BiblioVault - Books about Israel

Nearest East

American Millenialism and Mission to the Middle East

Authored by Hans-Lukas Kieser

Temple University Press, 2012

Long before oil interests shaped American interaction with the Middle East, the U.S. had a strong influence on the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman region. Covering the period from approximately 1800 to the 1970s, Hans-Lukas Kieser’s compelling Nearest East tells the story of this intimate, identity-building relationship between the U.S. and the Near East.

Kieser chronicles how American missionaries worked to implement their belief in Biblical millennialism, enlightened modernity, and a modern Zion-Israel. Millennialism was part of an American identity that constituted itself religiously in the interaction with and the representation of the “cradle of Zion.” As such, "going Near East" was—at least to American evangelical Protestants—in some ways more important than colonizing the American West. However, many Ottoman Muslims felt threatened by the American missionaries perceiving their successful institutions as an estranging challenge from the outside.

Measuring the long twisted road from the missionary Zion-builders of the early 19th century to the privileged US-Israeli partnership in the late 20th century, Nearest East looks carefully on both sides of the relationship. Kieser uses a wide range of Ottoman, Turkish, French, German and other sources, unfamiliar to most Anglophone readers, to tell this story that will appeal to historians of all stripes.

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The Negev

The Challenge of a Desert, Second Edition

Michael Evenari, Leslie Shanan, and Naphtali Tadmor

Harvard University Press, 1982

The Negev, first published in 1971, told the story of some twenty years of study of southern Israel’s desert. It synthesized the findings of botanists, geologists, soil scientists, agronomists, archaeologists, historians, and engineers and told how the applications of their work produced an agricultural surplus in this forbiddingly dry, hot region.

Now Michael Evenari has amplified the book with data from another decade of work. He describes the efforts at a new farm at Wadi Mashash, extends the weather data another ten years, presents further work on the adaptations of plants and animals to desert conditions, and takes a much deeper look at the historical precedents for the method of runoff agriculture, which has made the desert bloom.

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New Children of Israel

Emerging Jewish Communities in an Era of Globalization

Nathan P. Devir

University of Utah Press, 2017

In the last century, the tragic events of the Holocaust and the subsequent founding of the state of Israel brought about tremendous changes for Jewish communities all over the world. This book explores what may be the next watershed moment for the Jews: the inclusion of millions of people from developing nations who self-define as Jewish but who have no historical ties with established centers of Jewish life. These emerging groups are expanding notions of what it means to be Jewish.

This comparative ethnographic study, the first of its kind, presents in-depth analyses of the backgrounds, motivations, and sociohistorical contexts of emerging Jewish communities in Cameroon, Ghana, India, and other postcolonial locales. It investigates the ramifications of these new movements for the larger Judeo-Christian world, particularly with regard to issues of multiculturalism, immigration, race relations, and messianic expectations concerning the prophecy of Isaiah 11:12, according to which God will “assemble the dispersed of Israel, and gather together the scattered of Judah from the four corners of the earth.”

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New Inscriptions and Seals Relating to the Biblical World

Meir Lubetski

SBL Press, 2012

This volume continues the tradition of New Seals and Inscriptions, Hebrew, Idumean and Cuneiform (Sheffield Phoenix, 2007) by featuring analyses by eminent scholars of some of the archaeological treasures from Dr. Shlomo Moussaieff’s outstanding collection. These contributions signal fresh approaches to the study of ancient artifacts and underscore the role of archaeological evidence in reconstructing the legacy of antiquity, especially that of the biblical period. The contributors are Kathleen Abraham, Chaim Cohen, Robert Deutsch, Claire Gottlieb, Martin Heide, Richard S. Hess, W. G. Lambert†, André Lemaire, Meir Lubetski, Matthew Morgenstern, Alan Millard, Lawrence J. Mykytiuk, and Peter van der Veen.

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The New Jewish Diaspora

Russian-Speaking Immigrants in the United States, Israel, and Germany

Gitelman, Zvi

Rutgers University Press, 2016

In 1900 over five million Jews lived in the Russian empire; today, there are four times as many Russian-speaking Jews residing outside the former Soviet Union than there are in that region. The New Jewish Diaspora is the first English-language study of the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora. This migration has made deep marks on the social, cultural, and political terrain of many countries, in particular the United States, Israel, and Germany. The contributors examine the varied ways these immigrants have adapted to new environments, while identifying the common cultural bonds that continue to unite them.

Assembling an international array of experts on the Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish diaspora, the book makes room for a wide range of scholarly approaches, allowing readers to appreciate the significance of this migration from many different angles. Some chapters offer data-driven analyses that seek to quantify the impact Russian-speaking Jewish populations are making in their adoptive countries and their adaptations there. Others take a more ethnographic approach, using interviews and observations to determine how these immigrants integrate their old traditions and affiliations into their new identities. Further chapters examine how, despite the oceans separating them, members of this diaspora form imagined communities within cyberspace and through literature, enabling them to keep their shared culture alive.

Above all, the scholars in The New Jewish Diaspora place the migration of Russian-speaking Jews in its historical and social contexts, showing where it fits within the larger historic saga of the Jewish diaspora, exploring its dynamic engagement with the contemporary world, and pointing to future paths these immigrants and their descendants might follow.

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A New Orient

From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel

Amit Levy

Brandeis University Press, 2024

A history of knowledge transfer of Oriental Studies stretching along an axis from Germany to Palestine/Israel.

This study examines the history of Zionist academic Orientalism—referred to throughout as Oriental studies, the term contemporary English speakers would have used—in light of its German-Jewish background, as a history of knowledge transfer stretching along an axis from Germany to Palestine. The transfer, which took place primarily during the 1920s and 1930s, involved questions about the re-establishment, far from Germany, of a field of knowledge with deep German roots. Like other German-Jewish scholars arriving in Palestine at the time, some of the Orientalist agents of transfer did so out of Zionist conviction as olim (immigrants making aliyah, or literally “ascending” to the homeland), while others joined them later as refugees from Nazi Germany; both groups were integrated into the institutional apparatus of the Hebrew University. Unlike other fields of knowledge or professions, however, the transfer of Orientalist knowledge was unique in that the axis involved an essential change in the nature of its encounter with the Orient: from a textual-scientific encounter at German universities, largely disconnected from contemporary issues to a living, substantive, and unmediated encounter with an essentially Arab region—and the escalating Jewish-Arab conflict in the background. Within the new context, German-Jewish Orientalist expertise was charged with political and cultural significance it had not previously faced, fundamentally influencing the course of the discipline’s development in Palestine and Israel.

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Notes from a Sealed Room

An Israeli View of the Gulf War

Robert Werman. Introduction by Gerald M. Phillips

Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

In this compelling and often startling account, Robert Werman chronicles his experiences as an Israeli citizen living in Jerusalem during the Gulf War. On January 19, 1991, he began writing daily reports on his computer, sending them to friends and a few computer networks that dealt with Jewish culture and the politics of the Middle East. To Werman’s surprise, he received numerous electronic responses to his entries, sometimes as many as one hundred a day. As a result, his "war diary" was born, a diary that he continued until February 22, 1991, when, near the end of the war, he was hospitalized for a heart condition.

In the early entries, Werman notes each Iraqi Scud attack, describing in detail the sealed room in which he and his family sought shelter during the expected chemical attacks. "Sitting in the antigas room, members of the family try to put on a brave face, make jokes. . . . Only the dog, a rather stately collie, sits quietly and does not appear at all excited. We pity the dog, for he is the only one without a mask. But then we remember that—without a mask—he is our canary in the coal mine." Futilely, Werman seeks patterns to the attacks, attempting to predict when they might occur. He writes of the nation’s response to war: joggers running with their gas masks in hand, schools temporarily disbanded while children meet in small groups to continue their education, city streets emptied by six o'clock each evening as people wait in their homes for the sound of the sirens that herald an assault. He discusses the varying opinions concerning retaliation against Iraq, the fluctuating morale of the country, the damage produced by Iraqi missiles, and the widespread speculation of Israeli citizens concerning their country’s survival. Yet Werman’s daily reports, digressions, and explanations not only include his observations and impressions; they also poignantly reveal his own personal story and political, religious, and philosophical views.

Werman’s journal gives a singular view of a country under siege, recounting in detail the pressures, conflicts, and dangers existing during a war. It is a distinctive book, a fascinating personal and political account of a man, his family, their nation, and a war.

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