Journal articles on the topic 'Jewish-Arab relations – History – 20th century'

The article analyzes modern tendencies in Ukrainian historiography of XIX – and early XX century Jewish pogroms. General works on the history of Ukraine, special works devoted to anti-Jewish violence, and the study of the similar problems, that has been published in the last two decades, are considered. The general context of works, their sources, previous researches influence, conclusions of which the authors came, etc. are analyzed. Reading the intelligence on the pogroms, we can see, that the pogroms were largely the result of modernization, internal migration, the relocation to Ukraine of workers from the Russian provinces of the Romanov Empire and so on. Pogroms are also viewed in the context of social and revolutionary movements. That is, the violence, according to researchers, led to the emergence of Zionism. Also, Jews were actively involved to the left movement, while falling victim to extreme Russian nationalists and chauvinists - the Black Hundreds. We have special works dedicated to the pogroms of the first and second waves, which, however, are not so many. Their authors find out the causes and consequences of the pogroms, the significance of violence for the Jewish community and Ukrainian-Jewish relations, the attitude of the authorities and society to these acts of violence, and so on. Some Ukrainian historians research the problem of pogroms on various issues. Among them are works on the history of Jews from different regions of Ukraine, communities of individual cities, Ukraine as a whole; the history of the Ukrainian peasantry, the monarchical and Black Hundred movement in Ukraine, the revolutionary events of 1905-1907, migration processes in Ukrainian lands, the formation of modern nations, the life and work of prominent figures and more. The authors conduct full-fledged research using a wide source base, including archival materials, which, however, are often factual in nature. This is a disadvantage, because historians are "captured" by the sources on which they rely. We also have conceptual research that refers to a broad historiography of the problem, including foreign. These works often draw the reader's attention to a broader - the imperial, modernization or migration context. It is important, that researchers see actors of Ukrainian history in the Jewish population. Because of this, they are much less interested in the future of the Jews who left the Ukrainian lands than in the researchers of Jewish history.

Both Arab and Western scholars agree that, starting in the mid-20th century, the correlation of Western Europeans with the Crusaders and the extrapolation of the term “Crusade” to modern military conflicts have become an integral part of modern Arab political discourse, and are also widely reflected in Arab culture. The existence of works examining references to the theme of the Crusades in Arab social thought, politics, and culture of the second half of the 20th century contrasts with the almost complete absence of specialized studies devoted to the analysis of references to this historical era in Arab culture in the 19th century and first half of the 20th. An analysis of references to the era of the Crusades in the work of Arab poets before 1948 shows that, already in the period of the Arab Revival, this topic occupied an important place in the imagery of anti-colonial poetry, and not only in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, historically attacked by the Crusaders, but also in other regions of the Arab world. If, before World War I, Arab poets only praised the commanders of the past who defeated the Crusaders, then afterwards the theme of the Crusades was also used to liken the European colonialists to the “medieval Franks”. The authors of the poems containing images from the era of the Crusades were, among others, the participants of the Arab Uprising of 1936–1939 and the Arab-Israeli War of 1947–1949, who set their goal with the help of poetry to mobilize the masses for the struggle.

This paper examines the concept of symbiosis in Islamic history as developed by Schlomo Dov Goitein, the 20th-century Jewish German scholar in the area of Jewish and Arabic studies, and discusses its application to the identity sourcing of Prophet Muhammad in particular. The aim of the study is to review the historical outline briefly on the background and formation of “symbiosis” preceding and in the aftermath of Goitein’s conceptualization and context, following a qualitative research approach with an intertextual criticism to his references and discussing their possible philological aspects in his mindset. The study found that, while the Islamic historical sources presented the relations between Jews and Muslims in the Madina period of Islam as negative, in Goitein’s works, the Jewish perception of early Islamic history is positively grounded on a mid-eight century Jewish messianic-apocalyptical text, namely, The Secrets of Rabbi Simon ben Yohai as traditionally understood in Judaism for describing Ishmaelites as the savior of Jews from Christian oppression. This finding seems to be in explicit contradistinction to the concept of innovative “creative symbiosis” with subversion of historical experience.

Abstract When social work emerged as a profession in the first decades of the 20th century, it was strongly influenced by emancipatory motives introduced by various sociocultural and religious movements, and at the same time devoted itself to the construction and maintenance of a powerful welfare and nation state. Transnational agents and social movements promoted these processes and played a crucial role in establishing and developing national welfare systems and relevant professional discourses. This article examines the gendered construction of the social work profession through the transnational history of early social work between Germany and the Jewish community in Palestine in the first half of the 20th century. By adopting a biographical approach to the specific paths of Jewish women practitioners who had been educated in German-speaking countries, immigrated to mandatory Palestine, and engaged themselves in the emerging field of social work, we will trace the construction of the profession as deeply embedded in social power relations. At the same time, we will trace its (re)construction as led mainly by female pioneers, who were concerned with emancipation, discrimination and migration.

Introduction. The article is devoted to the development of relations between Bulgaria and the Arab countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of relations between Bulgaria and the countries of the Arab East is of interest in the context of the study of the forms, directions of cooperation, reasons for the mutual interest of peoples heterogeneous in ethno-confessional and cultural terms. Methods and materials. The historical-typological, historical-systemic methods and the civilizational approach used in the article allow to analyze the process of the emergence, development and transformation of the Bulgarian-Arab relations in political, trade, economic, cultural areas. Analysis. Before World War II the international mechanisms were being created for the further development of trade, economic, and political ties between the Arab states and Bulgaria together with infrastructure and sea transport routes. The problems in the development of Bulgarian-Arab relations were caused by the difficulties in forecasting of the processes, which were often subordinate to the subjective factor, personal ambitions and emotions of Arab leaders. Bulgarian diplomacy demonstrated the great patience to maintain relations that met the country’s interests. The cooperation between Bulgaria and the Arab countries developed in various forms with noticeable positive dynamics. Political changes in a number of Arab countries and inter-Arab conflicts did not fundamentally affect relations, but caused only temporary difficulties. Despite the fact that the systemic changes, which occurred in Bulgaria in the 1990s, became a restraining factor in the development of the Bulgarian-Arab relations, they were restored due to the mutual interests of the states at the turn of the 20th – 21st centuries. Results. It is concluded that Bulgaria had established diplomatic relations with almost all Arab countries by 1960. The main direction of development of ties until the 1990s was dictated by political and ideological considerations, but trade and economic relations often preceded political ones. Bulgaria had gone beyond the traditional exchange of goods and switched to such forms of cooperation as construction, engineering design, tourism, culture, exchange of specialists, and personnel training. At the end of the 20th century Bulgarian leadership returned to the development of relations with Arab countries, which was dictated by the needs of the market economy development, new political realities and Bulgaria’s attempts to identify its place in the modern world.

History of relations between France and the Islamic world goes back to the first centuries of Hijra, when the Franks first faced the Caliphate and its troops in the Eastern and Western Mediterranean. On the eve of the New times Paris had already developed its numerous contacts with Turkey, Iran and the Arab West — the Maghreb area. The conquest of Algeria (from 1830) formed a basis of the French colonial empire in Africa and Asia with the growing role of Islam in political activities and ambitions of Paris. Millions of Muslims in French colonies contributed to growth of political and economic progress of their metropoly with its pretensions to become a great Muslim power. Meanwhile, thousands of them lost their lives during two great world wars of the 20th century. Waves of immigration gave birth to an impressive Islamic community (‘umma), in France, reaching about a million of residents by the middle of the 20th century. With the growth of Muslim immigration from Africa and the Middle East a number of Muslims among the natives of France also augmented. By the end of the last century the Muslims formed as much as about 10 % of the whole population of France. The “French Islam” born at the dawn of the 20th century. after a century of its evolution became an important civilizational reality of Europe, at times more attractive for the local youth than traditional Christian values, or the new ideals, brought with the winds of globalism, multiculturalism and a “non-stop consumerism”.

The books that are the subject of this review essay comprise three new contributions and one revised edition about a topic that has become paradigmatic in defining scholarly and political approaches to key areas of Middle Eastern history. It has shaped studies of the historical and ideological roots of Arab nationalism, the Arab–Israeli conflict, and the emergence and perseverance of authoritarian regimes in the modern Middle East. The ways that politicians, intellectuals, political movements, and the Arab public related to Nazism and Nazi anti-Semitism have been used to contest the legitimacy of 20th-century Arab political movements across the ideological spectrum. Historians have theorized about the involvement of individuals such as Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini in the crimes of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Eichmann; the roots of Arab nationalist doctrine in German Volk ideas; the mimicry of Nazism in organizations such as the Iraqi al-Futuwwa and Antun Saadeh's Syrian Social Nationalist Party; and Arab public sympathies for Nazi anti-Semitism dating from the 1930s or even earlier. Until recently, European and Anglo-American research on these topics—often based on a history of ideas approach—tended to take a natural affinity of Arabs toward Nazism for granted. More recent works have contextualized authoritarian and totalitarian trends in the Arab world within a broad political spectrum, choosing subaltern perspectives and privileging the analysis of local voices in the press over colonial archives and the voices of grand theoreticians. The works of Israel Gershoni have taken the lead in this emerging scholarship of Arab nationalism. This approach was also the common denominator of a research project on “Arab Encounters with National Socialism,” which the Berlin Center for Modern Oriental Studies (Zentrum Moderner Orient) hosted from 2000 to 2003. Its members included the author of this review and the authors of two of the books under review (Nordbruch and Wildangel). The project used indigenous Arabic sources, especially local newspapers, for a close scrutiny of Arab reactions to the challenge of Nazism in a period when Arabs, especially nationalists, perceived that quasicolonial regimes undermined the ostensibly democratic and liberal ethos of the British and French Mandate powers.

AbstractIn his autobiographical writings, the Russian-Jewish author and the founder of Zionist Revisionism Vladimir Jabotinsky constructed a retrospective self-image, according to which ever since becoming a Zionist early in the 20th century he exclusively clung to a Jewish national identity. This one-dimensional image was adopted by the early historiography of the Revisionist movement in Zionism. Contrary to this trend, much of the recent historiography on Jabotinsky has taken a different direction, describing him, particularly as a young man during the period of his early Zionism in Tsarist Russia, as a Russian-European cosmopolitan intellectual. Both these polarized positions are somewhat unbalanced and simplistic, whereas the figure of Jabotinsky and his worldview that emerge from reading his rich publicist writing in late Tsarist Russia present a far more complex picture of interplay between his deep ethnic-national primordial Jewish affinity, on the one hand, and an array of his different attachments to his non-Jewish surroundings including local, cultural, and civil identities, on the other. Focusing on Jabotinsky’s unexplored journalist writings that address the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, the article discovers a previously unknown identity pattern of the young Jabotinsky—his Russian state patriotism—and traces its relationship to his Jewish nationalism.

This article analyzes the phenomenon of „Bessarabian Olympus” in the cultural and literary life of Jews not only in Bessarabia, but also in the Romanian and world cultural space. The author tries to explain why Lipcani - a small town, produced such a large group of remarkable people. Eliezer Șteinbarg, Iehuda Șteinberg, Leiser Grinberg, Mihail Kaufman, Yankev Șternberg, Moisei Altman - these are just a few representative names for the respective pleiad of Jewish writers. Even a brief review of the history of Jewish national culture from the Bessarabian region leads to the conclusion that the peak of its development took place in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century. The author discusses the links between social and historical memory as multilateral relations, offering the possibility to make a specific portrait of the era and of the people who represent it. The Bessarabia of that time, of the integration of the foreign-speaking population, contrasts strongly with the official data not only of the Soviet sources, but also with those of different studies published after 2000. It is necessary that the scientific analysis of Jewish literature and culture in the interwar period to be carried out in a form as developed as possible, which would allow the scattering of preconceived ideas about the culture and history of Bessarabia.

The author considers the study of the issue of the Jewish population conversion to Christianity in the Turkestan Krai. The article reveals the religious situation in tsarist Russia related to the problems of Jews’ conversion, provides reliable facts of the conversion with regard to the most important Islamic outskirts of the empire - Turkestan, where the overwhelming majority of the population belonged to Islam - over 95%. The author examines the reasons for the conversion of regional Jews to Christianity and the real consequences of this process. The peculiarity of Turkestan made a significant impact on the spiritual life of Jews, on the nature and motives for the adoption of Christianity. In the Central Asian region, Jews were not a homogeneous group; they often had different features of culture and traditions. There were several Jewish communities there: the so-called “European” Jews (who arrived from Russia) led by their own chief rabbi; besides, in Central Asia there lived “native” Jews who got the status of Russian citizens and had their own rabbi. In this regard, it seems interesting to trace the conditions of the conversion of these different groups of Jews to Christianity, their motives and the attitude of official authorities towards them. It is important to note that the Jews of the Turkestan Krai converted not only to Orthodoxy, but also Catholicism, Lutheranism, Armenian-Gregorianism, and other faiths. However, the tsarist authorities believed that the conversion of Jews to non-Orthodox confessions was not enough to free them from the imposed legislative restrictions. In general, the example of the situation in Turkestan allows us to see that the features of the adoption of Christianity and the change in the legal status of Jews often depended on the region in which they were baptized. In addition, it was the factor of belonging to a certain Jewish community that played an important role.

In 2005, historian David R. Roediger published the now-classic Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White in which he recounts how immigrant minorities in the early 20th century secured their place in the “white race” in order to qualify as fully American and be treated with fairness and respect. Muslim immigrants from the Middle-East were no exception to the process described. However, becoming white was a particularly long and arduous journey which eventually led to the 1978 Office of Management Budget directive officially categorizing Middle-Eastern immigrants as white. But the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 sparked new alliances between the various ethnic groups that make up the US Muslim community: Arabs, African-Americans or South-East Asians from all walks of life have joined forces in resisting discrimination and bigotry. Thus, the question arises whether common cultural heritage or faith should be the main force shaping a new collective and visible identity. Also, such process entails a questioning of hierarchies based on socioeconomic status; compared to their African-American coreligionists, American citizens of Arab descent fare much better in terms of education and wealth. The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of 9/11 on the way Arab-American Muslims and their community leaders re-define the boundaries of their collective identity and how they forge bonds of solidarity with indigenous Muslims. It seeks to address two related questions: How do Arab-American Muslims relate to the black-white dualist model or racial binary? What role does class identification play in structuring social relations between Arab and African-American Muslims? While I do not negate the fact that in the US race continues to play a fundamental role in structuring social relations, I argue that it is important to pay close attention to how socioeconomic status may condition the formulation of a group identity.

The Jewish prayer “Birkat ha-Minim” (“Blessing on the heretics”), 12th benediction of Amida, attracts attention not only of Jewish Liturgy researchers, but it is also an important plot in the history of Jewish-Christian relations in ancient period. Throughout the 20th century “Birkat ha-Minim” was read in the context of anti-Judean passages of the New Testament’s books and early Christian polemic treatises. Such works often include New Testament references to the excommunication of the Christ’s followers from the synagogue (John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2). On the other side, for 2nd–3rd centuries’ Christian authors “Blessing” was one of the reasons for the emergence of anti-Jewish sentiments in the Christians’ environment. However, in recent times, a number of scholars, after more than a hundred years break, conducted a paleographic and textual analysis of the most currently known manuscripts, containing the text of the prayer, and published number of its versions, accompanied by a new critical apparatus. These publications have radically changed the understanding of this blessing. For this reason, all previous works either require rethinking or completely outdated. Although recent research allows us more accurately determine the time and place of the creation of manuscripts containing prayer, there is still no consensus on what purpose it was created and who should be understood by the term “Minim”. In addition, to what extent we can link “Birkat ha-minim” with the New Testament passages about excommunication Christ’s followers from the synagogue.

The first periodical in Egypt to focus on women as both subject and audience, Al-Fatat (The Young Woman, 1892), heralded the founding by women of many periodicals for women in Egypt. The women's press emerged in a time of intense public debate concerning putative intersections of systemic gender relations and gender ideology with anti-imperialist nationalism: what would constitute “national” strength sufficient to assert, or force, an independent existence based on claims to autonomous nation-state status?1Women writing in the women's press, as well as in the mainstream—or “malestream”—press, shaped the debate over how gender did and should inflect social organization and institutional change.2 Equally, male intellectuals and politicians participated in a rhetoric of persuasion, edification, and ambition. When women and men wrote treatises on what was called the “woman question” (qadi¯yat al-mar[ham]a), articles in the women's press challenged, debated, and refined the points of these treatises. Writers approached that fraught “question” from another direction, too, establishing a thriving industry of conduct literature that fed on translations of European works as well as original works by Egyptian and other Arab writers. Books on how to behave as a proper father, a good mother, a fine son or daughter, or a responsible schoolgoer went through numerous printings for a reading public prepared by various rhetorics of nationalism, theology, and reform to bring this debate into everyday life by following the guides for behavior that such literature—including essays in the women's press—supplied.3

This article aims to shed light on activities launched by Russian diplomats and military intelligence officers in the late 19th — early 20th centuries seeking to better ascertain the situation in the two regions of the Arabian Peninsula that were once incorporated into the Ottoman Empire — Hijaz (Western Arabia) and Najd (Central Arabia). It also tackles the highly entangled, and at times extremely tense relations between Turkish authorities and Arabs who lived in these two regions. A body of little-known documents stored in the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire (AFPRE) and Russian State Military-Historical Archive (RSMHA), as well as foreign archives, form the backbone of this article. The author demonstrates that within the period under review both Bedouin tribes and the urban notables more than once rebelled against the Ottoman stranglehold and each time were suppressed by military force. Turkish-Arab relations, especially in view of Ottoman military expeditions into the Arabian regions, drew the intense interest of Russian diplomacy and military intelligence, the latter especially given the likelihood of armed conflict between Russia and the Ottomans was high. This meant that diplomats in the Russian Consulate in Jeddah, who were entrusted with the task of gaining knowledge on how Ottoman authorities leveraged Muslim pilgrimage to influence Russian Muslims who had arrived in Hijaz, recognized that their lives and health were in danger. Russian diplomats were painfully aware that the policies pursued by the UK in those regions were a means to destabilize the situation, especially in light of the smuggling of arms destined for local tribes occurring under the noses of the Ottomans.

The Arab world today is encountering a destructive resurgence of sectarianism, which, up to a few years ago, had been confined to books and rhetorical debates. In the first half of the 20th century, Iraqi sociologist Ali Al-Wardi pioneered the critique of sectarianism in the Arab world. Unlike others, he approached the issue from a specific and unique perspective. His observations of Iraqi history were made from a sociological standpoint that aimed at revealing the impact of sectarianism on Iraqi politics. Al-Wardi's writings were carried out to two phases: the first extends from the early 1950s to the early 1960s; and the second covers the period between the publication of his two books, Study on the Nature of Iraqi Society (the year of publication is unknown) and Social Briefs from the Modern History of Iraq (1971). The first phase focused on Islam's heritage and a number of social phenomena; the second focused exclusively on the study of Iraqi society. A number of factors influenced Al-Wardi's personality and thinking, a fact especially evident in the kind of methodology he used, which was new when addressing the sectarian issue. Based on Al-Wardi's research, this paper traces the historical factors and process that affected the historical development of the divisions separating two main sects of Islam – Shi'a and Sunni – resulting in a duel between them, which led to the configuration of Iraqi society along sectarian lines. It elaborates on the methodology used by Al-Wardi in his studies of Iraqi society, as well as his attitude with regard to sectarianism in modern Iraq. It also explores the intellectual and political influences that helped shape his thinking in this domain and its legacy on sociological thought in the Arab world.

AbstractThe sweeping and far-reaching political, economical and demographical changes in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of 19th, beginning of the 20th century affected profoundly the linguistic situation of the country's Jewish, overwhelmingly Sephardic, minority. Having lost the unity with their brethren on Balkans, the Bosnian Jews had to rely more and more on their relations with other Bosnian ethno-religious communities. It is from this deepened contact with their Serbian, Muslim and Croatian neighbors on one side and from the constant need for new linguistic solutions, brought about by the ever changing reality, that Serbo-Croatian influences (once so superficial) started entering all the spheres of Bosnian Judeo-Spanish, its lexicon, morphology, phonology, syntax, and even grammar. The author analyzes those influences as they are, consciously or unconsciously, reflected in the literature produced by the members of the Sephardic Circle—the Sarajevo-based group of young and idealistic Sephardic intellectuals who tried to fight and prevent the oblivion of Judeo-Spanish language and culture.

In his studio in Beirut in 1929, the young artist Moustapha Farroukh (1901–57) envisioned a composition to change his society. He hoped his oil painting would incite broad support among his fellow Lebanese for a revolution in conventional gender relations and women's participation in the urban social order. He titled the picture The Two Prisoners and based it on a European convention for representing the East: the Nude odalisque (Figure 1). The resulting painting exemplifies the complex role Arab intellectuals of the early 20th century played in the formation of modern art and universal modernity. Leading artists in Mandate-era Beirut felt compelled to paint Nudes and display them as part of a culturing process they called tathqīf (disciplining or enculturing). To a large extent, tathqīf consisted of recategorizing norms for interaction and self-scrutiny. Joseph Massad has revealed that one crucial component of tathqīf was the repudiation of behaviors and desires associated with the Arab Past, such as male homosexuality. An equally important component was the cultivation of “modern,” “masculine” heterosexual eroticism and a dutiful feminine compliance associated with ḥadātha (novelty) and muʿāṣira (contemporaneity). This was accomplished through the use of a genre that was deliberately new and alien in both its material media and its impact on makers and viewers.

My Father’s Wars – Are Our Wars: Review of the Book: Alisse Waterstone (2014), My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century. New York and London: Rutledge Taylor & Francis GroupThe book My Father’s Wars by Alisse Waterston is a structural expression of the need for a new anthropological orientation in history. Waterston chooses to gradually weave the narrative through the methodological directions of intimate ethnography. More precisely, it is a story about the importance of the relationship between micro-history and the fluidity of historical particularisms, between the relations of matrixes of power and reflections on anthropocultural systems of the higher kind. It is here that the value of the complex focalization point in the work is accommodated; it lies in the question in what grammatical person to tell an individual story (which at the same time leaves a strong seal the identity of the descendants) embedded in Jewish cultural history as part of the larger history of war(s) and migration trajectories in the 20th century. Wojny mojego ojca – to nasze wojny. Recenzja książki: Alisse Waterstone (2014), My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century. New York and London: Rutledge Taylor & Francis GroupKsiążka My Father’s wars [Wojny mojego ojca] autorstwa Alisse Waterston jest wyrazem potrzeby nowej orientacji antropologicznej w historii. Waterston decyduje się na stopniowe splatanie narracji, wykorzystując metodologiczne kierunki etnografii intymnej. А dokładniej, jest to opowieść o znaczeniu związku pomiędzy mikrohistorią a płynnością historycznych partykularyzmów, między centrami władzy i refleksją zawartą w systemach antropologicznych wyższego rzędu. Właśnie na tej sferze jest skoncentrowany cel tej książki; zawarty jest w pytaniu, w jakiej kategorii gramatycznej opowiedzieć indywidualną historię (jednocześnie naznaczoną przez tożsamość potomków), osadzoną w żydowskiej historii kultury jako części szerszej historii wojny (wojen) i trajektorii migracyjnych w XX wieku.

The purpose of the paper is to study the struggle for economic dominance of Pochaiv branch of the Union of the Russian People and the Orthodox clergy of Volyn at the beginning of the 20th century. The key factors that influenced the activity of economic and financial institutions that were under the influence of the Black Hundreds are analyzed. The scientific novelty of the study: based on archival documents and materials of the Black Hundreds’ press, the peculiarities of the struggle for the economic dominance of the Black Hundreds and the Orthodox clergy in Volyn at the beginning of the 20th century are clarified, and the results of the activities of the Union of the Russian People and their role in the aggravation of international relations are analyzed. Conclusions. It is proven that since the beginning of its activity, Pochaiv branch of the Union of the Russian People had launched an active and purposeful campaign to create a strong network of primary centers in the region. With the support of the imperial authorities and the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, which played an active role in the process of formation of the organization, the ‘allies’ managed to achieve their goal quite quickly. They put the struggle against ‘non-Russians’ as one of their priority tasks. Taking into account that during the studied period in Volyn, Poles, Jews, and, to a lesser extent, German agrarian colonists played a key role in the economy, just with those ethnic groups the Black Hundreds began the struggle for economic dominance. They saw one of their main tasks in that field of activity in creating a number of small credit societies and opening consumer stores. Covering up themselves with demagogic slogans about Jewish usury, they actively promoted the organization’s ideology through the named institutions with the help of the influence of parish priests. In 1911, thanks to the persistent efforts of the Head of Pochaiv branch of the Union of the Russian People, Archimandrite Vitalii, the Black Hundreds managed to open their own bank, the main declared purpose of which was to help the peasants purchase land and oppose non-Russians in that. Due to the use of demagogic slogans, the Black Hundreds succeeded in achieving certain positive results in their efforts and strengthened their economic position in the region shortly before the First World War. However, that area of activity of the Union of the Russian People contributed to an even greater aggravation of inter-ethnic relations in Volyn during the period under study.

The article explores contemporary historiography of the history of Königsberg University (Albertina), which had existed in East Prussia since 1544 until 1944. Over the course of four centuries there was an official narrative on the history of the university as a stronghold of German culture in the east of the country. After World War II the university history was mainly investigated by German historians, but after the end of the Cold War the interest in this topic increased not only in Germany, but also in other countries. The researchers are primarily focused on two periods – the early modern one (mid-16th – 17th centuries) and the end of the 19th – the first half of the 20th century. A considerable number of topics on the history of Königsberg University, which earlier were taboo or ignored for other reasons, have become a subject of academic interest in recent decades. Discussions arose about the degree of responsibility of university intellectuals for the Nazis’ crimes. New biographies of historians such as Hans Rothfels or Werner Conze force a reader to form a more realistic image of Albertina in the 1930s. The material ofthe university history makes it possible to reconsider the contradictory relations between the German state and Jewish communities as well as to expand understanding of the circumstances of the Jews’ persecution at the beginning of the National Socialistera. The analysis of contemporary historiography shows that, with all its achievements, it retains some stereotypes dating back to the traditional narrative, primarily a lack of attention to the role of women in the university history and the importance of the university as an institution strengtheninga gender order. The paper introduces a number of examples of women scholars that are not fully represented in the history of the university (Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Sophie Brutzer, Elise Jenny Baumgartel). Moreover, the article gives a brief description of Russian historiography. Taking into account the development trends of contemporary historiography, the author considers the prospects of the research devoted to Königsberg University history.

The article deals with travel guides in German language about current territory of Ukraine at the end of 19th – first half of 20th centuries. It is noted that they represent quite a small group of literary sources. Major part of their content is reference information about geography, history, specific features of daily life and household traditions of one region or another, but major function is imposing of normative perception of foreign, alien culture. The most well-known are those, which were issued by publishing house “Baedeker”, as well as those, published in the times of Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. The author analyses image of Jews as ethnic community in the regions of Eastern Galicia and so-called Great Ukraine before the First World War, in the interwar period and during the Second World War. It is emphasized that thorough consideration of image of the Jews through prism of travel guides during dramatic and tragic events of the end of XIX – the first half of XX centuries may open to the readers of the XXI century new perspectives in understanding of such socio-political phenomena, as a state policy towards ethnic minorities; collective auto- and hetero-stereotypes; dynamics of antisemitism from common level of everyday life to discrimination and extermination of Jews. Moreover, travel guides contain various materials for analysis of issues, related to cultural transfer, models of journeys, attractiveness of certain destinations and objects of cultural and historical heritage at the territory of regions, which for centuries were known by coexistence of various ethnic groups and frequent changes of borders. Necessity of usage of interdisciplinary approach was an additional stimulus for research on the subject under consideration. The author stressed that the book of Franz Obermeyer “Ukraine. Land der schwarzen Erde”, as well as the travel guide by Baedeker, 1943, and the travel guide for Kyiv, 1942, were instruments of the criminal Nazi-Propaganda, contrary to publications during Austrian-Hungarian monarchy, which to certain measure can be considered as a source of knowledge about inter-cultural communications and tolerance. But in both cases the character of these books depended on a political and ideological conjuncture. While in the books, published before the WWI, the image of a Jew was presented mainly from the ethnographic perspective, but in Nazi publications during WWII it was transformed into the image of an enemy. But the authors avoided usage of formulations like “judo-bolshevism” or “worldwide Jewish conspiracy”. Most likely, the traditional format of a travel guide as an instrument of inter-cultural communication limited its actual transformation into a primitive racial or anti-Semitic propaganda. Certain attention in the article is given to the soviet travel guides, edited by Alexander Rado and published by All-Union Society of Cultural Relations in the 1920-ies, which were and are still little known.

Summary This article explores Jurjī Zaydān’s contribution to questions that the Arabic language was confronted with at the turn of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. These questions pertained to the capability of Arabic as a medium of communication, its appropriateness to express new ideas, and its suitability for use in education and for naming technological items borrowed from the West. As can be imagined, the pre-occupation of the Nahḍah Arab intellectuals with linguistic matters was immense. Nonetheless Zaydān’s contribution to these debates consists of constant writings in his magazine al-Hilāl (1892–1913), and two books that specifically dealt with linguistic matters. Zaydān’s linguistic views were relevant to the on-going debate in many intellectual circles at that time. He had no doubts about the suitability of ‘simplified’ Classical Arabic in education as the case was proven at the Syrian Protestant College (now the American University of Beirut) in the 1860s. In order to fill the then existing vacuum, Zaydān took it as his responsibility to write (text)books in Arabic for use in Egyptian schools. The suitability of Arabic in education and the capability of the language to adapt itself to new situations was placed in a historical perspective by Zaydān. He argued that much as Arabic had adapted to new orders in the past, i.e., the rise of Islam (7th century), the translation period (9th-10th centuries), so can the language adapt itself to Western ‘imports’ at his time. Again, as if to prove his point and in order to bridge the gap between al-fuṣḥā and al-cÀmmiyyah, the language of the common people, Zaydān adopted a simple style in diction and syntax in his writings. Zaydān, unlike many of his contemporary Arab scholars, followed in the footsteps of many Western scholars, both predating and contemporary to him, by equipping himself with knowledge of many languages, Eastern and Western, and by applying some of these scholars’ methodologies of investigation. In order for Arabic to accommodate new technologies and ideas, the language must be subject to changes, in Zaydān’s view, as it was subject to changes at the rise of Islam in the 7th century and during the 9th and 10th centuries when many translations into Arabic were made. Zaydān rejected calls for the use of dialects in writing, thus arguing that al-fuṣḥā, i.e., the Classical Arabic language, was a unifying bond among Arabic-speaking lands. Zaydān’s actual treatment of language matters are innovative for his time. Arabic, in his view, was subject to change and evolution, not static. He examined the language by placing it in a wider perspective, i.e., in its context in the Semitic family, and in its relations to other non-Semitic languages that Arabic had come in contact with at its varying stages of growth such as Persian and Turkish in the earlier centuries, and French and English in the 19th century. Zaydān’s use of comparative methodology is innovative compared to the ways of studying Arabic at his time. However, Zaydān’s views on language origin and development can be characterized by the criteria of our times as superficial.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not existed since the beginning of time. Hatem Bazian explores the roots of the conflict, locating the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project under the tutelage of British colonial efforts. Bazian’s text is a look at and beyond first-hand accounts, an investigation of and critical analysis of settler practice in relation to similar texts such as Sari Nusseibeh’s Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life, Alan Dowty’s Israel/Palestine, and Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land. Hatem Bazian’s Palestine…it is something colonial is not an introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Readers should possess a basic understanding of the conflict and history of the region over the last century. Nor does this text provide the reader with an unbiased look at the timeline of events since the inception of the Zionist movement. Palestine…it is something colonial instead is a rich critique of the Zionist movement and British colonialism. It investigates the way British colonialism influenced Zionism and how Zionism adopted colonial ideas and practices. Bazian locates Zionism as a settler colonialist movement still at work today, which historically planned and systematically executed the removal of Palestinians from their land, with the aid of the United Kingdom and (later) the United States. Bazian examines Ottoman collapse, the colonization of Palestine by the British, Israel’s biblical theology of dispossession, as well as British colonial incubation of Zionism, Zionism as a Eurocentric episteme, the building of Israel through ethnic cleansing, and the Nakba, all of these culminating in legalized dispossession. Throughout the text, Bazian is able to tie each chapter to the present state of affairs and remind the audience of the trauma of a people forcibly removed. Bazian opens with the straightforward assertion that “Palestine is the last settler-colonial project to be commissioned in the late 19th early 20th centuries and still unfolding in the 21st century with no end in sight” (17). In chapter one, “Dissecting the Ottomans and Colonizing Palestine,” Bazian navigates the biased historiography of the fall of the Ottoman empire, linking the collapse of the empire to the colonizing forces of Europe which sought to ensure access to the newly discovered oil in the region as well as to Asia and Africa. Bazian masterfully steers the reader through the history of European intervention, and in particular on behalf of Christians as ethnic minorities in the Middle East. Europe is historically anti-Jewish; at the turn of the century, Zionism was determined to solve Europe’s “Jewish Problem” and maintain a stronghold in the Middle East, he writes. In chapter two, “Israel’s Biblical Theology of Dispossession,” Bazian explores the biblical roots of Zionist ideology. The chapter opens with a discussion of a contemporary Bedouin tribe being expelled in the Negev. Bazian writes that “the biblical text gets transformed into policy by the Zionist state, by which it then normalizes or makes legal the wholesale theft of Palestinian lands and expulsion of the population”(57) using legal documents such as the Levy Report. These policies create “facts on the ground” which lead to “legalized expulsions.” The Bible was central to the historical development of the European Christian supremacist idea of the Holy Land. The loss of the territory conquered during the Crusades ruptured this notion, a break “fixed” through Zionism. In chapter three, “British Colonialism and Incubation of Zionism,”Bazian begins to address British colonialism and Zionism as complementary. Bazian uses primary texts from British political actors of the time, such as Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Balfour, to establish the anti-Semiticinspiration for British actions of the time. Bazian also successfully uses the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence and the Sykes-Picot agreement to establish the double dealings of the British in the Middle East in the early twentieth century. Bazian uses many primary texts in this chapter effectively, though their organization could leave readers confused. Chapter four, “Zionism: Eurocentric Colonial Epistemic,” continues the themes of the prior chapter as the colonial influence is cemented. In this chapter, Bazian explores the subterfuge and the genius propaganda selling Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land” along with “making the desert bloom”—as if the indigenous Arab people were not there. Bazian frames this chapter within the Zionist ideology of the peoples living in the land being only a barrier to a Jewish state in Palestine. Bazian uses primary sources (e.g., Herzl) to defend the assertion that the removal of the Palestinian people was always a piece of the Zionist plan. Bazian also includes Jewish critical voices (e.g., excerpts from the reporter Ella Shohat) to establish the European Jewish bias against the indigenous Arab peoples, including Sephardic Jews. Bazian that these biases and the effort to remove Palestinians from their land defined the early Zionist movement and the creation of the state of Israel in chapter five, “Building a State and Ethnic Cleansing.” This chapter draws extensively on primary sources: correspondence, reports, declarations, agreements, commissions, and maps. Bazian struggles to organize these rich resources in a clear fashion; however, his analysis matches the richness of the sources. These sources establish the “legalized” systematic removal of the Palestinians from the land by the Israelis in 1948. In chapter six, “The Nakba,” Bazian uses further legal documents and first-hand accounts to trace the forced removal of Palestinians. He pays homage to the trauma while critically dissecting the process of legalizing ethnic cleansing and peddling the innocence of the Israelis to the rest of the world. Bazian profoundly concludes his chapter with the story of a Palestinian boy who witnessed the mass executions of men and women of his village and marched away from his home. The boy, now a man, closed his story with poignant words that capture the horror of the Nakba: “The road to Ramallah had become an open cemetery” (241). After the land was emptied the new state of Israel needed to legally take possession of the Palestinian-owned property. Chapter seven, “Colonial Machination,” elaborates this process: “the State of Israel is structured to give maximum attention to fulfillment of the settler-colonial project and the state apparatus is directed toward achieving this criminal enterprise” (243). The name “Palestine” is erased as a name for the land and the peoples; former colonial and Ottoman laws were twisted to support a systematic theft of the land. Bazian concludes his book with a look to the future: “What is the way forward and Palestine’s de-colonial horizon?” (276). He lays out the options available for true and lasting peace, discounting out of hand the twostate solution as impossible due to the extent of the settlements in the West Bank. He also dismisses both the options of the removal of Palestinians and the removal of the Jewish people. He instead posits a way forward through a one-state solution, leaving how this is to be done to the reader and the people of Israel/Palestine to determine. Bazian has contributed a full-bodied analysis of primary sources to defend his assertion that Zionism has always been a settler colonial movement with its goal being a land devoid of the indigenous people. The organization of the text, the lack of sectioning in the chapters, and the technical insertion and citation of primary sources could be improved for clearer reading. Bazian thoroughly defends his thesis with tangible evidence that Zionism is something colonial, and has been something colonial from the start. This is a text that complicates the narrative of what colonialism is, what the State of Israel is, and who and what Palestine is, together establishing the book as required reading for understanding nuances of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shelby Perez Master’s Divinity Candidate Chicago Theological Seminary

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not existed since the beginning of time. Hatem Bazian explores the roots of the conflict, locating the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project under the tutelage of British colonial efforts. Bazian’s text is a look at and beyond first-hand accounts, an investigation of and critical analysis of settler practice in relation to similar texts such as Sari Nusseibeh’s Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life, Alan Dowty’s Israel/Palestine, and Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land. Hatem Bazian’s Palestine…it is something colonial is not an introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Readers should possess a basic understanding of the conflict and history of the region over the last century. Nor does this text provide the reader with an unbiased look at the timeline of events since the inception of the Zionist movement. Palestine…it is something colonial instead is a rich critique of the Zionist movement and British colonialism. It investigates the way British colonialism influenced Zionism and how Zionism adopted colonial ideas and practices. Bazian locates Zionism as a settler colonialist movement still at work today, which historically planned and systematically executed the removal of Palestinians from their land, with the aid of the United Kingdom and (later) the United States. Bazian examines Ottoman collapse, the colonization of Palestine by the British, Israel’s biblical theology of dispossession, as well as British colonial incubation of Zionism, Zionism as a Eurocentric episteme, the building of Israel through ethnic cleansing, and the Nakba, all of these culminating in legalized dispossession. Throughout the text, Bazian is able to tie each chapter to the present state of affairs and remind the audience of the trauma of a people forcibly removed. Bazian opens with the straightforward assertion that “Palestine is the last settler-colonial project to be commissioned in the late 19th early 20th centuries and still unfolding in the 21st century with no end in sight” (17). In chapter one, “Dissecting the Ottomans and Colonizing Palestine,” Bazian navigates the biased historiography of the fall of the Ottoman empire, linking the collapse of the empire to the colonizing forces of Europe which sought to ensure access to the newly discovered oil in the region as well as to Asia and Africa. Bazian masterfully steers the reader through the history of European intervention, and in particular on behalf of Christians as ethnic minorities in the Middle East. Europe is historically anti-Jewish; at the turn of the century, Zionism was determined to solve Europe’s “Jewish Problem” and maintain a stronghold in the Middle East, he writes. In chapter two, “Israel’s Biblical Theology of Dispossession,” Bazian explores the biblical roots of Zionist ideology. The chapter opens with a discussion of a contemporary Bedouin tribe being expelled in the Negev. Bazian writes that “the biblical text gets transformed into policy by the Zionist state, by which it then normalizes or makes legal the wholesale theft of Palestinian lands and expulsion of the population”(57) using legal documents such as the Levy Report. These policies create “facts on the ground” which lead to “legalized expulsions.” The Bible was central to the historical development of the European Christian supremacist idea of the Holy Land. The loss of the territory conquered during the Crusades ruptured this notion, a break “fixed” through Zionism. In chapter three, “British Colonialism and Incubation of Zionism,”Bazian begins to address British colonialism and Zionism as complementary. Bazian uses primary texts from British political actors of the time, such as Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Balfour, to establish the anti-Semiticinspiration for British actions of the time. Bazian also successfully uses the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence and the Sykes-Picot agreement to establish the double dealings of the British in the Middle East in the early twentieth century. Bazian uses many primary texts in this chapter effectively, though their organization could leave readers confused. Chapter four, “Zionism: Eurocentric Colonial Epistemic,” continues the themes of the prior chapter as the colonial influence is cemented. In this chapter, Bazian explores the subterfuge and the genius propaganda selling Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land” along with “making the desert bloom”—as if the indigenous Arab people were not there. Bazian frames this chapter within the Zionist ideology of the peoples living in the land being only a barrier to a Jewish state in Palestine. Bazian uses primary sources (e.g., Herzl) to defend the assertion that the removal of the Palestinian people was always a piece of the Zionist plan. Bazian also includes Jewish critical voices (e.g., excerpts from the reporter Ella Shohat) to establish the European Jewish bias against the indigenous Arab peoples, including Sephardic Jews. Bazian that these biases and the effort to remove Palestinians from their land defined the early Zionist movement and the creation of the state of Israel in chapter five, “Building a State and Ethnic Cleansing.” This chapter draws extensively on primary sources: correspondence, reports, declarations, agreements, commissions, and maps. Bazian struggles to organize these rich resources in a clear fashion; however, his analysis matches the richness of the sources. These sources establish the “legalized” systematic removal of the Palestinians from the land by the Israelis in 1948. In chapter six, “The Nakba,” Bazian uses further legal documents and first-hand accounts to trace the forced removal of Palestinians. He pays homage to the trauma while critically dissecting the process of legalizing ethnic cleansing and peddling the innocence of the Israelis to the rest of the world. Bazian profoundly concludes his chapter with the story of a Palestinian boy who witnessed the mass executions of men and women of his village and marched away from his home. The boy, now a man, closed his story with poignant words that capture the horror of the Nakba: “The road to Ramallah had become an open cemetery” (241). After the land was emptied the new state of Israel needed to legally take possession of the Palestinian-owned property. Chapter seven, “Colonial Machination,” elaborates this process: “the State of Israel is structured to give maximum attention to fulfillment of the settler-colonial project and the state apparatus is directed toward achieving this criminal enterprise” (243). The name “Palestine” is erased as a name for the land and the peoples; former colonial and Ottoman laws were twisted to support a systematic theft of the land. Bazian concludes his book with a look to the future: “What is the way forward and Palestine’s de-colonial horizon?” (276). He lays out the options available for true and lasting peace, discounting out of hand the twostate solution as impossible due to the extent of the settlements in the West Bank. He also dismisses both the options of the removal of Palestinians and the removal of the Jewish people. He instead posits a way forward through a one-state solution, leaving how this is to be done to the reader and the people of Israel/Palestine to determine. Bazian has contributed a full-bodied analysis of primary sources to defend his assertion that Zionism has always been a settler colonial movement with its goal being a land devoid of the indigenous people. The organization of the text, the lack of sectioning in the chapters, and the technical insertion and citation of primary sources could be improved for clearer reading. Bazian thoroughly defends his thesis with tangible evidence that Zionism is something colonial, and has been something colonial from the start. This is a text that complicates the narrative of what colonialism is, what the State of Israel is, and who and what Palestine is, together establishing the book as required reading for understanding nuances of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shelby Perez Master’s Divinity Candidate Chicago Theological Seminary

This article highlights the positive relations between the Jewish and the Kurdish nations, maintained mainly by Kurdistani Jews until their displacement to Israel in the mid-20th century. These positive relations have been transmitted through their oral traditions, documented by both communities and travelers to Kurdistan, and validated by several scholars who studied the Jews of the region, Kurdistan, and Jewish-Kurdish relations. The dearth of historical documentation of both societies has resulted in a ‘negative myth’ used by the enemies of the Kurds and the Jews to dehumanize them before the 20th century, and therefore delegitimizing their right to statehood in modern times. From the 16th century onward, there is more solid evidence about the Kurdistani Jews and their relations with Kurdish neighbors. There are considerable and certain parallels between the two nations in terms of their oral traditions as well as linguistic and literary practices. The historical ties between the Jews and their neighbors in Kurdistan formed a fruitful ground for the relations between the Jewish people of Israel and the Kurds since 1948. Despite the exodus of almost the entire Kurdistani Jewish population to the State of Israel, Kurdistani Jews have largely retained their identity, culture, and traditions and have effectively influenced Israel’s policy towards the Kurds. The often-secret relations between the Kurdish movement in Iraq and Israel since 1960 played an important role in the global security policy of the Jewish nation in the Middle East, and in effect served to keep Baghdad from becoming involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict on one hand, and allowed the Kurdish liberation movement in Southern/Iraqi Kurdistan to survive on the other. These ties were reinforced by the sense of a common fate and struggle for statehood, persecution and genocides, feeling of solidarity, mutual strategic interests, humanitarian and economic dimensions, in post-1988 Halabja Massacre, the operation of the US led coalition against Iraq in 1991, and 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Since the Arab Spring, the military interventions against the self-proclaimed caliphate, Islamic State (IS), and the referendum for an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq in 2017, this relationship allegedly has extended to include the relationships between Israel and the Kurds in Western/Syrian and Eastern/Iranian Kurdistan as well. Notably, Israel was the only state that publicly supported the creation of an independent Kurdish state. With all the development the Kurdish question has paved in the 21st century, the article concludes that the majority of the Kurds of the 21st century can be described as a ‘pariah people’ in Max Weber’s definition and meditation of the term and Hannah Arendt’s ‘rightless’, who ‘no longer belong to any community’, while describing the different aspects of the political, economic, and cultural calamity of Jews, refugees, and stateless people at the beginning of the 20th century.

Ключові слова: українське селянство, дореформений період, феодально-кріпосницький лад, кріпоснеправо, українська історіографія. Анотація Автор аналізує статті, присвячені дослідженню кризи феодально-кріпосницького ладу, які булиопубліковані на сторінках наукового часопису «Український селянин» у 2001–2021 рр. З’ясовано, що упублікаціях знайшов відображення процес занепаду заснованого на примусовій праці селян-кріпаків сільськогогосподарства і показано наростання зумовлених цим кризових явищ. Наукові напрацювання авторівобгрунтовують висновок про назрілі у той час докорінні зміни у виробничих відносинах в українському селі іприведення їх у відповідність з капіталістичними продуктивними силами. Посилання Barmak, 2006 – Barmak M. V. Hospodarske zhyttia nimetskykh kolonii Volynskoi hubernii (KhIKh – pochatok KhKhst.) [Economic life of the German colonies of the Volyn province (19th – early 20th centuries)] // Ukrainskyi selianyn.2006. Vyp. 10. 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Tradytsii hospodariuvannia yak mirylo ukraino-yevreiskykh vidnosyn na seli(XIX – pochatok XX st.) [Farming traditions as a measure of Ukrainian-Jewish relations in the countryside (19th – early20th centuries)] // Ukrainskyi selianyn. 2002. Vyp. 5. S. 234–239 [in Ukrainian].Rudakova, 2001 – Rudakova I. V. Ideina kryza pravoslavia yak odyn iz chynnykiv polikonfesiinosti v ukrainskomu seli(seredyna XIX – pochatok XX st.) [Ideological crisis of Orthodoxy as one of the factors of multi-confessionalism in theUkrainian village (mid-19th – early 20th centuries)] // Ukrainskyi selianyn. 2001. Vyp. 1. S. 81–83 [in Ukrainian].Taranenko, 2009 – Taranenko O. M. Ahrarna polityka P.Skoropadskoho na storinkakh «Ukrainskoho selianyna»[Agrarian policy of P. Skoropadsky on the pages of «Ukrainian Peasant»] // Naukovi pratsi Chornomorskohoderzhavnoho universytetu im. Petra Mohyly. T.104. Vyp. 91. 2009. S. 39–44 [in Ukrainian].Tovstopiat, 2004 – Tovstopiat L. M. Rozvytok silskoho hospodarstva Zakarpattia v kintsi KhVIII – na pochatku KhIKhst. v otsintsi I. H. Shulhy [The development of agriculture in Transcarpathia at the end of the 18th – the beginning of the19th century. in the assessment of I. H. Shulga] // Ukrainskyi selianyn. 2004. Vyp. 8. S. 42–44 [in Ukrainian].

Nomi Eve’s novel Henna House: A Novel (2014) is the first novel to tackle the history of Jews in Yemen—one of the poorest and most forgotten countries of the world—in English. The novel revisits the last period of the Jews’ history in Yemen before their transportation to Israel in Operation Magic Carpet between 1949 and 1950 and is illustrative of the subordination and suffering of Jews in Yemen. It explores the experience of the Yemenite Jews in the first half of the twentieth-century Yemen and reveals the explicitly racialized association of human repression of Zaydi majority. It also explores the experiences of marginalization and segre­gation in the lives of Yemenite Jews. It raises questions on the relation between religion, politics and minorities and legal implications of the incorporation of a religious minority into the mainstream of national identity. The aim of the present article is to examine the effects of Zaydi discriminatory laws particularly the Orphans’ Decree on the Yemenite Jewish community and explores the experience of the Jewish children under the threat of being uprooted just to be planted in another soil. It argues that Eve has been able to articulate the suffering experienced by Yemenite Jews at the hands of Zaydis and that the novel presents a realistic picture of the Jewish community during the first half of the 20th century.

Following a roundtable discussion at the University of Coimbra on the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel regarding the perspectives and activity of the organisation Breaking the Silence, the journal Estudos do Século XX [20th Century Studies], published periodically by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of the University of Coimbra, deemed this interview worthy of inclusion. This first conversation aims therefore to allow the two ex-soldiers and directors of Breaking the Silence to respond to questions posed by four researches from Group 1 – History, Memory, and Public Policy, of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of the University of Coimbra. Unlike sections such as the “Thematic File”, ‘Interdisciplinary Dialogue” and “Critical Reviews”, which are aimed at publishing humanistic, artistic, scientific or technological texts, the “Interviews” section proposes to share civic-minded or memorialistic responses to questions regarding current but relevant issues in broader intellectual and social terms. Such is the intention, whether by bringing more civilian narratives into an academic journal, or simply noting correlations between humanistic, artistic, scientific or technological knowledge and civic intervention. This interview was documented, on the one hand, due to the ethical and geostrategic importance of the ongoing situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel; and, on the other hand, to highlight the main features and discursive strategy of Breaking the Silence. It is important to remember that this organisation is made up solely of Israeli citizens who have carried out mandatory military service in the Occupied Palestinian Territories; and that their discursive strategy prioritises characterising and contextualising/comparing specific situations in order to explain value judgements and suggestions for how to bring about drastic change. We value the existence of such an organisation within Israeli society that, in view of the grave problems in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, explicitly assumes the status of an association of ex-perpetrators. From this standpoint, Breaking the Silence defends: a) that Israeli soldiers describing in their own words what is really happening is one way of contributing to ending the ongoing systematic violation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories; b) that victims and ex-perpetrators are entitled to support, should they so wish, in their efforts to overcome the effects of the mass violence that has occurred. Avner Gvaryahu and Avihai Stollar’s answers are especially poignant. Whether consciously or not, their respective intellectual rigour and ethical self-expectations seem to correlate somehow with the likes of Benedict de Spinosa and Hannah Arendt. The options set forth are also important owing to both the complexity and lengthy duration of the Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, and from the contradictions experienced in Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Syria. Also considered were the verifiable connections with the overall mindset of the Cold War and the Post-Cold-War period, as well as phenomena such as the Jewish diaspora, anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. As researchers, we try above all to recreate and analyse, to contextualise and compare how communities handle and manage situations in which human rights are violated systematically, even when those responsible for such processes of mass violence are countries under liberal-democratic or democratic regimes. As citizens, we also recognise how important it is to highlight the individual (or small group) behaviour of those notable for their profound intellectual rigour and heightened self-expectations. As has sometimes happened in the past, we hope that, both now and in the future, the example set by the fairer minority will be followed by the majority; a majority composed of perpetrators and those who are indifferent to such events.

The Turkish Republic ended the twentieth century without any significant role in the Middle East. From the end of World War One until the end of the 20th century, Turkey adopted a foreign policy based on isolation from its Arab region and a role that does not exceed its Western allies in international affairs. The Turkish foreign policy could be described as a policy aimed at achieving the security of great powers in the region. However, when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey in 2002, and its attempts to redefine Turkey's role in the area and to formulate a new foreign policy towards its Arab region and to adopt what was known as the "Zero Problems" policy. But Turkey could not abandon the political constraints imposed by its commitments Especially towards the United States of America. The article (From Border Security to National Security: Change in Turkish Foreign Policy towards the Middle East after 2016 - Realistic Perspective-) adopted the Realistic Theory of International Relations as a basis for analyzing the change in Turkish foreign policy towards the Middle East issues after 2016. The article based on the assumption that the failed coup attempt against Turkey on 25 July 2016 has become a pivotal turning point in the political history of the Turkish Republic in general, and especially in Turkey's foreign policy. For the first time in nearly a century Turkey Foreign policy aimed at achieving its national security beyond its geographical borders.

Pakistan was sought as a separate state in the name of securing the interests and identity of Muslims within the Indian subcontinent. Its ideological identification with Islam and Muslims was reinforced by the disadvantages that it found itself having on its emergence in August 1947 in relation to its twin-born country, that is, India, in terms of name, size, resources and a history to draw upon. However, initially, its calling out for a degree of solidarity in the name of Islam had relatively limited success in the context of secular nationalist forces dominating the Muslim West Asia throughout the 1950s and first half of the 1960s. It was in the context of significant geopolitical and economic developments from the late 1960s and 1970s in the region that Pakistan was prompted to re-emphasise the Islamic dimension of its foreign policy, particularly within the framework of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation after its emergence in the late 1960s. It began to use its membership of this forum to undermine Indian positions and interests on a number of issues. It was particularly successful in getting its own position on Kashmir endorsed through various resolutions on the issue that were critical of the Indian position and policies in dealing with the political-cum-militant uprising in the state. However, a number of developments from the latter part of the 20th century, particularly after 11 September 2001 (9/11), introduced a number of fissures and irritants into the Arab-Islamic world that undermined the spirit of solidarity that had characterised the work of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in its initial years of establishment. The changing context has considerably constrained Pakistani options in foreign, regional and domestic policies. Comparatively, in recent years, India has gained greater proximity with some of the oil-rich conservative Gulf Muslim monarchies that exercise a high degree of control in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation because of their financial support for it.

The text deals with (re)interpretations of history in professional contemporary Lithuanian theatre.According to historians, nowadays there are few dominating narratives about Lithuanian history: the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with the grand dukes in the forefront, the only Lithuanian king Mindaugas, and the history of the 20th century wars, occupation ant battles for independence. Based on that, the text provides an attempt to figure out how these narratives are represented and reinterpreted in contemporary Lithuanian theatre with the 20th century stories dominating the repertory of historic performances. Those are both confirming the predominant narratives and reinterpreting them and establishing new relation with personalities and events dominant in memory politics. The text also deals with the narrative of the victim that dominates historic Lithuanian self-perception. Two performances help as examples understanding how this narrative can be strengthened or criticised. The last part of the text presents the place that Polish, Russian and Jewish minorities get in contemporary Lithuanian theatre to represent their versions of history and asks whether contemporary Lithuanian theatre is contributing to the creation of a more involving social environment.

In the history of the Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s reception in modern philosophical thought, a philosophical tradition of German-Jewish origin has a prominent role. Product of a singular “spiritual synthesis”, as observed by Michael Löwy, the thought of Franz Kafka, George Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin has appeared in modern times as the sign of messianic claim for a libertarian, radical, and revolutionary socialism. Bearing in common the experience of not being reconciled with the world and history, this generation of intellectuals from Central Europe had “Jewish messianism” and “German romanticism” as privileged sources of their world-view. The religious concept of redemption and the political notion of libertarian utopia were combined in the trajectory of this German-Jewish intelligentsia that promoted an unprecedented reconfiguration of philosophical thought. It is well-known that the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy traverse the messianic and utopian imagery of this generation of revolutionary intellectuals and, as professor Michael Löwy assertively stated, “the utopian Bloch finds in Dostoevsky elements that legitimize The Principle of Hope: Aliocha Karamazov would be a precursor to the ‘religious kingdom of justice’…”. Such an observation is at the heart of a critical fortune accumulated in the works of Löwy and opens paths of analysis that have yet to be made in relation to the reception of Russian literature in modern Jewish philosophy. Michael Löwy is director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS-Paris) and is one of the most significant and creative intellectuals of today. The Marxist philosopher’s work offers a rare intertwining of socialism and surrealism, and establishes a meticulous approximation between philosophy and literature. The acuity with which Löwy interprets the German-Jewish messianism and romanticism, the tragic negativity and the ethical and human claims brought to light by such a tradition presents us with a revolutionary and libertarian state of being that only has equivalents in the utopian-messianic glimpses we find in the great Russian novels. The concept of “Romantic anti-capitalism”, which made it possible to read the romantic tradition in a revolutionary way, can be interpreted as the fil rouge that connects the world of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to the messianic utopianism of modern Judaism. The reception of Russian literature in the philosophical thought of the 20th century was complex and polyphonic, and the example of Dostoevsky, a thinker who, for Löwy, “is clearly situated on the grounds of the romantic world-view”, becomes significantly emblematic. Although a conservative romanticism has found in the author of The Brothers Karamazov elements that could legitimize the nationalist desire for roots arising from a conservative tradition (Moeller van den Bruck, Goebbels, Heidegger), the utopian-revolutionary interpretation of the Russian writer made by “Jews of German culture” is among the most creative pages of modern philosophy. The set of analyses offered by Michael Löwy on the Jewish and neo-romantic tradition represented by authors such as Kafka, Lukács, Bloch, and Benjamin is an essential material for those who seek to better understand the reception and influence of Russian literature, especially Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in the philosophical constellation of Judaism in the first half of the 20th century. The elective approximation carried out by the Franco-Brazilian philosopher between the “spiritual culture” expressed in the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and the historical condition of Jewish intellectuals in Central Europe appears here as an essential element. An anecdote told by Emmanuel Levinas during an interview with François Poirié reveals that, during the visit of an Israeli from Eastern Europe to his home, the visitor noticed the complete works of Pushkin on the bookshelves and stated: “One immediately sees that we are in a Jewish house”. In the interview we present here and, above all, in the greatness of Michael Löwy’s works, we can find fundamental clues to interpret the spiritual proximity between a Central European Jewish tradition and the great Russian literature. This “attractio electiva”, coming from a neo-romantic Jewish intelligentsia in relation to the theological and utopian residues that are embodied in the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (residues that may be essentially Jewish), can be interpreted as the most explosive element of modern philosophical messianism.

Abstract Since its very inception, the field of social work has acknowledged the importance of place in shaping communal identity, construing shared meanings and generating collective actions. Nevertheless, the analytical framework of place-making, which enjoys growing interest in other disciplines, has little impact on social work and its incorporation into social work community practice is still embryonic. The place-making perspective is particularly relevant to the multiple challenges faced by community practice in the twenty-first century. This qualitative study aims to encourage the inclusion of place-making analytical perspective in community practice research by examining community practitioners’ engagement in place-making processes within the complex context of Israeli Jewish–Arab mixed cities. Based on semi-structured interviews with thirty community practitioners in the public services, the findings reveal that participants were highly engaged in four main interrelated aspects of place-making: shaping the ethnocultural meanings of place, managing the meaning of space in power relations, re-constructing the conflicted meaning of space and framing the history of place. The study illustrates the usefulness of the place-making analytical framework in community practice, especially in the context of increasing contested and divided urban realities.

“The intellect must not only desire surreptitious delights; it must become completely free and celebrate Saturnalia.” (Nietzsche 6) Theory-jamming suggests an array of eclectic methods, deployed in response to emerging conditions, using traditional patterns to generate innovative moves, seeking harmony and syncopation, transparent about purpose and power, aiming for demonstrable certainties while aware of their own provisional fragility. In this paper, theory-jamming is suggested as an antidote for the confusion and disarray that typifies communication theory. Communication theory as the means to conceptualise the transmission of information and the negotiation of meaning has never been a stable entity. Entrenched divisions between ‘administrative’ and ‘critical’ tendencies are played out within schools and emerging disciplines and across a range of scientific/humanist, quantitative/qualitative and political/cultural paradigms. “Of course, this is only the beginning of the mischief for there are many other polarities at play and a host of variations within polar contrasts” (Dervin, Shields and Song). This paper argues that the play of contending schools with little purchase on each other, or anything much, has turned meta-discourse about communication into an ontological spiral. Perhaps the only way to ride out this storm is to look towards communication practices that confront these issues and appreciate their theoretical underpinnings. From its roots in jazz and blues to its contemporary manifestations in rap and hip-hop and throughout the communication industries, the jam (or improvised reorganisation of traditional themes into new and striking patterns) confronts the ontological spiral in music, and life, by taking the flotsam flung out of the spiral to piece together the means to transcend the downward pull into the abyss. Many pretenders have a theory. Theory abounds: language theory, number theory, game theory, quantum theory, string theory, chaos theory, cyber-theory, queer theory, even conspiracy theory and, most poignantly, the putative theory of everything. But since Bertrand Russell’s unsustainable class of all classes, Gödel’s systemically unprovable propositions and Heisenberger’s uncertainty principle, the propensity for theories to fall into holes in themselves has been apparent. Nowhere is this more obvious than in communication theory where many schools contend without actually connecting to each other. From the 1930s, as the mass media formed, there have been administrative and critical tendencies at war in the communication arena. Some point to the origins of the split in the Institute of Social Research’s Radio Project where pragmatic sociologist, Paul Lazarsfeld broke with Frankfurt School critical theorist, Theodor Adorno over the quality of data. Lazarsfeld was keen to produce results while Adorno complained the data over-simplified the relationship between mass media and audiences (Rogers). From this split grew the twin disciplines of mass communication (quantitative, liberal, commercial and lost in its obsession with the measurement of minor media effects) and cultural/media studies (qualitative, post-Marxist, radical and lost in simulacra of their own devising). The complexity of interactions between these two disciplines, with the same subject matter but very different ways of thinking about it, is the foundation of the ontological black hole in communication theory. As the disciplines have spread out across universities, professional organizations and publishers, they have been used and abused for ideological, institutional and personal purposes. By the summer of 1983, the split was documented in a special issue of the Journal of Communication titled “Ferment in the Field”. Further, professional courses in journalism, public relations, marketing, advertising and media production have complex relations with both theoretical wings, which need the student numbers and are adept at constructing and defending new boundaries. The 90s saw any number ‘wars’: Journalism vs Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies vs Cultural Policy Studies, Cultural Studies vs Public Relations, Public Relations vs Journalism. More recently, the study of new communication technologies has led to a profusion of nascent, neo-disciplines shadowing, mimicking and reacting with old communication studies: “Internet studies; New media studies; Digital media studies; Digital arts and culture studies; Cyberculture studies; Critical cyberculture studies; Networked culture studies; Informatics; Information science; Information society studies; Contemporary media studies” (Silver & Massanari 1). As this shower of cyberstudies spirals by, it is further warped by the split between the hard science of communication infrastructure in engineering and information technology and what the liberal arts have to offer. The early, heroic attempt to bridge this gap by Claude Shannon and, particularly, Warren Weaver was met with disdain by both sides. Weaver’s philosophical interpretation of Shannon’s mathematics, accommodating the interests of technology and of human communication together, is a useful example of how disparate ideas can connect productively. But how does a communications scholar find such connections? How can we find purchase amongst this avalanche of ideas and agendas? Where can we get the traction to move beyond twentieth century Balkanisation of communications theory to embrace the whole? An answer came to me while watching the Discovery Channel. A documentary on apes showed them leaping from branch to branch, settling on a swaying platform of leaves, eating and preening, then leaping into the void until they make another landing, settling again… until the next leap. They are looking for what is viable and never come to ground. Why are we concerned to ground theory which can only prove its own impossibility while disregarding the certainty of what is viable for now? I carried this uneasy insight for almost five years, until I read Nietzsche on the methods of the pre-Platonic philosophers: “Two wanderers stand in a wild forest brook flowing over rocks; the one leaps across using the stones of the brook, moving to and fro ever further… The other stands there helplessly at each moment. At first he must construct the footing that can support his heavy steps; when this does not work, no god helps him across the brook. Is it only boundless rash flight across great spaces? Is it only greater acceleration? No, it is with flights of fantasy, in continuous leaps from possibility to possibility taken as certainties; an ingenious notion shows them to him, and he conjectures that there are formally demonstrable certainties” (Nietzsche 26). Nietzsche’s advice to take the leap is salutary but theory must be more than jumping from one good idea to the next. What guidance do the practices of communication offer? Considering new forms that have developed since the 1930s, as communication theory went into meltdown, the significance of the jam is unavoidable. While the jam session began as improvised jazz and blues music for practice, fellowship and fun, it quickly became the forum for exploring new kinds of music arising from the deconstruction of the old and experimentation with technical, and ontological, possibilities. The jam arose as a spin-off of the dance music circuit in the 1930s. After the main, professional show was over, small groups would gather together in all-night dives for informal, spontaneous sessions of unrehearsed improvisation, playing for their own pleasure, “in accordance with their own esthetic [sic] standards” (Cameron 177). But the jam is much more than having a go. The improvisation occurs on standard melodies: “Theoretically …certain introductions, cadenzas, clichés and ensemble obbligati assume traditional associations (as) ‘folkways’… that are rarely written down but rather learned from hearing (“head jobs”)” (Cameron 178-9). From this platform of tradition, the artist must “imagine in advance the pattern which unfolds… select a part in the pattern appropriate to the occasion, instrument and personal abilities (then) produce startlingly distinctive sound patterns (that) rationalise the impossible.” The jam is founded on its very impossibility: “the jazz aesthetic is basically a paradox… traditionalism and the radical originality are irreconcilable” (Cameron 181). So how do we escape from this paradox, the same paradox that catches all communication theorists between the demands of the past and the impossibility of the future? “Experimentation is mandatory and formal rules become suspect because they too quickly stereotype and ossify” (Cameron 181). The jam seems to work because it offers the possibility of the impossible made real by the act of communication. This play between the possible and the impossible, the rumbling engine of narrative, is the dynamo of the jam. Theory-jamming seeks to activate just such a dynamo. Rather than having a group of players on their instruments, the communication theorist has access a range of theoretical riffs and moves that can be orchestrated to respond to the question in focus, to latest developments, to contradictions or blank spaces within theoretical terrains. The theory-jammer works to their own standards, turning ideas learned from others (‘head jobs’) into their own distinctive patterns, still reliant on traditional melody, harmony and syncopation but now bent, twisted and reorganised into an entirely new story. The practice of following old pathways to new destinations has a long tradition in the West as eclecticism, a Graeco-Roman, particularly Alexandrian, philosophical tradition from the first century BC to the end of the classical period. Typified by Potamo who “encouraged his pupils instead to learn from a variety of masters”, eclecticism sought the best from each school, “all that teaches righteousness combined, the complete eclectic unity” (Kelley 578). By selecting the best, most reasonable, most useful elements from existing philosophical beliefs, polymaths such as Cicero sought the harmonious solution of particular problems. We see something similar to eclecticism in the East in the practices of ‘wild fox zen’ which teaches liberation from conceptual fixation (Heine). The 20th century’s most interesting eclectic was probably Walter Benjamin whose method owes something to both scientific Marxism and the Jewish Kabbalah. His hero was the rag-picker who had the cunning to create life from refuse and detritus. Benjamin’s greatest work, the unfinished Arcades Project, sought to create history from the same. It is a collection of photos, ephemera and transcriptions from books and newspapers (Benjamin). The particularity of eclecticism may be contrasted with the claim to universality of syncretism, the reconciliation of disparate or opposing beliefs by melding together various schools of thought into a new orthodoxy. Theory-jammers are not looking for a final solution but rather they seek what will work on this problem now, to come to a provisional solution, always aware that other, better, further solutions may be ahead. Elements of the jam are apparent in other contemporary forms of communication. For example bricolage, the practice from art, culture and information systems, involves tinkering elements together by trial and error, in ways not originally planned. Pastiche, from literature to the movies, mimics style while creating a new message. In theatre and TV comedy, improvisation has become a style in itself. Theory-jamming has direct connections with brainstorming, the practice that originated in the advertising industry to generate new ideas and solutions by kicking around possibilities. Against the hyper-administration of modern life, as the disintegration of grand theory immobilises thinkers, theory-jamming provides the means to think new thoughts. As a political activist and communications practitioner in Australia over the last thirty years, I have always been bemused by the human propensity to factionalise. Rather than getting bogged down by positions, I have sought to use administrative structures to explore critical ideas, to marshal critical approaches into administrative apparatus, to weld together critical and administrative formations in ways useful to both sides, bust most importantly, in ways useful to human society and a healthy environment. I've been accused of selling-out by the critical camp and of being unrealistic by the administrative side. My response is that we have much more to learn by listening and adapting than we do by self-satisfied stasis. Five Theses on Theory-Jamming Eclecticism requires Ethnography: the eclectic is the ethnographer loose in their own mind. “The free spirit surveys things, and now for the first time mundane existence appears to it worthy of contemplation…” (Nietzsche 6). Enculturation and Enumeration need each other: qualitative and quantitative research work best when they work off each other. “Beginners learned how to establish parallels, by means of the Game’s symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature. Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited combinations.” (Hesse) Ephemera and Esoterica tell us the most: the back-story is the real story as we stumble on the greatest truths as if by accident. “…the mind’s deeper currents often need to be surprised by indirection, sometimes, indeed, by treachery and ruse, as when you steer away from a goal in order to reach it more directly…” (Jameson 71). Experimentation beyond Empiricism: more than testing our sense of our sense data of the world. Communication theory extends from infra-red to ultraviolet, from silent to ultrasonic, from absolute zero to complete heat, from the sub-atomic to the inter-galactic. “That is the true characteristic of the philosophical drive: wonderment at that which lies before everyone.” (Nietzsche 6). Extravagance and Exuberance: don’t stop until you’ve got enough. Theory-jamming opens the possibility for a unified theory of communication that starts, not with a false narrative certainty, but with the gaps in communication: the distance between what we know and what we say, between what we say and what we write, between what we write and what others read back, between what others say and what we hear. References Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2002. Cameron, W. B. “Sociological Notes on the Jam Session.” Social Forces 33 (Dec. 1954): 177–82. Dervin, B., P. Shields and M. Song. “More than Misunderstanding, Less than War.” Paper at International Communication Association annual meeting, New York City, NY, 2005. 5 Oct. 2006 http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p13530_index.html>. “Ferment in the Field.” Journal of Communication 33.3 (1983). Heine, Steven. “Putting the ‘Fox’ Back in the ‘Wild Fox Koan’: The Intersection of Philosophical and Popular Religious Elements in The Ch’an/Zen Koan Tradition.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56.2 (Dec. 1996): 257-317. Hesse, Hermann. The Glass Bead Game. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-90. Kelley, Donald R. “Eclecticism and the History of Ideas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 62.4 (Oct. 2001): 577-592 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Pre-Platonic Philosophers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Rogers, E. M. “The Empirical and the Critical Schools of Communication Research.” Communication Yearbook 5 (1982): 125-144. Shannon, C.E., and W. Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949. Silver, David, Adrienne Massanari. Critical Cyberculture Studies. New York: NYU P, 2006. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Stockwell, Stephen. "Theory-Jamming: Uses of Eclectic Method in an Ontological Spiral." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/09-stockwell.php>. APA Style Stockwell, S. (Dec. 2006) "Theory-Jamming: Uses of Eclectic Method in an Ontological Spiral," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/09-stockwell.php>.

Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. 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