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In this article I examine out-migration from old Cairo's Ḥarat al-Yahud (The Jews' Alley) to that city's urban expansions in the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth. This migration was coupled with large-scale Jewish immigration to Cairo and intersected with its modern urban culture, which Jews shared with Muslim and Christian Cairenes. I argue that for Cairene Jews, these migrations, urban spaces, and regular itineraries within them held the promise of upward social mobility and integration into an urban middle-class culture that did not erase their Jewishness but removed it as a social barrier. This argument works against common narratives that saw Jewish Egyptians as foreigners living separately from Muslim Egyptians in another cultural milieu.

In this article I examine out-migration from old Cairo's Ḥarat al-Yahud (The Jews' Alley) to that city's urban expansions in the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth. This migration was coupled with large-scale Jewish immigration to Cairo and intersected with its modern urban culture, which Jews shared with Muslim and Christian Cairenes. I argue that for Cairene Jews, these migrations, urban spaces, and regular itineraries within them held the promise of upward social mobility and integration into an urban middle-class culture that did not erase their Jewishness but removed it as a social barrier. This argument works against common narratives that saw Jewish Egyptians as foreigners living separately from Muslim Egyptians in another cultural milieu.

El-Horria/La Liberté was a bilingual, Judeo-Arabic and French, Jewish weekly newspaper published in Tangier, Morocco between 1914 and ca. 1924. This article offers a careful study of this newspaper in order to show the worldview it created for its consumers through discussion of issues its editor and authors deemed to be crucial for Jewish life in Morocco at the time. These ranged from the consequences of World War I to French colonialism, Jewish peoplehood, Zionism, or the reorganization and modernization of Jewish communities in Morocco. Through a comparison of writings in Judeo-Arabic and French, this article also unpacks the intersections between language, social hierarchy, socio-political commitments, and Jewish minority-Muslim majority relations in Morocco. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how El-Horria/La Liberté promoted the integration of French-speaking, intellectual, urban, Jewish elites into a Jewish world focused on eastern and central Europe, and how it tried to do the same for the larger group of Judeo-Arabic speaking Jews in the Moroccan interior, although it was sometimes challenged by the latter.

Coffeehouses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cairo were an urban hub for working- and middle-class men, as well as for a growing number of women, for politicians, revolutionaries, intellectuals, and journalists, for immigrants and locals, and for people from different ethnic, racial, and religious communities. Indeed, coffeehouses were a fundamental social and cultural, even political, institution. They were embedded in Cairo’s landscape, and in the daily routines of its inhabitants. Their emergence offered new opportunities for socializing to more groups in society, they were a place of leisure and entertainment that supported popular culture, and they were a crucial part of the political public sphere. Using a rich mix of sources, such as spy reports, photographs, memoirs, guides, various descriptions of Cairo and its inhabitants, interviews, census data, and newspapers, this study traces the rich history of Cairo’s coffeehouses roughly from the 1870s to 1919, with an in depth look also at their longue durée history before the late nineteenth century. This study aims to show how the history of coffeehouses as actual places, not merely theorized sites, can shed light on a variety of critical developments. In particular, the history of Cairo’s coffeehouses illuminates many broader histories involving, for example, the construction of social hierarchies, the performance of class and gender, urban and economic development in Cairo, the assertion of colonialism and state-led surveillance, the construction of nationalism and mass politics, and more

Bacteria from the orders Bacillales and Clostridiales differentiate into stress-resistant spores that can remain dormant for years, yet rapidly germinate upon nutrient sensing. How spores monitor nutrients is poorly understood but in most cases requires putative membrane receptors. The prototypical receptor from Bacillus subtilis consists of three proteins (GerAA, GerAB, GerAC) required for germination in response to L-alanine. GerAB belongs to the Amino Acid-Polyamine-Organocation superfamily of transporters. Using evolutionary co-variation analysis, we provide evidence that GerAB adopts a structure similar to an L-alanine transporter from this superfamily. We show that mutations in gerAB predicted to disrupt the ligand-binding pocket impair germination, while mutations predicted to function in L-alanine recognition enable spores to respond to L-leucine or L-serine. Finally, substitutions of bulkier residues at these positions cause constitutive germination. These data suggest that GerAB is the L-alanine sensor and that B subunits in this broadly conserved family function in nutrient detection. Germination of Bacillus subtilis spores in response to L-alanine requires a putative membrane receptor consisting of three proteins. Here, Artzi et al. use evolutionary co-variation analysis and functional assays of mutants to provide evidence that one of the proteins, GerAB, likely acts as the L-alanine sensor.

Major depression is associated with low bone mass and increased incidence of osteoporotic fractures. However, causality between depression and bone loss has not been established. Here, we show that mice subjected to chronic mild stress (CMS), an established model of depression in rodents, display behavioral depression accompanied by impaired bone mass and structure, as portrayed by decreases in trabecular bone volume density, trabecular number, and trabecular connectivity density assessed in the distal femoral metaphysis and L3 vertebral body. Bone remodeling analysis revealed that the CMS-induced skeletal deficiency is accompanied by restrained bone formation resulting from reduced osteoblast number. Antidepressant therapy, which prevents the behavioral responses to CMS, completely inhibits the decrease in bone formation and markedly attenuates the CMS-induced bone loss. The depression-triggered bone loss is associated with a substantial increase in bone norepinephrine levels and can be blocked by the p3-adrenergic antagonist propranolol, suggesting that the sympathetic nervous system mediates the skeletal effects of stress-induced depression. These results define a linkage among depression, excessive adrenergic activity, and reduced bone formation, thus demonstrating an interaction among behavioral responses, the brain, and the skeleton, which leads to impaired bone structure. Together with the common occurrence of depression and bone loss in the aging population, the present data implicate depression as a potential major risk factor for osteoporosis and the associated increase in fracture incidence.

Bone mass is determined by a continuous remodeling process, whereby the mineralized matrix is being removed by osteoclasts and subsequently replaced with newly formed bone tissue produced by osteoblasts. Here we report the presence of endogenous amides of long-chain fatty acids with amino acids or with ethanolamine (N-acyl amides) in mouse bone. Of these compounds, N-oleoyl-L-serine (OS) had the highest activity in an osteoblast proliferation assay. In these cells, OS triggers a Gi-protein-coupled receptor and Erk1/2. It also mitigates osteoclast number by promoting osteoclast apoptosis through the inhibition of Erk1/2 phosphorylation and receptor activator of nuclear-κB ligand (RANKL) expression in bone marrow stromal cells and osteoblasts. In intact mice, OS moderately increases bone volume density mainly by inhibiting bone resorption. However, in a mouse ovariectomy (OVX) model for osteoporosis, OS effectively rescues bone loss by increasing bone formation and markedly restraining bone resorption. The differential effect of exogenous OS in the OVX vs. intact animals is apparently a result of an OVX-induced decrease in skeletal OS levels. These data show that OS is a previously unexplored lipid regulator of bone remodeling. It represents a lead to antiosteoporotic drug discovery, advantageous to currently available therapies, which are essentially either proformative or antiresorptive.

Bone mass is determined by a continuous remodeling process, whereby the mineralized matrix is being removed by osteoclasts and subsequently replaced with newly formed bone tissue produced by osteoblasts. Here we report the presence of endogenous amides of long-chain fatty acids with amino acids or with ethanolamine (N-acyl amides) in mouse bone. Of these compounds, N-oleoyl-l-serine (OS) had the highest activity in an osteoblast proliferation assay. In these cells, OS triggers a Gi-protein-coupled receptor and Erk1/2. It also mitigates osteoclast number by promoting osteoclast apoptosis through the inhibition of Erk1/2 phosphorylation and receptor activator of nuclear-κB ligand (RANKL) expression in bone marrow stromal cells and osteoblasts. In intact mice, OS moderately increases bone volume density mainly by inhibiting bone resorption. However, in a mouse ovariectomy (OVX) model for osteoporosis, OS effectively rescues bone loss by increasing bone formation and markedly restraining bone resorption. The differential effect of exogenous OS in the OVX vs. intact animals is apparently a result of an OVX-induced decrease in skeletal OS levels. These data show that OS is a previously unexplored lipid regulator of bone remodeling. It represents a lead to antiosteoporotic drug discovery, advantageous to currently available therapies, which are essentially either proformative or antiresorptive.