Product description The author studies the nature of the land of Palestine and the level of civilization attained by its residents at the turn of the century, employing the reactions of contemporary eyewitnesses along with a set of photographs prepared by T.W. Ingersoll and G. Eric Matson (the original photographs were color-tinted, and copyrighted by Ingersoll in 1904). Review ...provides the texture of old Palestine in a manner that is graphic and almost tactile. I recommend it heartily for students both of the region and of the problem.>>>> (Howard Sechar) ...This is a reading MUST for all the parties concerned in the problem of Israel and her Arab neighbours.>>>> (Prof. William J. Fishman) About the Author Saul S. Friedman is Associate Professor of History at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio. He is the author of Amcha: An Oral Testament of the Holocaust (UPA, 1979).

“What is so striking about Morris’s work as a historian is that it does not flatter anyone’s prejudices, least of all his own,” David Remnick remarked in a New Yorker article that coincided with the publication of Benny Morris’s 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. With the same commitment to objectivity that has consistently characterized his approach, Morris now turns his attention to the present-day legacy of the events of 1948 and the concrete options for the future of Palestine and Israel.The book scrutinizes the history of the goals of the Palestinian national movement and the Zionist movement, then considers the various one- and two-state proposals made by different streams within the two movements. It also looks at the willingness or unwillingness of each movement to find an accommodation based on compromise. Morris assesses the viability and practicality of proposed solutions in the light of complicated and acrimonious realities. Throughout his groundbreaking career, Morris has reshaped understanding of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Here, once again, he arrives at a new way of thinking about the discord, injecting a ray of hope in a region where it is most sorely needed --

In the nineteenth century, American tourists, scholars, evangelists, writers, and artists flocked to Palestine as part of a "Holy Land mania." Many saw America as a New Israel, a modern nation chosen to do God's work on Earth, and produced a rich variety of inspirational art and literature about their travels in the original promised land, which was then part of Ottoman-controlled Palestine. In American Palestine, Hilton Obenzinger explores two "infidel texts" in this tradition: Herman Melville's Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1876) and Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims' Progress (1869). As he shows, these works undermined in very different ways conventional assumptions about America's divine mission.In the darkly philosophical Clarel, Melville found echoes of Palestine's apparent desolation and ruin in his own spiritual doubts and in America's materialism and corruption. Twain's satiric travelogue, by contrast, mocked the romantic naiveté of Americans abroad, noting the incongruity of a "fantastic mob" of "Yanks" in the Holy Land and contrasting their exalted notions of Palestine with its prosaic reality. Obenzinger demonstrates, however, that Melville and Twain nevertheless shared many colonialist and orientalist assumptions of the day, revealed most clearly in their ideas about Arabs, Jews, and Native Americans.Combining keen literary and historical insights and careful attention to the context of other American writings about Palestine, this book throws new light on the construction of American identity in the nineteenth century.

The Savage in Judaism exposes and challenges the opposition between Judaism and "savage" religions that has shaped the conceptualization of Judaism in the discourses of modernity. Since the Enlightenment, Judaism has typically been regarded as superior to other religions. This judgment gave rise to the conviction that interpreters of Judaism had little if anything to learn from either the discipline of anthropololgy or comparative inquiry. This book, by contrast, aligns itself with a growing trend that is seeking to collapse the distinction between Judaism and savage religions. It does so, by recounting the history of that opposition and by a series of studies showing how differently Judaism appears when passed under the gaze of anthropological inquiry and cross-cultural analysis. Topics includes circumcision, impurity, and dietary restrictions.

This volume brings together studies by experts in the rabbinic literature of late antiquity and by specialists in the history of the Jews in that period, in order to reveal the value of rabbinic material as historical evidence and the problems and issues which arise in its exploitation for this purpose.

Covering topical issues concerning the nature of the Israeli state, this engaging work presents essays that combine a variety of comparative schemes, both internal to Jewish civilization and extending throughout the world, such as: modern Jewish society, politics and culture; historical consciousness in the 20th century; colonialism, anti-colonialism and postcolonial state-building.With its open-ended, comparative approach, Israel in History provides a useful means of correcting the biases found in so much scholarship on Israel, be it sympathetic or hostile. This book will appeal to scholars and students with research interests in many fields, including Israeli Studies, Middle East Studies, and Jewish Studies.

A number of 'histories of Israel' have been written over the past few decades yet the basic methodological questions are not always addressed: how do we write such a history and how can we know anything about the history of Israel? In Ancient Israel Lester L. Grabbe sets out to summarize what we know through a survey of sources and how we know it by a discussion of methodology and by evaluating the evidence. Grabbe's aim is not to offer a history as such but rather to collect together and analyze the materials necessary for writing such a history. His approach therefore allows the reader the freedom, and equips them with the essential methodological tools, to use the valuable and wide-ranging evidence presented in this volume to draw their own conclusions. The most basic question about the history of ancient Israel, how do we know what we know, leads to the fundamental questions of the study: What are the sources for the history of Israel and how do we evaluate them? How do we make them 'speak' to us through the fog of centuries? Grabbe focuses on original sources, including inscriptions, papyri, and archaeology. He examines the problems involved in historical methodology and deals with the major issues surrounding the use of the biblical text when writing a history of this period. Ancient Israel makes an original contribution to the field but also provides an enlightening overview and critique of current scholarly debate. It can therefore serve as a 'handbook' or reference-point for those wanting a catalog of original sources, scholarship, and secondary studies. Its user-friendly structure and Grabbe's clarity of style make this book eminently accessible not only to students of biblical studies and ancient history but also to the interested lay reader.

This book is a study of the city and urban life in Roman Palestine during the Talmudic period, 100-400 B.C. Rather than focus on a specific city, Daniel Sperber synthesizes what is known about city life in Talmudic Palestine to create a paradigmatic hypothetical Palestinian city. Drawing on numerous literary records for his information, he describes the structure and use of many physical aspects of the city, such as its markets, pubs, streets, bathhouses, roads, walls, toilets, and water supply. Rounding out the study is a chapter describing the archeological evidence, written by Sperber's colleague, Professor Joshua Schwartz. With the recent upsurge of interest in urbanization in the Greco-Roman world, The City in Roman Palestine will attract not only scholars of Judaic literature and history, but also classicists and ancient historians.

Review ?Mr. Samuel's book is dramatic not only for its contents but for its future implications. No one interested in modern Palestine and the fate of the Near East should fail to read its swift pages.?-Weekly Book Review "Mr. Samuel's book is dramatic not only for its contents but for its future implications. No one interested in modern Palestine and the fate of the Near East should fail to read its swift pages."-Weekly Book Review About the Author muel /f Maurice

Explores how the concept of settler colonialism provides a clearer understanding of the Zionist movement's project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, displacing the Palestinian Arab population and marginalizing its cultural presence. Halper argues that the only way out of a colonial situation is decolonization: the dismantling of Zionist structures of domination and control and their replacement by a single democratic state, in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews forge a new civil society and a shared political community. To show how this can be done, Halper uses the 10-point program of the One Democratic State Campaign as a guide for thinking through the process of decolonization to its post-colonial conclusion. --From publisher description.

"Bernard Wasserstein's book, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917-1929, argues that the decisions and policies implemented by the British mandatory government in its early years in Palestine were critical in "setting the mould" for the enduring Arab-Jewish conflict, shaping both its institutional and psychological climate that persists to the present day. "--

This volume provides new insights into the role of U.S. consuls in the Ottoman Middle East in the special context of the Holy Land. This volume provides new insights into the role of U.S. consuls in the Ottoman Middle East in the special context of the Holy Land. The motivations and functioning of the American consuls in Jerusalem, and of the consular agents in Jaffa and Haifa, are analyzed as part of the US diplomatic and consular activity throughout the world, and of Western involvement in the Ottoman Empire and in Palestine during the century preceding World War I. The processes of cultural, demographic, economic, environmental, and settlement change and the contribution of the US consuls and American settlers to development of and modernization of Palestine are discussed. Based on primary archival sources such facets as the role of consuls regarding the use of extraterritorial privileges, Western religious and cultural penetration, control of land and land purchase, non-Muslim settlement, judicial systems, and technological innovations are considered from American, Ottoman, and local viewpoints.

'Race and Photography' studies the changing function of photography from the 1870s to the 1940s within the field of the 'science of race', what many today consider the paradigm of pseudo-science. Amos Morris-Reich looks at the ways photography enabled not just new forms of documentation but new forms of perception

Two men, decades apart, are ensnared in the deadly search for a fabled treasure in the conclusion to Lavie Tidhar's epic and audacious Maror Trilogy. 1882, Jerusalem The foreigner. A man with no name, twin guns at his hips, a wide-brimmed hat on his head. A European exile in the backwaters of Ottoman Palestine, The foreigner is a bounty hunter in pursuit of a thief. 1948, Haifa Burton. A man with one name, a detective inspector in the crumpled khaki uniform of the Palestine Police Force's CID. With just seven days before the British Mandate ends, he must find a murderer and a missing aristocrat, as order collapses around him. Both men are outsiders in a land that is a palimpsest of ruins and loyalties, legacy of a history written in blood on a landscape that remembers everything. Both men will treat with bandits and mystics, dreamers and killers as they pursue their quarry; both will be ensnared in a lethal search for the fabled treasures of the Second Temple, long-lost amid the rise and fall of peoples, nations and empires. And both will be haunted by their dreams: burning red skies, a mountain of skulls, echoes of a vision from the dawn of humanity. Before Jerusalem, before Jericho, there has always been Golgotha.

The three-volume Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is the first authoritative reference source to provide comprehensive, impartial coverage of one of the most torturous and prolonged conflicts of our time. Written by an international team of more than 100 experts, and subject to an exhaustive, bias-hunting editorial process, this even-handed work presents some 900 A-to-Z entries covering the history, issues, actors, events, institutions, and policies related to the ongoing conflict. --from publisher description.

Over the last twenty years, there has been a growing understanding that conflicts in or over holy places differ from other territorial conflicts. A holy site has a profound meaning, involving human beliefs, strong emotions, "sacred" values and core identity self-perceptions; therefore a dispute over such land differs from a "regular" dispute over land. In order to resolve conflicts over holy sites, one must be equipped with an understanding of the cultural, religious, social and political meaning of the holy place to each of the contesting groups. This book seeks to understand the many facets of disputes and the triggers for the outbreak of violence in and around holy sites. It analyses fourteen case studies of conflicts over holy sites in Palestine/ Israel, including major holy sites such as Al-Haram al-Sharif/the Temple Mount, the Western Wall and the Cave of the Patriarchs/Al-Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, in addition to disputes over more minor sites. It then compares these conflicts to similar cases from other regions and provides an analysis of effective and ineffective conflict mitigation and resolution tools used for dealing with such disputes. Furthermore, the book sheds light on the role of sacred sites in exacerbating local and regional ethnic conflicts. By providing a thorough and systematic analysis of the social, economic and political conditions that fuel conflicts over holy sites and the conditions that create tolerance or conflict, this book will be a key resource for students and scholars of conflict resolution, political science and religious studies.

After World War II a flow of literature written by both Orthodox and left-wing Jewish writers, as well as academic works, appeared, defaming the attitude of Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency Executive toward the rescue of Europe's Jews during the Holocaust. The most slandering works were those by Rabbi M.D. Weissmandel and "The Seventh Million" by Tom Segev. Shows that Ben-Gurion, as early as 1932, foresaw the genocide of the Jews. He never favored the Zionist cause over the rescue of diaspora Jews, and did all he could for their rescue. However, he understood that little could be done by the Jewish Agency because it had no governmental authority. Ben-Gurion believed that the only way to save European Jews was to encourage immigration to Eretz Israel; therefore, most of his energy was directed to this cause. Examines Segev's book, as well as some other works, criticizing them for twisting the facts. Maintains that Weissmandel's rescue plan and other plans proposed by Zionist and non-Zionist leaders in Europe were not viable; therefore, their activities should not be juxtaposed with the alleged inactivity of the Yishuv and the JAE leadership.