Books & Media

In 1778, Mosseh Rodrigues del Prado of Suriname, a Dutch colony in South America, took justice into his own hands. Three years earlier, Prado had been convicted of verbally insulting the sexual virtue of various Jewish women. One of these was Ribca de la Parra, widow of Selomoh de la Parra, described variably as a “white…

When considering the literature that Jews of the Middle East and North Africa wrote in the first half of the twentieth century, one tends to think either of Iraqi Jewish authors, such as Anwar Shaul, or Sephardic writers from British Mandate Palestine, like Yiṣḥaq Shami and Yehuda Burla. In the case of Jewish writers of…

The advent of Islam in the seventh century brought profound changes to the Middle East and to the Jews living there. The unification through Islamic conquest of the formerly warring great empires of Christian Byzantium and Zoroastrian Persia opened up vast territories for long-distance exchange of goods within a single realm. For Jews, the predominantly…

In the works of Moroccan Jewish writers, authors, philosophers, and filmmakers, aspects are presented that illustrate a sense of double- or pluri-belonging, both to an abandoned homeland and to a new country of immigration; be it Israel, the mythical dreamt-of homeland; or, be it a foreign adopted country, devoid of any mythical connotations. Jews, originating…

The jewel case cover of the 2016 recording by a well-respected baroque orchestra is indeed evocative. A panorama of mosques rises out of the sand of medieval Cairo in earthy tones and we see the outlines of covered Muslim women carrying ceramic vessels on their heads as they disappear into a dusty sunset. Faux-Arabic letters…

Before the demise of the Jewish communities of the Middle East and Mediterranean regions in the middle of the twentieth century, their migration away from their countries of origin, and their resettlement in the West and Israel, the Sephardic ḥakhamim and intellectuals produced an immense literature that spanned the whole range of traditional Jewish learning:…