In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly three thousand years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born. Yona's son Ariel grew up in Los Angeles, where Yona had become an esteemed professor, dedicating his career to preserving his people’s traditions. Ariel wanted nothing to do with his father’s strange immigrant heritage—until he had a son of his own. Ariel Sabar brings to life the ancient town of Zakho, discovering his family’s place in the sweeping saga of Middle-Eastern history. This powerful book is an improbable story of tolerance and hope set in what today is the very center of the world’s attention.

A finalist for World Magazine's Book of the Year! Scholars, journalists, and even politicians uphold Muslim-ruled medieval Spain—"al-Andalus"—as a multicultural paradise, a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony. There is only one problem with this widely accepted account: it is a myth. In this groundbreaking book, Northwestern University scholar Darío Fernández-Morera tells the full story of Islamic Spain. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise shines light on hidden history by drawing on an abundance of primary sources that scholars have ignored, as well as archaeological evidence only recently unearthed. This supposed beacon of peaceful coexistence began, of course, with the Islamic Caliphate's conquest of Spain. Far from a land of religious tolerance, Islamic Spain was marked by religious and therefore cultural repression in all areas of life and the marginalization of Christians and other groups—all this in the service of social control by autocratic rulers and a class of religious authorities. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise provides a desperately needed reassessment of medieval Spain. As professors, politicians, and pundits continue to celebrate Islamic Spain for its "multiculturalism" and "diversity," Fernández-Morera sets the historical record straight—showing that a politically useful myth is a myth nonetheless.

A thousand years ago, Arabs & Jews built a paradise in the southern half of Spain. Everyone had the good life. This was a time of acceptance of differences.

The focus of this volume is on essential themes, images and generic patterns, beginning with a Talmudic legend about four scholars. They, by means of daring mystical interpretations of Scripture, entered a Paradise, representing different means of imaginative reading, perception, memory and application of the law. One of them died, one went mad, another became a heretic and the other came back as a traditional exegete and teacher. Based on that legend, this book examines a small group of late 19th and early 20th century European Jewish intellectuals and artists in the light of their dreams, writings, and moments of crisis. These men and women, comedians in both the sense of stage actors and clowns or witty performers, believed they had entered a new secular and tolerant society, but discovered that there was no escape from their Jewish heritage and way of seeing the world. This monograph looks into the imperfect mirror of cultural experience, discovers a hazy world of illusions, dreams and nightmares on the other side of the looking glass, and sometimes constructs a midrashic conceit of the comical and grotesque screen between them.

A child born in an east European Jewish community retains his memory of life in Paradise in this novel based on Yiddish folklore.