Presents a sephardim of Manchester genealogy and history.

Originally published in 1951, this book explores the development in England of the Sephardi branch of the Jewish community, the co-heirs, with their kinsmen in Holland, in Italy, in North America and in the Middle East, of the Golden Age of Jewish history in Spain. Based on archival history from within the community, it was the first full-length history of the Sephardi community in England and describes how this little Jewish community, the first in England since the Middle Ages, grew, prospered and contributed the wealth and influence of London, and eventually producing in Disraeli one of England’s greatest Prime Ministers.

A Global Community is pertinent to current discussions and debates concerning ethnic persistence and assimilation, transnational diasporas, and nationalism."--BOOK JACKET.

This rich, interdisciplinary collection of articles offers fascinating new insights into the history and culture of Sephardic Jewry both in pre-Expulsion Iberia and throughout the far-flung diaspora.

The exploring and defining of identities and societal cultures is a tenuous task at best. With that in mind, this book explores the development of the Jewish community of Leeds, England, and investigates the sense of community developed by its members. The Jewish community of Leeds offers itself as a valuable tool in assessing identity change, both real and perceived. Their varied experiences are not the sole focus of the book, as it also explores their retention of common Judaism and what became of a rich culture when confronted by alien ideas and attitudes. The period spanning the 1880s through to World War I was an era that brought thousands of Jews to Leeds, where most settled in the area known as the Leylands. In exploring their experiences in education, work, uniformed movements, worship and during the war, this book reveals a side of Jewishness in Leeds not fully understood. It develops and extends existing histories of the Leeds Jewish community. Hosting the nation’s third largest Jewish population, the city stands out in many ways, particularly with regards to the paucity of published research on this community. The existing literature reflects divisions. Ernest Krausz, Anne Kershen, Joseph Buckman, Laura Vaughn, Rosalind O’Brien and Ernest Sterne have all approached various different elements of Leeds Jewry. There is a lack of a focused yet broad picture of this key era in which the community fully blossomed. Most of the limited work on Leeds highlights and focuses on specific areas such as tailoring, disharmony or how the community contrasted to Manchester. What is needed is an effort to bring these issues and others together to better discern Britishness and Jewishness as seen by the people of Leeds (both Jew and Gentile). In discerning the unique nature of Leeds Jewry, this book provides a greater understanding of the relationships between majority and minority communities, and the impact of external and internal pressures on their interpretation of culture, belonging and acceptance.

Minority populations are often regarded as being ‘hard to reach’ and evading state expectations of health protection. This ethnographic and archival study analyses how devout Jews in Britain negotiate healthcare services to preserve the reproduction of culture and continuity. This book demonstrates how the transformative and transgressive possibilities of technology reveal multiple pursuits of protection between this religious minority and the state. Making Bodies Kosher advances theoretical perspectives of immunity, and sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, social history and the study of religions.

Taking a new approach to the study of cross-cultural trade, this book blends archival research with historical narrative and economic analysis to understand how the Sephardic Jews of Livorno, Tuscany, traded in regions near and far in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Francesca Trivellato tests assumptions about ethnic and religious trading diasporas and networks of exchange and trust. Her extensive research in international archives--including a vast cache of merchants' letters written between 1704 and 1746--reveals a more nuanced view of the business relations between Jews and non-Jews across the Mediterranean, Atlantic Europe, and the Indian Ocean than ever before. The book argues that cross-cultural trade was predicated on and generated familiarity among strangers, but could coexist easily with religious prejudice. It analyzes instances in which business cooperation among coreligionists and between strangers relied on language, customary norms, and social networks more than the progressive rise of state and legal institutions.