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Foreword
- Brandeis University Press
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Foreword It is with great enthusiasm that we present a volume of the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought devoted to a heterogeneous set of intellectuals who stood at the intersection of Jewish and Arab identities. These Jews from the Arab East, some of whom identified themselves as Mizrahim, wrestled with questions of religious difference and national aspirations in Arabic, Hebrew, and French publications since the confluence of haskala and nahda intellectual movements at the close of the nineteenth century. Moshe Behar and Zvi BenDor Benite open a window onto the vibrant visions for Jewish culture and politics within overlapping Arabic, Islamic, and colonial contexts. The rise of secular nationalist movements, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and the Zionist call for Jewish settlement in Palestine dramatically changed the landscape that Middle Eastern Jews inhabited. After 1948 there would be a whole new set of responses to integration within the State of Israel, a polity and society dominated by elites from Europe or their descendants. Within one decade of statehood, Israel became the regional center for Middle Eastern Jewry. Thus would begin a new era of intellectual ferment, one that would be decisively conditioned by Israel’s cultural and political coordinates. In this sense, this volume traces the largely unacknowledged origins of the reconstituted Mizrahi intellectual of subsequent generations. Eugene R. Sheppard and Samuel Moyn, Editors The Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought ...