Jewish Identities in East and Southeast Asia

Jewish Identities in East and Southeast Asia
Author: Jonathan Goldstein
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2015-11-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110395460

The Jewish communities of East and Southeast Asia display an impressive diversity. Jonathan Goldstein’s book covers the period from 1750 and focuses on seven of the area’s largest cities and trading emporia: Singapore, Manila, Taipei, Harbin, Shanghai, Rangoon, and Surabaya. The book isolates five factors which contributed to the formation of transnational, multiethnic, and multicultural identity: memory, colonialism, regional nationalism, socialism, and Zionism. It emphasizes those factors which preserved specifically Judaic aspects of identity. Drawing extensively on interviews conducted in all seven cities as well as governmental, institutional, commercial, and personal archives, censuses, and cemetery data, the book provides overviews of communal life and intimate portraits of leading individuals and families. Jews were engaged in everything from business and finance to revolutionary activity. Some collaborated with the Japanese while others confronted them on the battlefield. The book attempts to treat fully and fairly the wide spectrum of Jewish experience ranging from that of the ultra-Orthodox to the completely secular.

Essential Outsiders

Essential Outsiders
Author: Daniel Chirot
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2011-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295800267

Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, like Jews in Central Europe until the Holocaust, have been remarkably successful as an entrepreneurial and professional minority. Whole regimes have sometimes relied on the financial underpinnings of Chinese business to maintain themselves in power, and recently Chinese businesses have led the drive to economic modernization in Southeast Asia. But at the same time, they remain, as the Jews were, the quintessential “outsiders.” In some Southeast Asian countries they are targets of majority nationalist prejudices and suffer from discrimination, even when they are formally integrated into the nation. The essays in this book explore the reasons why the Jews in Central Europe and the Chinese in Southeast Asia have been both successful and stigmatized. Their careful scholarship and measured tone contribute to a balanced view of the subject and introduce a historical depth and comparative perspective that have generally been lacking in past discussions. Those who want to understand contemporary Southeast Asian and the legacy of the Jewish experience in Central Europe will gain new insights from the book.

Jewish Communities in Asia Minor

Jewish Communities in Asia Minor
Author: Paul R. Trebilco
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 1991-05-31
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 0521401208

The book provides an invaluable and coherent description of the life of Jewish communities in Asia Minor.

Jewish Communities in Modern Asia

Jewish Communities in Modern Asia
Author: Rotem Kowner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2023-04-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1009162586

A pioneering exploration of the Jewish communities across the Asian continent and their dramatic rise and fall in modern times

Jews and Muslims in South Asia

Jews and Muslims in South Asia
Author: Yulia Egorova
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2018-10-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199856230

Jews and Muslims in South Asia examines how Jews and Muslims relate to each other in a place where, in contrast to Europe, their perceived attitudes towards one another do not often make headlines. In the European imagination, Jews and Muslims have both been seen as the ultimate "other." At the same time, Western politics and media construct Jews and Muslims in opposition to each other and see their relationship as unavoidably polarized due to the conflict in the Middle East. In this book, Yulia Egorova explores how South Asian Jews and Muslims relate to each other outside of a Western and Christian context, and reveals that despite some important differences this relationship is still intrinsically connected to global narratives about Jews and Muslims. She also shows that the Hindu right have turned South Asian Jewish experiences into a rhetorical tool to deny the existence of discrimination against religious minorities, and that this ostensible celebration of Jewishness masks not only anti-Muslim, but also anti-Jewish prejudice. She argues that South Asia inherited these notions of racial and religious difference from the British during the colonial period, which continue to cause stigmatization and oppression to this day. Jews and Muslims in South Asia is a fascinating new contribution to the academic discussion on anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and their overlapping histories.

Western Jews in India

Western Jews in India
Author: Kenneth X. Robbins
Publisher:
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: Jews
ISBN: 9788173049835

This is the first book describing the roles of Western Jews in South Asian political affairs, medicine, painting, architecture and religion. A time-line summarises their contributions and those of the Indian Jews to the Indian subcontinent. Many of these foreign Jews left behind their Jewish identities. Others remained Jews, but functioned as individuals unconcerned with implementing any "Jewish agenda".

Ethnic and Religious Identities and Integration in Southeast Asia

Ethnic and Religious Identities and Integration in Southeast Asia
Author: Keat Gin Ooi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Cultural pluralism
ISBN: 9786162151262

"This stimulating volume analyzes the impact of ethnic change and religious traditions on local, national, and regional identities. Through the lens of identity, the authors explore and appraise the level of integration within the political borders of Southeast Asian nation-states and within the region as a whole. Case studies include the Bru population in Laos-Vietnam, hill tribe populations without citizenship in northern Thailand, the Lua also in northern Thailand, the Pakistani community in Penang, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Karen Leke religious movement in Thailand/Myanmar, political Islam in Indonesia, Sufi Muslims in Thailand, pluralism in Penang, the Preah Vihear dispute between Thailand and Cambodia, and hero cult worship in northern Thailand. Historians and social anthropologists variously tackle these issues of identity and integration within the kaleidoscope of ethnicities, religions, languages, and cultures that make up Southeast Asia. The result is a rich, multifaceted volume that is of great benefit to students and specialists in unraveling the complexities of national and transnational dynamics in the region." --

Once We Were Slaves

Once We Were Slaves
Author: Laura Arnold Leibman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2021-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197530494

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and--at times--white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race--as well as on the role of religion in racial shift--in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia

The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia
Author: Shinji Yamashita
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2004
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781571812582

In a path-breaking series of essays the contributors to this collection explore the development of anthropological research in Asia. The volume includes writings on Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines.