Judaism and communism: Hanukkah,Passover, and the Jewish Communists in Mandate Palestine and Israel, 1919–1965

This article explores the mythological, ritualistic, and symbolic aspects of the ways in which the festivals of Hanukkah and Passover were celebrated by the Jewish Communists in Mandate Palestine and the State of Israel. It illustrates how elements of Zionist-socialist culture were adopted by Jewish Communists and integrated in their cultural activities. In a gradual process starting in the1920s and culminating in the mid-1960s, the Jewish Communists created a combination of Marxist ideology and Zionist-socialist cultural practices. However, when a group of young Sabra activists reinforced the Zionist-socialist elements, the balance was undermined, contributing to the rift within Israeli communism.     

‘Remember the Sabbath’: a history of technological decisions and innovation in Orthodox Jewish communities

ABSTRACT

The relationship of Modern Orthodox Jewish communities to technology is mediated by the calendar, following requirements to keep the Sabbath holy. As nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twentyfirst-century inventions reshaped work, public spaces, and domestic living, rabbis intensely debated whether, how, and why observant Jewish people should avoid using electric switches, kitchen appliances, elevators, and other everyday devices on the Sabbath. To justify their decisions, rabbis interrogated minute technical details of these objects. Sabbath prohibitions promoted innovation, as rabbis collaborated with Jewish engineers to create what they judged to be Sabbath-compliant adaptions of everyday technologies. Given that prominent rabbis often disagreed about proper technology use on the Sabbath, Jewish families had the opportunity to decide for themselves what counted as authentic devotion in handling personal and domestic technologies.     

Experimental Pesah or,How do you Eat a Lamb while Holding a Staff in your Hand?

The Passover festival has been the ritual expression of Jewish cultural identity ever since the Old Testament got the form it has today. This article looks at the ways cultural identity was expressed in antiquity, critiques the traditional prioritising of the story of exodus over its biblical ritual expression in understanding ancient Jewish identity and explores various Pesah sacrifice instructions in Exodus 12 as an implicit polemical ritual discourse engaged in constructing a ritual of cultural distinction. The article pays close attention to the tension between the invented and the real of the instructions, and attempts to identify the possible cultural other against whom some of the Exodus instructions were constructed.     

Early Neolithic Agriculture in the Iberian Peninsula

The spread of agriculture in the Iberian Peninsula is documented from at least ca. 5600–5500BC, although botanical data are absent or very limited for large areas. Archaeobotanical information shows from the beginning an imported agrarian system with a great diversity of crops: hulled and naked wheats and barleys, legumes such as pea, lentil, fava bean, vetches and grass peas, flax and poppy. This diversity of plants with different requirements, processing and uses, implies that the first farmers quickly imported or acquired a wide range of agrarian knowledge. Regional and inter-site agrarian differences are discussed in relation to factors like ecology, culture, use of the cultivated plants and management of the risk of crop failure. The adoption of farming resulted in significant ecological, economic, dietary, and social changes for the Neolithic people of Iberia.     

The idea of a Jewish nation in the German discourse about emancipation

This article compares the German conservative conceptualization of Judaism and Jewish emancipation with that of liberals, from the Vormärz (1830–1848) to the Neue Ära (1858–1861). It argues that both conservatives and liberals understood Judaism not merely as a religion but also as a nationality. Yet while liberals acknowledged the national dimension of Judaism as a secularized culture, and even supported Jewish emancipation, conservatives developed a different concept. Since the 1830s, conservatives accommodated nationalism while investing the Christian State ideal with national meaning. This national‐religious construction was imposed on Judaism, which was similarly interpreted now as a synthesis between religion and nationality. In accordance with this conceptualization, conservatives rejected Jewish emancipation on national ground while advocating for the establishment of a Jewish nation‐state. This thesis diverges from the existing literature, in which the reluctance of conservatism to embrace nationalism until the 1870s stands as the consensual view.     

吉林大学图书馆馆藏抄稿本家谱叙录

本将吉林大学图书馆藏的二十一种稀见抄稿本家谱做以叙录,旨在揭示馆藏,亦供家谱研究及爱好参考利用。     

The bishop and the Basques: The diocese of Calahorra and the Basque provinces of Alava and Vizcaya under Bishop Rodrigo Cascante, 1147–1190

Under Bishop Rodrigo Cascante (1147–90), the northern Iberian diocese of Calahorra made its first significant administrative inroads into Alava and Vizcaya since its nominal assimilation of those Basque provinces around 1090. An examination into the fluctuating history of Calahorra's administrative penetration of its Basque provinces during this period highlights the extreme difficulty of this undertaking, which was severely hampered by the opposition of a strong Basque regional nobility. It also reveals a close connection between the fluctuations that characterized Calahorra's administrative fortunes north of the Ebro and the see's turbulent political context, defined by its position straddling a volatile frontier between Castile, Navarre and Aragon. Finally, it provides a useful opportunity to analyse Rodrigo Cascante's changing relationships with the secular powers that competed for the territory of his Riojan see. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the bishop of Calahorra was not a passive partner in these relationships, but actively adjusted his stance with respect to the crowns of Castile and Aragon, primarily in function of how well they did, or might, contribute to the realization of his Basque agenda.     

Massive storage in As Laias/O Castelo (Ourense,NW Spain) from the Late Bronze Age/Iron Age transition to the Roman period: a palaeoethnobotanical approach

The highest platforms of As Laias, a settlement located in northwest Iberia, were used for storage during the Iron Age and until the turn of the Era. In this time-span, the whole hilltop – the croa – was a walled enclosure mostly used for storage and due to recurrent fires affecting the settlement's terraces, abundant plant remains were preserved in overlying wattle and daub storage structures.     

New Models of Religious Diversity: Modern Judaism beyond the Scylla of “Political” and the Charybdis of “Religious”

ABSTRACT

This essay is a response to Julie Cooper’s piece in this volume. In her essay, Cooper insightfully analyzes ways in which the rise of the modern state has imposed “religious” forms of identification on Jews, and she engages a series of early twentieth-century Zionist thinkers who resisted and challenged that problematic imposition. I build on Cooper’s analysis, highlighting ways in which even these thinkers may still be caught up in the very paradigm that they sought to challenge. Yet despite their limitations, I suggest that it is precisely by engaging more deeply with such thinkers that theorists today can extend and continue the critique that they initiated. By gaining greater awareness of the ways in which useful critiques of “religionization” can still succumb to problematic “politicization,” and vice versa, theorists can better position themselves to draw on past texts and thought in order to challenge the hegemony of dominant “political” and “religious” options.     

Pacific Collections at the Australian National University Library – Impacts of the Chifley Flood

The Australian National University (ANU) Library is comprised of five specialist branches. ANU Library collections have been developed over the last 50 years by academics and library staff to support world class research and study at ANU. On Sunday 25 February 2018, flooding inundated the ANU Chifley branch of the ANU Library, resulting in damage to collections related to Australian and general History, Philosophy and Religion as well as some relevant microform resources to Pacific research.     

Five thousand years of atmospheric Ni,Zn, As,and Cd deposition recorded in bogs from NW Iberia: prehistoric and historic anthropogenic contributions

The analysis of environmental archives from across the world has demonstrated that human perturbation of the geochemical cycles of trace metals and the resultant atmospheric metal contamination date back, at least, several millennia. However, an understanding of the local processes and timing of changes in trace metal deposition is also essential for a proper global interpretation. The Iberian Peninsula was a major mining area since prehistoric times and the analysis of environmental archives provides a good opportunity to improve our understanding of the history of mining and metallurgy in Europe. We present the results from three ¹⁴C dated peat cores from the Xistral Mountains (NW Iberia). These records are used to reconstruct past atmospheric deposition of Ni, Zn, As, and Cd. The chronology of the changes in concentrations and metal accumulation rates was found to be concordant in the three bogs, and showed great similarity to total Pb, Hg, and Pb isotope ratios as determined in previous investigations. They present a consistent view of changes in atmospheric pollution and the importance of metals in the development of human societies, especially: i) the first evidence of atmospheric metal pollution 3400 years ago, which is simultaneous with the expansion of the Atlantic Bronze Koine; ii) a pollution event between 2350 and 2150 years ago, associated to the development of so-called Celtic culture (local Late Iron Age); iii) a dramatic increase of metal fluxes in Roman times; iv) a severe and rapid increase in the last 250 years corresponding to the beginning of the industrial revolution in Europe, reflecting the emergence of the new dominant sources of pollution, and v) the increase of long range atmospheric transport of pollutants. Our data suggest that all detected ancient (until ca. 1450 cal BP) periods of enhanced Ni, Zn, As, and Cd accumulation may have had an anthropogenic origin, related to the onset and development of mining and metallurgy.     

Greek women in Latin households of fourteenth-century Venetian Crete

Of all the inhabitants, both Latin and Greek, of the colony of Crete, Greek women of the elite and the poorest unfree Greek women were the most vulnerable to the process of colonization after the Venetian conquest of the island in 1211. An examination of wills and marriage contracts from the fourteenth century offers evidence of the change brought about by the entrance of Greek women as wives into Latin households. The presence there of Greek servant women and slaves, who bore the illegitimate children of Latin fathers, also modified the character of Latin households. The sanctioned and non-sanctioned unions between Greek women and Latin men gave rise, in large part, to a colonial society whose constituent communities displayed more characteristics in common than has previously been thought.