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Longing and Belonging

Jews in the Modern Islamic World

Nancy Berg editor Dina Danon editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Pennsylvania Press

Publishing:25th Feb '25

£54.00

This title is due to be published on 25th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Longing and Belonging cover

Longing and Belonging investigates the histories of Jews living among Muslims from 1900 until 1950. The volume depicts modern Jewish protagonists as active participants in an expansive Islamic civilization, reflecting a mutuality and cross-fertilization in the region that raises new lines of inquiry and which offers enduring lessons for the world today.

This volume explores the history of Jewish life and experience in the modern Islamic world
Longing and Belonging investigates the lives of Jews among Muslims in the modern age, both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire and after its demise. Here, modern Jewish protagonists are revealed as active participants in an expansive Islamic civilization, reflecting a mutuality and cross-fertilization in the region that raises new lines of inquiry and which offers enduring lessons for the world today. This collection both foregrounds the experiences of Jewish communities that have long been relegated to the margins of historical and literary studies and, critically, uses these experiences to complicate prevailing narratives from both Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies. By following communities from the coffeeshops of Cairo to the villages of Yemen, from the local marriage market in Izmir to the global commerce of the Sassoons, readers gain intimate insight into a world that resists a simple understanding of the modern Islamic world and of the place of Jews within it. Just as much as the Sephardi and Mizrahi experience complicates prevailing paradigms in the study of Jewish modernity, so too does it enrich understandings of modernity across Muslim societies. The volume tells a story of longing, belonging, and longing to belong, of multiple affinities in a world that no longer exists.
Contributors: Esra Almas, Nancy E. Berg, Dina Danon, Keren Dotan, Annie Greene, Alma Rachel Heckman, Hadar Feldman Samet, Joseph Sassoon, Edwin Seroussi, Alon Tam, Alan Verskin, Mark Wagner.

"Longing and Belonging is one of the most exciting, and important, contributions to the study of Middle Eastern and North African modernity. This complex and riveting account presents Jewish music, religious and social life, economic networks, and gender relations in their full complexity, paying tribute to a Muslim-Jewish world whose histories bear crucial meanings to our present days and current dilemmas." * Orit Bashkin, University of Chicago *

ISBN: 9781512827118

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

288 pages