Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora PDF Download

Author: Emily Colbert Cairns
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319578677
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
This book explores Queen Esther as an idealized woman in Iberia, as well as a Jewish heroine for conversos in the Sephardic Diaspora in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The biblical Esther --the Jewish woman who marries the King of Persia and saves her people -- was contested in the cultures of early modern Europe, authored as a symbol of conformity as well as resistance. At once a queen and minority figure under threat, for a changing Iberian and broader European landscape, Esther was compelling and relatable precisely because of her hybridity. She was an early modern globetrotter and border transgressor. Emily Colbert Cairns analyzes the many retellings of the biblical heroine that were composed in a turbulent early modern Europe. These narratives reveal national undercurrents where religious identity was transitional and fluid, thus problematizing the fixed notion of national identity within a particular geographic location. This volume instead proposes a model of a Sephardic nationality that existed beyond geographical borders.

Author: Sarah E. Owens
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487531710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Recognizing the variety of health experiences across geographical borders, Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World interrogates the concepts of "health" and "healing" between 1500 and 1800. Through an interdisciplinary approach to medical history, gender history, and the literature and culture of the early modern Atlantic World, this collection of essays points to the ways in which the practice of medicine, the delivery of healthcare, and the experiences of disease and health are gendered. The contributors explore how the medical profession sought to exert its power over patients, determining standards that impacted conceptions of self and body, and at the same time, how this influence was mediated. Using a range of sources, the essays reveal the multiple and sometimes contradictory ways that early modern health discourse intersected with gender and sexuality, as well as its ties to interconnected ethical, racial, and class-driven concerns. Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World breaks new ground through its systematic focus on gender and sexuality as they relate to the delivery of healthcare, the practice of medicine, and the experiences of health and healing across early modern Spain and colonial Latin America.

Author: Esther Benbassa
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520218222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
"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].

Author: Aviva Ben-Ur
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081225211X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
A fascinating portrait of Jewish life in Suriname from the 17th to 19th centuries Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society explores the political and social history of the Jews of Suriname, a Dutch colony on the South American mainland just north of Brazil. Suriname was home to the most privileged Jewish community in the Americas where Jews, most of Iberian origin, enjoyed religious liberty, were judged by their own tribunal, could enter any trade, owned plantations and slaves, and even had a say in colonial governance. Aviva Ben-Ur sets the story of Suriname's Jews in the larger context of Atlantic slavery and colonialism and argues that, like other frontier settlements, they achieved and maintained their autonomy through continual negotiation with the colonial government. Drawing on sources in Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Spanish, Ben-Ur shows how, from their first permanent settlement in the 1660s to the abolition of their communal autonomy in 1825, Suriname Jews enjoyed virtually the same standing as the ruling white Protestants, with whom they interacted regularly. She also examines the nature of Jewish interactions with enslaved and free people of African descent in the colony. Jews admitted both groups into their community, and Ben-Ur illuminates the ways in which these converts and their descendants experienced Jewishness and autonomy. Lastly, she compares the Jewish settlement with other frontier communities in Suriname, most notably those of Indians and Maroons, to measure the success of their negotiations with the government for communal autonomy. The Jewish experience in Suriname was marked by unparalleled autonomy that nevertheless developed in one of the largest slave colonies in the New World.

Author: Emily Sarah Colbert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781267421159
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
I explore, in both fictional and historical works the complex construction and representation of the "Jew" as both Spanish and colonial other in the Iberian Diaspora. Following different converso female figures my dissertation travels between England, Spain, Italy, and ends across the Atlantic in New Spain. By moving converso Jews from the margin to the center and analyzing this subgroup through the narrower lens of female identity and practice, my dissertation demonstrates the need to re-think the boundaries of Iberia in the Early Modern world as well as female contribution to the preservation of Jewish rituals. I examine how a series of texts engage with the issues of religious and gender identity. Male authors use female protagonists to explore their relationships to a changing society and burgening modern world. They use the female body as a blank space to project and inscribe social ideals. At the same time, these women use their bodies and bodily practices to speak back and create identity. I explore in detail the material practices surrounding the body including clothing, food, and language. These practices reveal the center of female power and the importance of the home in the continuity of tradition and maintenance of Jewish ritual and converso identity. I show in Chapter 1 how Isabel from La Espanola Inglesa is a projection of feminine ideals, how in Chapter 2 La Celestina and La Lozana Andaluza in Chapter 3 use their body to speak back against ideals of female subservience, and Isabel de Carvajal in Chapter 4 uses her body to observe crypto-Jewish religious practices. As these figures all struggle with boundaries and liminal spaces, I show crypto-Jewish practice to be a hybrid combination of Jewish and Catholic traditions. As I analyze the female protagonists from La Espanola Inglesa, La Celestina, La Lozana Andaluza, and the Inquisition manuscripts of Isabel de Carvajal, an alternative discourse is created which challenges patriarchal and hegemonic centers of power. Located on different corners of the Sephardic Diaspora in the Early Modern period, these figures reveal different ways of belonging and aspects of identity that normally go unnoticed.

Author: William David Davies
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521219297
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 766

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Book Description
Vol. 4 covers the late Roman period to the rise of Islam. Focuses especially on the growth and development of rabbinic Judaism and of the major classical rabbinic sources such as the Mishnah, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud and various Midrashic collections.

Author: Tsaurayi Kudakwashe Mapfeka
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004406565
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
In Esther in Diaspora, Tsaurayi Kudakwashe Mapfeka utilises a theory-nuanced concept of diaspora to offer a new way of reading Esther, in the process, critiquing the traditional view that has relied on its close association with Purim.

Author: Katharina Galor
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003805515
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Jewish Women: Between Conformity and Agency examines the concepts of gender and sexuality through the primary lens of visual and material culture from antiquity through to the present day. The backbone of this transhistorical and transcontextual study is the question of Jewish women’s agency in four different geographical, chronological, and methodological contexts, beginning with women’s dress codes in Roman-Byzantine Syro-Palestine, continuing with rituals of purity in medieval Ashkenaz, worship in papal Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, and ending with marriage and divorce in Israeli film. Each of these explorations is interested in creating a dialogue between the patriarchal legacy of the traditional texts and the chronologically corresponding visual and material culture. The author challenges traditional approaches to the study of Jewish culture by employing tools from art history, archaeology, and film and media studies. In each of these different contexts, there is ample evidence that women—despite persistent overall structural discrimination—have found ways to challenge male constructs of gender norms. Ultimately, these examples from past and present times highlight women’s eminence in shaping Jewish history and culture. Bringing a new interdisciplinary lens to the study of the history of gender and sexuality, the book will be of interest to students and researchers of Jewish history and culture, art history, archaeology, and film studies.

Author: David M. Gitlitz
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466824778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 570

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Book Description
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.

Author: Emily Colbert Cairns
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789463727297
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic is the first volume to emphasize women's personal experiences and their life trajectories as mothers within the Peninsula and across the Atlantic. Although an official discourse that defined the conditions of motherhood emerged in the eighteenth century, before this period there were many different articulations of motherhood through which women negotiated hierarchical relationships, power struggles and alliances. While the individual experiences were unique and depended upon the positionality of race and class, the complexities of being a mother were universal. The wide variety of written and visual documents included in this volume highlight women's voices in the first person along with more subtle references to motherhood as well as silences. This collection broadens our understanding of the complexities of motherhood, addressing the pressures of becoming a mother, miscarriage, the acts of giving birth and lactation and the ordeals of raising children.