Review articles

Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics. Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917, Cambridge University Press, 1981

Michael M. Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco, 1862–1962, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1983, xv+372 pp.

Yehoshua Freundlich, ed., Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel, vol. 3, Israel State Archives, Jerusalem, 1983 LIV+758 pp. and Companion Volume, LXXV+229 pp.     

Reviews

The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane, Beatrice Forbes Manz, Cambridge, 1989, xi + 227 pp., including notes, maps, bibliography, index.

The Arts of Persia, ed. R. W. Ferrier, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, 334 pp, $60.00.

Silent Boundaries: Cultural Constraints on Sickness and Diagnosis of Iranians in Israel, Karen L. Pliskin, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, 283 pp., bibliography, index.

Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution, Misagh Parsa, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989, xiii + 348 pp., cloth $40.00, paperback $15.00.

Persian Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marie Lukens Swietochowski and Sussan Babaie, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989, 87 pp.

The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran, Said Amir Arjomand, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, 210 pp., appendixes, notes, glossary, bibliography, and index to p. 283, hardback $21.95.

Iran: From Royal Dictatorship to Theocracy, Mohammed Amjad, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989, 179 pp., including glossary, bibliography, index, cloth $35.00.

Cry for My Revolution, Iran, Manoucher Parvin, Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1987, pp. 383, $14.94.

Her Eyes, Bozorg Alavi, trans. John O'Kane, Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989, 222 pp.

Iranian Short Story Authors: A Bio‐bibliographic Survey, John Green, Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1989, viii + 250 pp., $29.95.

Asrar al‐tawhid fi maqamat al‐shaykh Abi Sa'id, Mohammad b. Monavvar, ed. Mohammad Reza Shafi'i Kadkani, 2 vols., Tehran: Agah, 1366 S./1987.

Colloquial Persian, Leila Moshiri, The Colloquial Series, London: Routledge, 1988, 222 pp., £6.95.

Land Reform and Social Change in Iran, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Utah: University of Utah Press, 1987, 246 pp.

Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. M. Nazif Shahrani and Robert L. Canfield, Research Series No. 57, Institute of International Studies, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1984.

Musaddiq's Memoirs: The End of the British Empire in Iran, Muhammad Musaddiq, ed. Homa Katouzian, London: Jebhe, 1988, lxxxvii + 340 pp., appendixes 46 pp., index 7 pp., cloth $50, paperback $30.

The Pilgrim's Rules of Etiquette, Taghi Modarressi, New York: Doubleday, 1989, 279 pp., $18.95.

Buying Security: Iran Under The Monarchy, Ann Tibbits Schulz, Boulder, San Francisco & London: Westview Press, 1989, xi + 192 pp.

Shi'ism: Doctrines, Thought, and Spirituality, ed., annot., and with an introduction by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Hamid Dabashi, and Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988, xviii + 401 pp., cloth $73.50, paper $24.50.

Expectation of the Millennium: Shi'ism in History, ed., annot., and with an introduction by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Hamid Dabashi, and Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, xxxiii + 460 pp., cloth $73.50, paper $24.50.     

Civil War heritage as American diplomacy, 1957–1965

This paper explores the role of Civil War heritage in U.S. public diplomacy during the Cold War era. Especially during the celebration of the Civil War’s centennial, between 1961 and 1965, the Americans endeavoured to harness the conflict’s heritage to promote U.S. interests in Europe. How they intended to do this is demonstrated primarily through an examination of Colonel Sidney Morgan’s mission to Europe to find how the commemoration of the Civil War could be used for public diplomacy. Additionally, by exploring how Civil War heritage was spread and used in the British public sphere, the paper examines and underlines the key role saved to unofficial cultural agents, such as Civil War re-enactment clubs and private people, in heritage diplomacy. The focus on unofficial agents and networks enable this study to show how heritage diplomacy works at the un-institutionalised level and to explore the interaction between the official and unofficial level in heritage diplomacy. The historical perspective and methodology cast new light on the use of history, historical memory and heritage for diplomatic ends and introduces both historians and heritage scholars with new avenues to explore, such as the role of memory and historical consciousness in shaping international relations.     

THE SHTETL—THE JEWISH SMALL TOWN IN EASTERN EUROPE

The Jewish town (shtetl) in Eastern Europe existed for hundreds of years as an unique cultural world, a world completely vanished since World War II. The large majority of the towns was small—90% being no larger than 5,000 people. The Jews of the shtetl did not live to feel the full extent of technological change because most of them, their settlements and their entire culture were razed by the flames of the war. In this study, an attempt is made to reconstruct the spatial structure of the shtetl and the arrangement of the elements by using the Core and Periphery Model.     

Rethinking Canaanite Palaces? The Palatial Economy of Tel Kabri during the Middle Bronze Age

Here we explore aspects of Canaanite palatial economy through an analysis of finds from the Middle Bronze Age palace at Tel Kabri, a 34 ha site located in the western Galilee of modern day Israel. The palace was founded in the middle part of the MBA I period, and continued without interruption until an advanced part of the MBA II period. Despite the fact that the Kabri palace was vast (perhaps up to 6000?sq?m), functioned as the center of a polity, and could commission wall and floor paintings in an Aegean style, there are no signs of literate administration, or even administrative use of sealings. Patterns of animal husbandry, textile production, pottery manufacture and consumption, and storage within the palace all provide evidence that the palace behaved economically much more like an estate than a redistributive center. Our hypothesis is that the palace had aspects of an Oikos economy, i.e., that it functioned as a large household—richer and more populous than other households of the period, but with minimal involvement in the economy of the private sector. This contrasts with the contemporary polities in Syria, such as Alalakh and Ebla, as well as possibly its neighbor to the east, Tel Hazor, which had literate administrations and redistributive economies during this same period.     

Class and nation in the Jewish settlement of Palestine: the case of Merhavia, 1910–30

This article examines the relationship between ideology and settlement in early twentieth-century Palestine by tracing the evolution of one co-operative, Merhavia, located at the heart of the «ideological settlement core» in the northern Jezreel valley. The study begins by looking at how socialist Zionist ideology was redefined in order to endorse permanent settlement where earlier it had rejected it. The article then examines two phases of further ideological change. In the first, class-based strategies were replaced by national solutions which favoured an exclusive Jewish economy. In the second, an «ideology from below» in the form of egalitarian and collectivist values was asserted, with the effect of destroying the Merhavia co-operative while sustaining its main rival, the kibbutz. Far from marking a clash between «ideology» and «geographical realities» the new ideologies provided the most effective long-term solution for settlement, one that would hold sway for over half a century.     

“Measure for measure”: a taphonomic reconsideration of the Kebaran site of Ein Gev I,Israel

We present the results of a detailed taphonomic study of the faunal remains from Ein Gev I, a Kebaran open-air site near the Sea of Galilee, Israel. In an earlier study faunal remains were assigned to bone element and species using a rapid method technique based on the identification of teeth and epiphyses only (Davis, 1974). In this study we identified the maximum number of skeletal elements, including fragments of long bone shafts. We also employed a series of taphonomic analyses to reconstruct the depositional history of the bone assemblage and to investigate subsistence, meat procurement and bone processing strategies. We compared the results obtained by a complete bone sampling method with those derived using a rapid method. The bone assemblage is dominated by mountain gazelle (Gazella gazelle), Mesopotamian fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica) and bezoar goat (Capra aegagrus). The assemblage is characterized by significant density-mediated biases, caused by both human bone processing behaviours and in situ post-burial bone attrition. Our attempts to compare species abundance derived from the two different identification protocols revealed no significant difference between the two sampling methods, both in terms of species diversity (richness and evenness) and skeletal element abundance (SEA). These comparisons contrast previous studies that expected to find ubiquitous head-and-foot dominated SEA profiles in zooarchaeological studies that were based on the incomplete identification of faunal remains.