact with each another.
between Europe and Islam. The general chapters on secularism, security, identity and solidarity show the challenge of promoting a stable multi-cultural society. In depth analysis of France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, and Italy reveal the extent to which this challenge of stable multiculturalism differs from one country to the next. The argument that emerges is not that Europe and Islam are incompatible. Rather it is that reconciling the tensions that arise from the mixing of different cultures will require enormous patience, understanding, and investment. The contributors represent some of the leading voices in debates about European politics – and not just those focusing narrowly on the question of Islam. Hence this volume offers both a gateway to understanding the special relationship between Europe and the Muslim world and a means of tying that understanding to the future of European integration. This book was previously published as a special issue of The International Spectator.
of survival for societies characterized by religious diversity. Yet it remains unclear what the crisis is all about. This book argues that its roots are internal to the liberal model of secularism and toleration. Rather than being neutral or non-religious, this is a secularized theological model with deep religious roots. The limits of liberal secularism go back to its emergence from the dynamics and tensions of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. From the very beginning, it went hand in hand with its own mode of intolerance: an anticlerical theology that rejected Catholicism and Judaism as evil forms of political religion. Later this framework produced the colonial descriptions of Hinduism (and its caste hierarchy) as a false and immoral religion. Thus, secularism was presented as the only route forward for India. Still, the secular state often harms local forms of living together and reinforces conflicts rather than resolving them. Todays advocacy of secularism is not the outcome of reasonable reflection on the problems of Indian society but a manifestation of colonial consciousness.
factors that shape the attitudes and behaviors of Muslims in the West, particularly their socio-economic status, gender, age, education, social class, and attitude toward religion and the Western lifestyle. The majority of Muslims in North America and Europe are reluctant to be reduced to ‘Muslim,’ although some of them feel obliged to accept the label. In this volume, the various chapters reveal that diasporic Muslims are heterogeneous given their diverse cultures and ethnicities; they are actually divided, not united, and have different views and interpretations of Islam and various attitudes and representations of Western realities. Due to their marginalization and often low social status, some Muslims turn to religion and traditional values and practices to overlook for their socio-economic exclusion from the European or American society.
church-state models, using a philosophical methodology. The work defends autonomy-based liberalism and elaborates how this liberalism can meet the requirements of liberal neutrality. The chapters also explore religious education and the financing of institutionalized religion. This volume collates the work of top scholars in the field. Starting from the idea that autonomy-based liberalism is an adequate framework for the requirement of liberal neutrality, the author elaborates why a liberal state can support religions and how she should do this, without violating the principle of neutrality. Taking into account the principle of religious freedom and the separation of church and state, this work explores which criteria the state should take into account when she actively supports religions, faith-based schools and religious education. A number of concrete church-state models, including hands-off, religious accommodation and the state church are evaluated, and the book gives some recommendations in order to optimize those church-state models, where needed. Practitioners and scholars of politics, law, philosophy and education, especially religious education, will find this work of particular interest as it has useful guidelines on policies and practices, as well as studies of church-state models.
their own form of Christianity, Pentecostalism, shaped by their various cultures and religious worlds. At the heart of Annalisa Butticci’s beautifully sculpted ethnography of African Pentecostalism in Italy is a paradox. Pentecostalism, traditionally one of the most Protestant of Christian faiths, is driven by the same concern as Catholicism: real presence.