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Emissaries from the Holy Land: The Sephardic Diaspora and the Practice of Pan-Judaism in the Eighteenth Century

Online ISBN:
9780804792462
Print ISBN:
9780804789653
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

Emissaries from the Holy Land: The Sephardic Diaspora and the Practice of Pan-Judaism in the Eighteenth Century

Matthias B. Lehmann
Matthias B. Lehmann
University of California, Irvine
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Published:
1 October 2014
Online ISBN:
9780804792462
Print ISBN:
9780804789653
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

Emissaries from the Holy Land tells the story of a philanthropic network that was overseen by the Jewish community leadership in the Ottoman capital city of Istanbul between the 1720s and the 1820s in support of the impoverished Jews of Palestine. Putting the notion of Jewish solidarity, Jewish unity, and the enduring centrality of the Holy Land for the Jewish world to the test, the community leadership in Palestine and their allies in Istanbul dispatched rabbinic emissaries on fundraising missions everywhere from the shores of the Mediterranean to the port cities of the Atlantic seaboard, from the Caribbean to India. This book explores how this eighteenth-century philanthropic network was organized and how relations of trust and solidarity were built across vast geographic differences. It looks at how the emissaries and their supporters understood the relationship between the Jewish diaspora and the Land of Israel, and it shows how cross-cultural encounters and competing claims for financial support involving Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and North African emissaries and communities contributed to the transformation of Jewish identity in the eighteenth century.

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