Mediterranean Modernity through Jewish Eyes: The Transimperial Life of Abraham Ankawa

Marglin, Jessica M.

doi:10.2979/jewisocistud.20.2.34

Cited by 14 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…This might be because the scrolls themselves have participated in the same idiosyncratic circulation networks of Sephardic migration as the members of the community. Learning about the way a scroll is used in a diverse community is often a complex process of coming to understand the role a congregation perceives itself to play in an equally complex history of human movement across empires (see Marglin 2014). In the process of studying scrolls and their chanting from an ethnographic perspective, I have encountered a range of ways of engaging with a Torah scroll, and I present that range here as three categories of behavior, each revealing a particular attitude towards the condition of exile and diaspora.…”

Section: Chanting Processing Displaymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, when I refer to empire, I refer to a combination of top-down migration orders and more elite movement between and among Christian and Muslim powers. I draw from the work of Marglin (2014), Stein (2008Stein ( , 2015, Schreier (2017), and Everett and Vince (2020). 5 Certain experts can identify scrolls quickly, such as the historians and scribes at the Memorial Scrolls Trust in London: (http://memorialscrollstrust.org, last accessed July 21 2021).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Moroccan Torah Scrolls: Theorizing a Diasporic Afterlife

Webster-Kogen

2022

Cont Jewry

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Torah scrolls are more than ritual objects; when used in a congregation, they take on semihuman characteristics and are given special agency. For Sephardic communities, some scrolls bear witness to the history of migration and trade that has uprooted them over five centuries. This article examines Torah scrolls originating in Morocco or used today by Moroccan communities, arguing that they take on different meaning for the community depending on whether they are used, displayed or guarded. We consider the difference in social meaning between chanting from a scroll and venerating it, and how Moroccan Jewry is impacted by efforts in Morocco, Israel and the diaspora to ascribe ownership of the Torah via networks of patrimony and belonging. Offering an ethnographically-informed analysis of Torah scrolls in London, Essaouira and Tel Aviv, this article demonstrates that Torah scrolls serve as productive members of the communities that own them when they facilitate a thorough understanding of the migration networks that create communities.

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Section: Chanting Processing Displaymentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Moroccan Torah Scrolls: Theorizing a Diasporic Afterlife

Webster-Kogen

2022

Cont Jewry

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“…The traditions that both James and Laila champion converge in other ways: James adheres to the Enkaoua Rabbinim of the Tlemcen rabbinic line, and Laila to the Tariqat Boutichichiya Sufi order whose yearly pilgrimage occurs in the nearby Moroccan border town of Oujda. Both religious orders are politically conservative, even as they eschew politics per se, and both accept the rule of the day, one the Makhzan (the vernacular term for the Moroccan powers that be), the other French imperialism (Spiegel 2015: 39; Marglin 2014: 39).…”

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confidence: 99%

Une Ambiance Diaspora: Continuity and Change in Parisian Maghrebi Imaginaries

Everett

2020

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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This article is an investigation of ethno-commercial exchanges and interactions between Jews and Muslims of North African heritage that takes account of their cross-cultural antecedents and continuities. The ethnographic focus is a telecommunications company called M-Switch located in the Parisian neighborhood of le Sentier, the trajectory of which is part of a broader cultural and economic shift observable in the neighborhood from industry to new technologies. This particular company is a privileged site for witnessing how people work with and across religious differences between Maghrebi Jews and Muslims in France. The ethnography looks at how contemporary, non-nostalgic reconceptualizations of the past are utilized to negotiate an ethnically plural and potentially convivial present. Relationships within the company have a Maghrebi center made up of shared cultural memories, economic interdependency, and changing gender and class relations. More specifically, relationships between Jews and Muslims at M-Switch are often defined by a desire to re-appropriate and adapt a Maghrebi world. This project is complicated by French and geopolitical representations of ethno-religious conflict.

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“…35 In fact, modernity was related to a Mediterranean space that "was defined precisely by the interaction between new political structures (the colonial state) and older forms of transregional connectivity and authority." 36 Although rooted in Western culture and the colonial experience, modernity as an imaginative trope thus offered Middle Eastern Jews the possibility of taking part in the development of Arab nationalism and the Nahda, in addition to the elaboration of models of Jewish cultural and political identity that today are largely lost or forgotten. Lève-toi, Pentaour!…”

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confidence: 99%

A Fragile Cradle: Writing Jewishness, Nationhood, and Modernity in Cairo, 1920–1940

Miccoli¹

2016

Jewish Social Studies

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On the basis of literary texts by four Jewish writers (Georges Cattaui, Emile Mosseri, Albert Staraselski, and Lucien Sciuto), this article tries to understand the models of Jewish cultural and political identity circulating in Cairo during the monarchic period, investigating the intellectual atmosphere of interwar Egypt and the numerous ways in which the Cairene Jewish middle and upper classes narrated their lives vis-à-vis their own ethnoreligious community, Egypt, Europe, and Zionism. Literary representations of Jewishness, nationhood, and modernity suggest that living in Egypt as a Jew meant belonging not only to a (semicolonial) national space, to whose imagination these four writers contributed, but also to a wider Mediterranean lieu de savoir (site of knowledge), at the crossroads of past ethnoreligious legacies and novel feelings of cultural and political belonging.

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Mediterranean Modernity through Jewish Eyes: The Transimperial Life of Abraham Ankawa

Cited by 14 publications

References 34 publications

Moroccan Torah Scrolls: Theorizing a Diasporic Afterlife

Moroccan Torah Scrolls: Theorizing a Diasporic Afterlife

Une Ambiance Diaspora: Continuity and Change in Parisian Maghrebi Imaginaries

A Fragile Cradle: Writing Jewishness, Nationhood, and Modernity in Cairo, 1920–1940

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