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The black Jewish movement in the United States is an African American new religious movement often linked to black gods. This religious thought raises concerns and questions. Firstly, if the assertions of black Jews are factual, what happens to biblical Israelites and their historicity? Secondly, what is the background of black Jews, and how does that relate to biblical Israel? Thirdly, what are the primary religious claims of black Jews? This article is a critical evaluation of the religious-historical, biblical and theological assertions of the black Jews in America. The article argues that the religious-historical antecedents, theological and biblical claims of the black Jews in America are untrue and cannot replace scriptural assertions about biblical Hebrews or Israelites. The claims of black Jews are eisegetical, not exegetical. The hermeneutics of the black Jews is incoherent with biblical tenets and theological integrity. Therefore, the black Jewish movement cannot substitute or reconstruct the biblical historicity of Israelites.ContributionThe article contributes to the subject of new religious movements in the US. It reveals the discourse of black gods within the African American communities, focusing on the ongoing discourse on the black Jewish movement. It explains and evaluates the claims of black Jews in America, refuting their religious-historical antecedents, theological and biblical claims.

This article forms part of a larger project on the apocryphal Book of Judith. It explores the performative nature of turmoil, trauma and tenacity as found in the second half of the book (9–16). The impetus for this investigation is the work done by same author on chapters 1–8 of Judith while focusing on a similar theme. The present article suggests that the exploration of the turmoil, trauma and tenacity to be found in chapters 1–8 does not comprehensively represent all aspects that this topic has to offer to the reader of Judith. The contention here is that the theme of turmoil, trauma and the resultant tenacity in the second half of Judith needs further scholarly exploration as it reveals contrasting developments regarding two rivalling camps, that is, the Israelites and the Assyrians. From a speech act interpretive angle, the article asserts that turmoil, trauma and tenacity are intentionally utilised as a literary tool for indicating honour (Israelites) and shame (Assyrians). This has the potential to persuade the reader to make choices and/or decisions as they read the story.ContributionThe article is a continuation of my work on the first part of Judith (chapters 1–8), as indicated. Its main contribution rests on its unique approach to investigating the performative nature of trauma, turmoil and tenacity in the second part of the book, namely, chapters 9–16. The study of the theme of trauma, turmoil and tenacity in Judith is insightful and thought-provoking and does advance research around this fascinating book.

Based on published primary and secondary materials and oral interviews with some eighty communal and organizational leaders, experts and scholars, this book provides a comparative account of the reconstruction of Jewish communal life in both Germany and in Austria (where 98% live in the capital, Vienna) after 1945. The author explains the process of reconstruction over the next six decades, and its results in each country.The monograph focuses on the variety of prevailing perceptions about topics such as: the state of Israel, one's relationship to the country of residence, the Jewish religion, the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the influx of post-soviet immigrants. Cohen-Weisz examines the changes in Jewish group identity and its impact on the development of communities. The study analyzes the similarities and differences in regard to the political, social, institutional and identity developments within the two countries, and their changing attitudes and relationships with surrounding societies; it seeks to show the evolution of these two country's Jewish communities in diverse national political circumstances and varying post-war governmental policies.

In separate traditions in the HB, the Rephaim are presented either as a living group of gigantic warriors or as shadowy figures of the underworld of Sheol. They are referred to as the rp’um in earlier Amorite Ugaritic texts, in which their role and status are much debated. This paper offers a hypothesis that, first, tracks rp’um/Rephaim antecedent traditions from the Sumerian heroic and funerary practices adopted by the Amorites to the tradition of the rp’um of the Ugaritic literature, and then tracks them on to the HB, through the Amorite connection to Mlk/Molech, in two different regional traditions found in the HB. Literary analysis and cross-cultural evidence regarding the Amorites are used to demonstrate the plausibility of this hypothesis. This paper also puts forth that: the name Hammurapi is a reference to a funerary practice and is a titular name; rpi is employed in its more basic sense of meaning “to restore/mend”; rp’um, following Good, is the passive participle, “restored/healed ones”; and Deut 2:10–11 and the biblical King Og texts do not support the Israelites having encountered living Rephaim warriors. Tracking the heroic and death-culture traditions shows that the antecedents to the biblical Rephaim were likely originally heroic-age warriors who, upon death, were cared for and were appealed to through funerary rituals for some benefit. However, these Amorite traditions were not fully understood by the Israelites when they encountered them and appropriated aspects in their representation of the Rephaim.

Jewish presence in Malabar (also known as Kerala) is attested since the ninth century in various sources and diverse languages. Malabar Jewry emerged out of the medieval Indian Ocean maritime trade networks and in the context of intense inter-cultural contacts between West and South Asia. This book ventures to contextualize Malabar Jewish history in long-distance trade networks and their transition from the medieval Arab maritime trade (900s-1500s).

Since 1999 hundreds of thousands of young American Jews have visited Israel on an all-expense-paid 10-day pilgrimage-tour known as Birthright Israel. The most elaborate of the state-supported homeland tours that are cropping up all over the world, this tour seeks to foster in the American Jewish diaspora a lifelong sense of attachment to Israel based on ethnic and political solidarity. Over a half-billion dollars (and counting) has been spent cultivating this attachment, and despite 9/11 and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict the tours are still going strong. Based on over seven years of first-hand observation in modern day Israel, Shaul Kelner provides an on-the-ground look at this hotly debated and widely emulated use of tourism to forge transnational ties. We ride the bus, attend speeches with the Prime Minister, hang out in the hotel bar, and get a fresh feel for young American Jewish identity and contemporary Israel. We see how tourism's dynamism coupled with the vibrant human agency of the individual tourists inevitably complicate tour leaders' efforts to rein tourism in and bring it under control. By looking at the broader meaning of tourism, Kelner brings to light the contradictions inherent in the tours and the ways that people understandtheir relationship to place both materially and symbolically. Rich in detail, engagingly written, and sensitive to the complexities of modern travel and modern diaspora Jewishness, Tours that Bind offers a new way of thinking about tourism as a way through which people develop understandings of place, society, and self.

Jewish Odesa: Negotiating Identities and Traditions in Contemporary Ukraine explores the rich Jewish history in Ukraine's port city of Odesa. Long considered both a uniquely cosmopolitan and Jewish place, Odesa's Jewish character has shifted since the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine gained its independence. Drawing on extensive field research, Marina Sapritsky-Nahum, examines how the role of Russian language and culture, memories of the Soviet political project, and Odesan's place in a Ukrainian national project have all been questioned in recent years. Jewish Odesa reveals how a city once famous for its progressive Jewish traditions has become dominated by Orthodox Judaism and framed by the agendas of international Jewish organizations embedded in a religiosity that is foreign to the city. Russia's war in Ukraine has forced Jewish identities with ties to Odesa to change still further.

This book is the only comprehensive treatment in any language of a rather \"exotic\" Balkan Jewish community. It places the Jewish community of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the context of the Jewish world, but also of the world within which it existed for around five hundred years under various empires and regimes. The Bosnian Jews might have remained a mostly unknown community to the rest of the world had it not played a unique role within the Bosnian Wars of the early 1990s, providing humanitarian aid to its neighbor Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Watch Francine Friedman's presentation on The Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A Winner of the 2024 Association for Jewish Studies' Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award This book contains a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, alongside the original Hebrew texts, focusing on the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese communities of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. This collection will acquaint the reader with Jews who, following their expulsion, settled in the Ottoman Empire, in Palestine under the Mamluks, in Amsterdam and in Brazil. The period of the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula was a tragic time in Jewish history, but the revitalization of the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish communities in new locales is testimony to the human spirit and determination. The volume includes eight chapters, each built around one responsum from one of the great halakhic authorities of the time. Topics include excommunication in Amsterdam, ʻ agunot , inheritance rights of a converso son, obligatory contracts and breach of agreement, heresy and humanist scholarship, informing on someone to the Venetian Inquisition, and more