In Search of a Missing Editor: Españoles sin patria after Ángel Pulido. Sephardic Jews on a Habsburg Faultline and the Challenge of Micca Gross Alcalay (1865–1905)

American Wars, American Peace: Notes from a Son of the Empire, Philip Beidler. University of Georgia Press, 2007. The Ends of War. Social Text 91, Edited by Patrick Deer. Duke University Press, 2007. A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II, Jennifer James. University of North Carolina Press, 2007. This essay examines literary and cultural criticism written in the wake of the Gulf Wars, situating it within the broader history of the US peace movement. By convention, that history begins in 1792, when Benjamin Banneker, the free African-American scientist, and Benjamin Rush, a prominent physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, proposed the creation of an “Office of Peace” to counterbalance the “Office of War.” The organized peace movement began in the US 23 years later with the establishment of the first peace societies in New York and Massachusetts—largely reactions to the War of 1812. Just over a decade later, the first national organization, the American Peace Society, was founded. However, it would be more than 140 years after that, toward the end of the Vietnam War, before antimilitarism moved from the margins to the mainstream of US culture and politics.

In January, 1787, readers of the American Museum found in the magazine an article entitled “Address to the People of the United States,” written by Dr. Benjamin Rush, the prominent Philadelphia physician, philanthropist, and patriot. The first statement which met their eyes was: “There is nothing more common than to confound the terms of American Revolution with those of the late American war. The American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution.”

The Sephardi Jews of Amsterdam have always presented a complex historiographical problem for scholars who have occasionally come to contradictory conclusions on this subject. Graetz devoted a special chapter to Spinoza and to Sabbatai Sevi, noting the challenges to Judaism voiced in the mid-seventeenth century, almost simultaneously, both in the orient and in the west. S.Ettinger also related to the Sephardi Jews in Western Europe at the beginning of his history of the Jews in the modern period. However, having drawn an upper boundary line and distinguished between 17 th -century western Sephardi society and Jewish society in the era of change during the eighteenth century, we must likewise draw boundaries between western Sephardi society and other Jewish societies in the world of Jewish tradition in the late Middle Ages and early modern times. Most of the regulations of the Sephardi community in Amsterdam dealt with synagogue affairs. Keywords: Amsterdam; Graetz; Jewish Society; Judaism; Sephardi Jews; Spinoza; western Europe

Research on religions and religious migrants in the Atlantic world (and beyond) has made evident that these groups had a rather important impact on historical change in the economy, societies, politics, and cultures within the Atlantic world and beyond. Particularly in the early modern period, the history of religious groups and their networks is central to our understanding of the history of the Atlantic world. Networks of religious communities are crucial for transnational, translocal, and circum-Atlantic exchange, including the exchange of goods, knowledge, and peoples. Religious networks were by no means exclusive networks, but were established within and without specific religious communities in order to satisfy these communities’ needs. While religious groups such as Sephardic Jews, Puritans, Quakers, Huguenots, Moravians, Anglicans, and others in the Atlantic world have been studied for a long time, thorough analyses of their internal and external networks are of a more recent date. Furthermore, up to the present day, most research has focused on one specific religious group, and it has included neither these various groups’ external networks nor their shared networks. Future research may focus more on religious groups’ “internal” and “external” networks and how they are intertwined. This will provide a better understanding of how religious migrants became “in-betweens” and “cross-cultural brokers,” linking peoples and regions with each other. It will also broaden our understanding of Atlantic exchange, entangledness, and reciprocity. Establishing the existence of religious networks in the Atlantic world, both internal and external, is difficult and can be a tedious undertaking. First, it requires an abundance of primary sources, such as correspondence, journals, and lists of transferred goods and peoples over long periods of time. For many religious communities within the Atlantic world, these primary sources have either not survived or are scattered over various countries, towns, and archives. Second, wherever primary sources relevant to establish networks have survived, it is a rather time-consuming task to reconstruct networks out of them. This bibliography looks at networks of a variety but not all of the religious groups within the Atlantic world. While other religious groups might have created and sustained important internal and external networks, they are understudied as of yet. Thus, this entry offers works on Anglican Church/SPG, Irish Catholics, Jesuits, Methodists, Moravians/Herrnhuters, New England Dissenters/Puritans, Lutherans/Pietists, Portuguese and Sephardic Jews, Quakers, and Reformed (Dutch Calvinist, German, Huguenot) networks. It also includes a section on Trade Networks, which were more often than not created and sustained by specific religious groups, and thus help us understand the role of these groups as agents of transfer and exchange.

The economic role of Jews in Christian Europe changed profoundly from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Sephardic Jews—the descendents of those who had been expelled from the territories of the crown of Castile and Aragon in 1492, or of those who, after seeking refuge in Portugal, were forced to convert to Catholicism in 1497—formed increasingly stable communities in Venice, Livorno, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London (after 1656). They were eventually tolerated in Bordeaux and other towns in southwestern France, and slowly set foot in the Dutch and English Caribbean. In the late seventeenth century, they also established small enclaves in Levantine and North African ports. Unlike medieval Jewry or other early modern segments of Jewish society in Europe, Sephardic merchants did not engage in petty credit and retail sale. Instead, many among them were largely involved—each with varying degrees of success—in long-distance trade, international finance, and the processing and manufacturing of colonial goods (especially sugar, tobacco, and diamonds). For most Sephardim, credit operations were closely linked to commerce, but for a few, such as Gabriel de Silva (ca. 1683–1763) in Bordeaux, private banking was their sole occupation.1

For the process of European expansion and the colonial endeavors from the late 15th century to the 19th, historians of the Atlantic world have more often than not identified the imperial states as the most powerful players: the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English (later British). From these empires’ perspectives, colonization was also about converting the “heathen” to, first, Catholicism, and then, with the Reformation and the rise of different varieties of Protestantism, to other denominations as well. Colonization in the early modern period was as much about religious missions, about “the harvest of souls,” as it was about expanding territorial boundaries and economic resources (Lachenicht, et al. 2016, cited under General Overviews). What Lauric Henneton has dubbed the “spiritual geopolitics” of the Atlantic world (Henneton 2014, cited under Puritan Colonization Schemes) is an important feature in the conquest and colonization of the Atlantic world. While Catholic and Protestant institutions supported the imperial powers’ colonization schemes, the former had agendas of their own, which at times clashed with more worldly colonization schemes. Among the most powerful of these religious enterprises, we find next to the Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Capuchins a number of Protestant churches and communities. This is especially true for the later 17th and 18th centuries with so-called evangelical Protestantisms: Quakers, Halle Pietists, Moravians, and others. Many of these religious orders and communities had not only Atlantic but global networks that stretched from European to African, American, and Asian worlds—in the 19th century also to areas within the Pacific including Australia and New Zealand. In the early modern period, many religious minorities were heavily persecuted for their faith. Forced to migrate, a number of imperial states decided to “make use” of these religious minorities to populate their overseas colonies, to strengthen their might and prosperity. Tolerance, then, was about “suffering” the “religious other”—and about utilitarian motives that included colonization schemes (Lachenicht 2017, cited under General Overviews). Not only Sephardi Jews but also Huguenots, Quakers, Moravians, and others became—as Jonathan Israel has put it for Sephardi Jews—“agents and victims of empire” (Israel 2002, cited under Sephardi Jews and Colonization).

The present article describes briefly the development of the theories regarding the circulation of blood in humans, from the time of Galen (second century C.E.) to the work of William Harvey (17th century C.E.).We shall summarize the views of Galen together with those of two prominent Iranian physicians of the Middle Ages (Razi and Ahwazi known in the West as Rhazes and Haly Abbas respectively) as well as that of Ibn-Nafis from Damascus (the discoverer of the pulmonary circulation) and the Spanish physician and cleric Michael Servetus and finally the definitive work of William Harvey, the English physician who described the mechanism of both the systemic and pulmonary circulation of blood in the human body.

This book brings to life an impressively broad array of performances in the Eastern Mediterranean. It covers many traditional types of performance, including singers, dancers, storytellers, street performers, clowns, preachers, shadow-puppeteers, fireworks displays, and semi-theatrical performances in folk and other celebrations. It explores performance of the secular as well as of the sacred in its many forms, including Sunni, Shiite, Sufi, and Alevi Muslims; Sephardic Jews and those in the Holy Land; and Armenian, Greek, and European Catholic Christians. The book focuses on the Medieval and Early Modern periods, including the Early Ottoman. Some papers reach backward into Late Antiquity, while others demonstrate continuity with the modern Eastern Mediterranean world.

The importance of the Atlantic Ocean during the Early Modern period has been stressed in a growing number of studies since the 1960s. However, some aspects of the contacts between different cultures and continents have enjoyed little attention. One of these is the role of individuals behind the Atlantic economic system: merchants, businessmen and entrepreneurs.

This book brings to life an impressively broad array of performances in the Eastern Mediterranean. It covers many traditional types of performance, including singers, dancers, storytellers, street performers, clowns, preachers, shadow-puppeteers, fireworks displays, and semi-theatrical performances in folk and other celebrations. It explores performance of the secular as well as of the sacred in its many forms, including Sunni, Shiite, Sufi, and Alevi Muslims; Sephardic Jews and those in the Holy Land; and Armenian, Greek, and European Catholic Christians. The book focuses on the Medieval and Early Modern periods, including the Early Ottoman. Some papers reach backward into Late Antiquity, while others demonstrate continuity with the modern Eastern Mediterranean world. The articles discuss evidence for performers and performance coming from archival sources, architectural and manuscript images, musical notation, historical and ethnographic accounts, literary works, and oral tradition. Across the broad range of issues, chronology, and geography, certain fundamental topics are central: concepts of drama and theatricality; varied definitions of ‘performance’ and related terms; the sacred and the profane, and their frequent intersection; and complex relations between oral and written traditions.

This book brings to life an impressively broad array of performances in the Eastern Mediterranean. It covers many traditional types of performance, including singers, dancers, storytellers, street performers, clowns, preachers, shadow-puppeteers, fireworks displays, and semi-theatrical performances in folk and other celebrations. It explores performance of the secular as well as of the sacred in its many forms, including Sunni, Shiite, Sufi, and Alevi Muslims; Sephardic Jews and those in the Holy Land; and Armenian, Greek, and European Catholic Christians. The book focuses on the Medieval and Early Modern periods, including the Early Ottoman. Some papers reach backward into Late Antiquity, while others demonstrate continuity with the modern Eastern Mediterranean world. The articles discuss evidence for performers and performance coming from archival sources, architectural and manuscript images, musical notation, historical and ethnographic accounts, literary works, and oral tradition. Across the broad range of issues, chronology, and geography, certain fundamental topics are central: concepts of drama and theatricality; varied definitions of ‘performance’ and related terms; the sacred and the profane, and their frequent intersection; and complex relations between oral and written traditions.

This book brings to life an impressively broad array of performances in the Eastern Mediterranean. It covers many traditional types of performance, including singers, dancers, storytellers, street performers, clowns, preachers, shadow-puppeteers, fireworks displays, and semi-theatrical performances in folk and other celebrations. It explores performance of the secular as well as of the sacred in its many forms, including Sunni, Shiite, Sufi, and Alevi Muslims; Sephardic Jews and those in the Holy Land; and Armenian, Greek, and European Catholic Christians. The book focuses on the Medieval and Early Modern periods, including the Early Ottoman. Some papers reach backward into Late Antiquity, while others demonstrate continuity with the modern Eastern Mediterranean world.

This book brings to life an impressively broad array of performances in the Eastern Mediterranean. It covers many traditional types of performance, including singers, dancers, storytellers, street performers, clowns, preachers, shadow-puppeteers, fireworks displays, and semi-theatrical performances in folk and other celebrations. It explores performance of the secular as well as of the sacred in its many forms, including Sunni, Shiite, Sufi, and Alevi Muslims; Sephardic Jews and those in the Holy Land; and Armenian, Greek, and European Catholic Christians. The book focuses on the Medieval and Early Modern periods, including the Early Ottoman. Some papers reach backward into Late Antiquity, while others demonstrate continuity with the modern Eastern Mediterranean world. The articles discuss evidence for performers and performance coming from archival sources, architectural and manuscript images, musical notation, historical and ethnographic accounts, literary works, and oral tradition. Across the broad range of issues, chronology, and geography, certain fundamental topics are central: concepts of drama and theatricality; varied definitions of ‘performance’ and related terms; the sacred and the profane, and their frequent intersection; and complex relations between oral and written traditions.

Reviewed by: Jews in the Early Modern World Magda Teter Jews in the Early Modern World, by Dean Phillip Bell. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. 301 pp. $79.00 (c); $29.95 (p). Dean Phillip Bell’s book is an overview of the history of the Jews in the early modern period, defined, somewhat arbitrarily, as 1400–1700. The book consists of five thematic chapters, plus an introduction and conclusions. The long bibliography and a section of “Suggested Readings” should be very helpful for students and teachers. Chapter One discusses the medieval period, attempting to paint background for what is to follow in Chapters Two through Five, which cover “Settlement and Demography,” “Community and Social Life,” [End Page 152] “Identity: Religion and Culture,” and “Relations with the Other.” The author took upon himself a very difficult task: to write a book that would provide a broad overview of the history of the Jews from the Middle Ages through the end of the seventeenth century; and, as with any such broad studies, the limited space has forced him to make hard choices of what to include or exclude. One of the most valuable aspects of the book is its expansion of geographic perspective to include a discussion of Jewish communities in places beyond Europe and the Ottoman Empire, such as “the New World,” as well as India and China. The chapter on “Settlement and Demography” is useful in giving an overview of the demographic trends in the early modern period. But the extensive use of numbers, derived from Encyclopedia Judaica, a source used extensively in the book, is most problematic. Although the author acknowledges that “demographic information is notoriously difficult to secure for the premodern history” (p. 35), the book nonetheless provides authoritative-looking tables with population numbers for periods as remote as the 1300s. The chapter also unnecessarily simplifies the division of the Jewish population into Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews (pp. 35–36). While such division has been common, scholars are now more sensitive to communities that existed independently of the Germanic (Ashkenazic) or Iberian (Sephardic) lineage, including Italian, Iraqi, or Persian Jews. The chapter on “Settlement and Demography” overlaps with the chapter on “Relations with the Other.” The latter outlines the legal status of Jews. Demographic patterns are obviously related to the Jews’ legal status, and it would have been useful to have the two discussed together, rather than placing the two in separate chapters far removed from each other. Although “complexity” is perhaps the most frequently used word in the book, the book actually shies away from it. The chapter on “Community and Social Life” tends to focus on internal community developments, without linking them with the non-Jewish world. There is no question that internal community needs were crucial for the maintenance of a communal structure (courts, synagogues, mikvaot etc), yet recent scholarship, especially on Italy and Poland (e.g. Teller, Cooperman, Siegmund), has raised questions about the extent of Jewish autonomy, signaling that even the creation of certain bodies of what appears to be autonomous communal governance was often a result of political and economic policies of the non-Jewish governments. The chapter “Community and Social Life,” about communal structures, focuses on the male Jewish functions (rabbis, parnasim, courts, etc.); the same is true of the chapter on “Identity: Religion and Culture.” Although the author rightfully says that “women were integral members of the Jewish community and family” (p. 121), in the book itself women are not an integral part of the [End Page 153] society. Indeed “Jews” are male in the book (see, e.g., p. 130 “Jews, even Jewish women”). Women receive rather scant attention, and only within the context of family and “women” (pp. 120–127), or “deviance” (p. 166); they remain segregated and marginal in the book. If a focus on formal community structures makes it perhaps difficult to integrate women, discussion of economic activities or education, or “observance,” could have easily been more inclusive. Women’s involvement in economic activities is discussed briefly in the subsection “Women” (p. 122) rather than in the following section, “Professions and Occupations” (pp. 127–131). In chapter Four “Identity: Religion and Culture,” a discussion of...

This book brings to life an impressively broad array of performances in the Eastern Mediterranean. It covers many traditional types of performance, including singers, dancers, storytellers, street performers, clowns, preachers, shadow-puppeteers, fireworks displays, and semi-theatrical performances in folk and other celebrations. It explores performance of the secular as well as of the sacred in its many forms, including Sunni, Shiite, Sufi, and Alevi Muslims; Sephardic Jews and those in the Holy Land; and Armenian, Greek, and European Catholic Christians. The book focuses on the Medieval and Early Modern periods, including the Early Ottoman. Some papers reach backward into Late Antiquity, while others demonstrate continuity with the modern Eastern Mediterranean world. The articles discuss evidence for performers and performance coming from archival sources, architectural and manuscript images, musical notation, historical and ethnographic accounts, literary works, and oral tradition. Across the broad range of issues, chronology, and geography, certain fundamental topics are central: concepts of drama and theatricality; varied definitions of ‘performance’ and related terms; the sacred and the profane, and their frequent intersection; and complex relations between oral and written traditions.