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Acknowledgments In retrospect, the inception of this anthology probably dates back to 1990 when we met in Jerusalem as undergraduate students and realized that we were both reading and distributing the now legendary Mizrahi semi-samizdat publication Iton Aher (The other paper). Our friendship is an outgrowth of that one precious Jerusalemite afternoon. Ammiel Alcalay, to whom we owe a two-decade-long intellectual aspiration, has always maintained that writing Middle Eastern Jewish intellectual history should be a collective effort, and this anthology is precisely that. Locating some of the documents included in this collection was made possible because fellow scholars and friends shared our belief in both its importance and the need for it, and thus helped us to obtain them. Ziad Fahmi was kind enough to share with us texts by Ya‘qub Sannu‘; Lital Levy shared with us both essays by Esther Moyal; Amos Noy shared with us Avraham Elmaleh’s essay (in addition to his forthcoming article on Elmaleh); and Abigail Jacobson saved us time, money, and energy by kindly giving us, on a particularly humid day in Tel Aviv, a more readable copy of Nissim Malul’s article than the one we had. It is a pleasure and a duty to recognize the important work that these four scholars have been producing in the field, work that informs this anthology in many ways. Bryan Roby responded positively when we asked him to photocopy in the Givat Haviva Institute Sami Michael’s essay in al-Jadid; Mansoor A. Mirza was kind enough to photocopy for us at the London School of Economics Elie (Eliyahu) Eliacher’s testimony before the Palestine Royal Commission (the Peel Commission). We also thank Nissim Rejwan, Shimon Ballas, Sasson Somekh, and Reuven Snir, all of whom offered us kind advice on Iraqi Jewish intellectuals. For their help in finding other documents, we are grateful to the staffs of the Princeton University Library, Brandeis University Library, International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, the Public Record Office in London, and, in Jerusalem, the Ben Zvi Institute, Central Zionist Archive, and Israel’s National Library. We would also like to thank Eugene Sheppard, Samuel Moyn, and Sylvia Fuks Fried for supporting from the very beginning the idea of assembling an anthology such as this. Phyllis D. Deutsch, editor in chief at the University Press of New England, was kind and diligent in guiding us through the production xvi | A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s process. As editors of the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought, Eugene Sheppard and Sam Moyn were continuously helpful and ready to offer advice throughout. We would also like to thank Jonathan Decter and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on both the proposal and first draft of this anthology. We were also aided by skillful translators. Fuad Saleh carefully translated the Arabic texts by Ya‘qub Sannu‘, Esther Moyal, Murād Farag, Marsil Shirizi, and Yusuf Harun Zilkha. Atef Alshaer translated Sami Michael’s essay from the Arabic. Alistair Ligertwood translated the French texts by Ya‘qub Sannu‘, Joseph Aslan Cattaui Pacha, and Henri Curiel. We thank them for their care, diligence, and rigor. Lucy Mair and Lee Manneberg graciously helped us revise, translate, and edit texts from Hebrew. Jeanne Ferris carefully edited the entire manuscript, identifying and weeding out many problems that still hid in the text. For scholarly , linguistic, and communication considerations, we edited and sometimes emended all the translations in this book; if errors remain, they are ours alone and not those of the translators. The Tauber Institute generously provided funds for the translations, and we thank Miriam Hoffman and Sylvia Fuks Fried for their constant support and care in managing those funds. Thanks also go to Golan Moskowitz for carefully managing numerous drafts of the manuscript. A grant from New York University ’s Humanities Initiative Grants-in-Aid fund and a grant from the Pears Foundation ’s support for the University of Manchester’s library arrived at a crucial moment and facilitated the completion of this project. Conversations with friends and scholars over the last two decades helped us imagine and conceptualize this project. Although they are too many to be mentioned here, some of these friends and colleagues appear in the introduction to this volume as well as in our suggestions for further reading. It was thrilling to realize how much work they have accomplished over the years. This anthology, however, teaches us...

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