Without bounds: the life and death of Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana

Without Bounds illuminates the life of the mysterious Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana, a Jewish healer who worked in the Western High Atlas region in southern Morocco and died there in the early 1950s. Impressed by his healing powers and shamanic virtuosity, Moroccan Jews are intrigued by his lifestyle and contacts with the Muslim and the demonic worlds that dangerously blurred his Jewish identity.

Based on interviews with Moroccan Jews conducted in the late 1980s, Without Bounds proposes multipl…

From East to West: the westward migration of Jews from Eastern Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Migration has been a major factor in the life of the Jewish people throughout the two and a half millennia of their dispersion. And yet, the history of the Jewish migratory movements has not been fully explored in Jewish history. While the Jewish migratory movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and especially immigration to the New World, have attracted the attention of scholars, earlier such movements did not. In the present book I propose to discuss such a movement of an earlier …

Anti-Semitic stereotypes without Jews: images of the Jews in England, 1290-1700

Anti-Semitic Stereotypes Without Jews offers an exploration of English history, 1290- 1700, tracing the growth and development of these attitudes. It demonstrates that it is possible for prejudice to thrive even in the absence of a scapegoat group.

Following the expulsion in the year 1290 until 1656, although there was no real Jewish community in England, the molders of public opinion kept a shadowy image of the Jew alive through sermons and religious tracts, travelogues, folklore, rel…

No haven for the oppressed: United States policy toward Jewish refugees, 1938-1945

No Haven for the Oppressed is the most thorough and the most comprehensive analysis to be written to date on the United States policy toward Jewish refugees during World War II. Friedman draws upon many sources for his history, significantly upon papers which have only recently been opened to public scrutiny. These include State Department Records at the National Archives and papers relating to the Jewish refugee question at the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park. Such documents serve as the foun…