Jewish Identities in East and Southeast Asia

Jewish Identities in East and Southeast Asia PDF

Author: Jonathan Goldstein

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-11-13

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 3110395460

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Jewish communities of East and Southeast Asia display an impressive diversity. Jonathan Goldstein’s book covers the period from 1750 and focuses on seven of the area’s largest cities and trading emporia: Singapore, Manila, Taipei, Harbin, Shanghai, Rangoon, and Surabaya. The book isolates five factors which contributed to the formation of transnational, multiethnic, and multicultural identity: memory, colonialism, regional nationalism, socialism, and Zionism. It emphasizes those factors which preserved specifically Judaic aspects of identity. Drawing extensively on interviews conducted in all seven cities as well as governmental, institutional, commercial, and personal archives, censuses, and cemetery data, the book provides overviews of communal life and intimate portraits of leading individuals and families. Jews were engaged in everything from business and finance to revolutionary activity. Some collaborated with the Japanese while others confronted them on the battlefield. The book attempts to treat fully and fairly the wide spectrum of Jewish experience ranging from that of the ultra-Orthodox to the completely secular.

Essential Outsiders

Essential Outsiders PDF

Author: Daniel Chirot

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2011-10-01

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0295800267

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, like Jews in Central Europe until the Holocaust, have been remarkably successful as an entrepreneurial and professional minority. Whole regimes have sometimes relied on the financial underpinnings of Chinese business to maintain themselves in power, and recently Chinese businesses have led the drive to economic modernization in Southeast Asia. But at the same time, they remain, as the Jews were, the quintessential “outsiders.” In some Southeast Asian countries they are targets of majority nationalist prejudices and suffer from discrimination, even when they are formally integrated into the nation. The essays in this book explore the reasons why the Jews in Central Europe and the Chinese in Southeast Asia have been both successful and stigmatized. Their careful scholarship and measured tone contribute to a balanced view of the subject and introduce a historical depth and comparative perspective that have generally been lacking in past discussions. Those who want to understand contemporary Southeast Asian and the legacy of the Jewish experience in Central Europe will gain new insights from the book.

Jewish Communities in Asia Minor

Jewish Communities in Asia Minor PDF

Author: Paul R. Trebilco

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1991-05-31

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0521401208

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The book provides an invaluable and coherent description of the life of Jewish communities in Asia Minor.

Jewish Communities in Modern Asia

Jewish Communities in Modern Asia PDF

Author: Rotem Kowner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-04-30

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 1009162586

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A pioneering exploration of the Jewish communities across the Asian continent and their dramatic rise and fall in modern times

Western Jews in India

Western Jews in India PDF

Author: Kenneth X. Robbins

Publisher:

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9788173049835

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This is the first book describing the roles of Western Jews in South Asian political affairs, medicine, painting, architecture and religion. A time-line summarises their contributions and those of the Indian Jews to the Indian subcontinent. Many of these foreign Jews left behind their Jewish identities. Others remained Jews, but functioned as individuals unconcerned with implementing any "Jewish agenda".

Once We Were Slaves

Once We Were Slaves PDF

Author: Laura Arnold Leibman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-07-12

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0197530494

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and--at times--white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race--as well as on the role of religion in racial shift--in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Jewish Languages from A to Z

Jewish Languages from A to Z PDF

Author: Aaron D. Rubin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-13

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1351043439

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Jewish Languages from A to Z provides an engaging and enjoyable overview of the rich variety of languages spoken and written by Jews over the past three thousand years. The book covers more than 50 different languages and language varieties. These include not only well-known Jewish languages like Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino, but also more exotic languages like Chinese, Esperanto, Malayalam, and Zulu, all of which have a fascinating Jewish story to be told. Each chapter presents the special features of the language variety in question, a discussion of the history of the associated Jewish community, and some examples of literature and other texts produced in it. The book thus takes readers on a stimulating voyage around the Jewish world, from ancient Babylonia to 21st-century New York, via such diverse locations as Tajikistan, South Africa, and the Caribbean. The chapters are accompanied by numerous full-colour photographs of the literary treasures produced by Jewish language-speaking communities, from ancient stone inscriptions to medieval illuminated manuscripts to contemporary novels and newspapers. This comprehensive survey of Jewish languages is designed to be accessible to all readers with an interest in languages or history, regardless of their background—no prior knowledge of linguistics or Jewish history is assumed.

Beyond ISIS: History and Future of Religious Minorities in Iraq

Beyond ISIS: History and Future of Religious Minorities in Iraq PDF

Author: Bayar Mustafa Sevdeen

Publisher: Transnational Press London

Published: 2019-04-16

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1912997150

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book shares papers from a conference taking a deeper look at the victims of ISIS and beyond that all religious minorities of Iraq. This is the first book that considers all the religious minorities that existed in modern Iraq, including both historic communities and new groups that recently came with labour migration, especially to the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan. The book resulted from a conference in 2018 organized exactly at the site of the Simele Massacre in 1933. The campus of the American University of Kurdistan is located on the site of the first big massacre against a religious minority in Iraq. The conference entitled ‘Beyond ISIS: Minorities and Religious Diversity in Iraq and the Future of Êzîdî, Christians, Shabak, Yarsan, Mandeans and other Religious Minorities in the Middle East’ brought together Iraqi and international scholars, activists, and religious and community representatives. This book contains papers presented at the conference that included contributions on Iraq’s religious diversity and the historical and contemporary consequences of genocide and persecution on the religious minorities of Iraq.

Ambition and Identity

Ambition and Identity PDF

Author: Andrew R. Wilson

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2004-02-28

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780824826505

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

What binds overseas Chinese communities together? Traditionally scholars have stressed the interplay of external factors (discrimination, local hostility) and internal forces (shared language, native-place ties, family) to account for the cohesion and "Chineseness" of these overseas groups. Andrew Wilson challenges this Manichean explanation of identity by introducing a third factor: the ambitions of the Chinese merchant elite, which played an equal, if not greater, role in the formation of ethnic identity among the Chinese in colonial Manila. Drawing on Chinese, Spanish, and American sources and applying a broad range of historiographical approaches, this volume dissects the structures of authority and identity within Manila’s Chinese community over a period of dramatic socioeconomic change and political upheaval. It reveals the ways in which wealthy Chinese merchants dealt in not only goods and services, but also political influence and the movement of human talent from China to the Philippines. Their influence and status extended across the physical and political divide between China and the Philippines, from the villages of southern China to the streets of Manila, making them a truly transnational elite. Control of community institutions and especially migration networks accounts for the cohesiveness of Manila’s Chinese enclave, argues Wilson, and the most successful members of the elite self-consciously chose to identify themselves and their protégés as Chinese.