Forthcoming
Jewish Country Houses
Juliet Carey and Abigail Green, photography by Hélène BinetAn exploration of the world of Jewish country houses, their architecture and collections, and the lives of the extraordinary men and women who created, transformed and shaped them.
Country houses are powerful symbols of national identity, evoking the glamorous world of the landowning aristocracy. Jewish country houses—properties that were owned, built, or renewed by Jews—tell a more complex story of prejudice and integration, difference and connection. Many had spectacular art collections and gardens. Some were stages for lavish entertaining, while others inspired the European avant-garde. A few are now museums of international importance, many more are hidden treasures, and all were beloved homes that bear witness to the remarkable achievements of newly emancipated Jews across Europe—and to a dream of belonging that mostly came to a brutal end with the Holocaust.
Lavishly illustrated with historical images and a new body of work by the celebrated photographer Hélène Binet, this book is the first to tell their story, from the playful historicism of the National Trust’s Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire to the modernist masterpiece that is the Villa Tugendhat in the Czech city of Brno—and across the pond to the United States—where American Jews infused the European country house tradition with their own distinctive concerns and experiences. This book emerges from a four-year research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council that aims to establish Jewish country houses as a focus for research, a site of European memory, and a significant aspect of European Jewish heritage and material culture.
About the Authors
Juliet Carey is senior curator at Waddesdon Manor, UK.
Abigail Green is an Oxford historian and author of the award-winning Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero.
Hélène Binet has been described by Daniel Liebeskind as “one of the leading architectural photographers of the world."
The Martial Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648-1850
Noa ShasharA long overdue study of agunot based on exhaustive research in rabbinic sources, memoirs, and communal records.
Noa Shashar sheds light on Jewish family life in the early modern era and on the activity of rabbis whose Jewish legal rulings determined the fate of agunot, literally “chained women,” who were often considered a marginal group. Who were these men and women? How did Jewish society deal with the danger of a woman’s becoming an agunah? What kind of reality was imposed on women who found themselves agunot, and what could they do to extricate themselves from their plight? How did rabbinic decisors discharge their task during this period, and what were the outcomes given the fact that the agunot were dependent on the male rabbinic establishment?
This study describes the lives of agunot, and by reexamining the halakhic activity concerning agunot in this period, proposes a new assessment of the attitude that decisors displayed toward the freeing of agunot.
"The Marital Knot examines halakhah’s impact at its most consequential and personal. Shashar engages an astounding array of sources and analytical methodologies, and her insistence on combining the theoretical with the processual, the intellectual with the socio-cultural, introduces a critical dimension to the accepted narrative about iggun."
Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg, New York University
"In this insightful book, the complexities of Jewish marital law are brilliantly unpacked. The author skillfully illuminates the struggles faced by agunot, weaving together historical, social, and legal perspectives to offer a deeply empathetic exploration of a crucial topic within Jewish legal and social discourse."
Michael J. Broyde, Emory University, and former director of the Beth Din of America
"The Marital Knot masterfully interweaves women's voices from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, revealing a rich tapestry of law and culture in which human destiny resonantly whispers, seeking in vain to reclaim what was lost, reliant on - yet confined by - halakhic law and societal norms."
Maoz Kahana, Tel Aviv University
About the Author
Noa Shashar is an independent scholar. She writes and teaches about the history of Jewish family life and is the author of several volumes including Not on Bread Alone: The Krell Murachovski Family Histories.
A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel
Amit LevyA history of knowledge transfer from Germany to Palestine.
This study seeks to examine the history of Zionist academic Orientalism—referred to throughout as Oriental Studies, the term contemporary English speakers would have used—in light of its German-Jewish background as a history of knowledge transfer stretching along an axis from Germany to Palestine. The transfer, which took place primarily during the 1920s and 1930s, involved questions about the re-establishment, far from Germany, of a field of knowledge with deep German roots. Like other German-Jewish scholars arriving in Palestine at the time, some of the Orientalist agents of transfer did so out of Zionist conviction as olim (immigrants making aliyah, or literally “ascending” to the homeland) while others joined them later as refugees from Nazi Germany; both groups were integrated into the institutional apparatus of the Hebrew University. Unlike other fields of knowledge or professions, however, the transfer of Orientalist knowledge was unique in that the axis involved an essential change in the nature of its encounter with the Orient: from a textual-scientific encounter at German universities, largely disconnected from contemporary issues, to a living, substantive, and unmediated encounter with an essentially Arab region—and the escalating Jewish-Arab conflict in the background. Within the new context, German-Jewish Orientalist expertise was charged with political and cultural significance it had not previously faced, fundamentally influencing the course of the discipline’s development in Palestine and Israel.
"An engaging story of German Jewish Orientalists who arrived in Mandatory Palestine, either as refugees or as active Zionists and established the School of Oriental Studies at the Hebrew University. Levy explores the dilemmas faced by these scholars, the tensions between European traditions and Middle Eastern reality, and the escalating struggle between Zionism and Arab nationalism in Middle Eastern studies in Israel."
Hillel Cohen, The Hebrew University
"Levy's nuanced history shows that leaders of the School of Oriental Studies made many attempts to lay the foundations for the collaboration of Jewish, Arabic, and Palestinian scholars, though their efforts were often scuttled by nationalist political and economic considerations. A fine model for how to write a fair-minded history of academic institutions in the post-colonial world."
Suzanne L. Marchand, Louisiana State University
"Levy deserves special praise for providing a nuanced history that will be received with great interest by different audiences in the US—Jewish historians, Israel studies scholars, Middle East historians and scholars, Palestine studies scholars, and anyone interested in Orientalism (Said, and unSaid)."
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, New York University
About the Author
Amit Levy is a research fellow in the Department of Israel Studies, University of Haifa. His research focuses on the history of knowledge and migration and their impact on cross-cultural encounters. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the Open University of Israel.