Sarah Abrevaya Stein is an American historian of Sephardic and Mediterranean Jewries. [1]
She is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, Professor of History, and holder of the Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA. [1] She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and her B.A. from Brown University.
Stein is the author of ten books. Her work has been translated into Spanish, French, Hebrew, Russian, and Arabic.
Stein is the author of Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century. [2] Her 2008 book Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. [3]
New York Times contributor Matti Friedman has written that "Stein, a U.C.L.A. historian, has ferocious research talents....and a writing voice that is admirably light and human." [4] '
Stein’s books, articles, and pedagogy have won two National Jewish Book Awards, the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award.[ citation needed ] She is co-editor, with David Biale of Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture.
Stein has served as consultant, advisor, and board member for institutions as varied as The Walt Disney Company, Pixar, The World’s Jewish Museum of Tel Aviv, the Skirball Cultural Center, Jewish Story Partners, Facing History & Ourselves, the television series I Love Dick, and universities around the world. She is a frequent speaker and writer on Jewish diversity.
The Romaniote Jews or the Romaniotes are a Greek-speaking ethnic Jewish community native to the Eastern Mediterranean. They are one of the oldest Jewish communities in existence and the oldest Jewish community in Europe. The Romaniotes have been, and remain, historically distinct from the Sephardim, some of whom settled in Ottoman Greece after the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal after 1492.
SephardicJews, also known as Sephardi Jews or Sephardim, and rarely as Iberian Peninsular Jews, are a Jewish diaspora population associated with the Iberian Peninsula. The term, which is derived from the Hebrew Sepharad, can also refer to the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, who were also heavily influenced by Sephardic law and customs. Many Iberian Jewish exiled families also later sought refuge in those Jewish communities, resulting in ethnic and cultural integration with those communities over the span of many centuries. The majority of Sephardim live in Israel.
Cholent or Schalet is a traditional slow-simmering Sabbath stew in Jewish cuisine that was developed by Ashkenazi Jews first in France and later Germany, and is first mentioned in the 12th century. It is related to and is thought to have been derived from hamin, a similar Sabbath stew that emerged in Spain among Sephardic Jews and made its way to France by way of Provence.
The history of the Jews in Turkey covers the 2400 years that Jews have lived in what is now Turkey.
The Jewish people of Bosnia and Herzegovina are one of the minority peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to country's constitution. The history of Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina spans from the arrival of the first Bosnian Jews as a result of the Spanish Inquisition to the survival of the Bosnian Jews through the Holocaust and the Yugoslav Wars. Judaism and the Jewish community in Bosnia and Herzegovina have one of the oldest and most diverse histories of all the former Yugoslav states, and is more than 500 years old, in terms of permanent settlement. Then a self-governing province of the Ottoman Empire, Bosnia was one of the few territories in Europe that welcomed Jews after their expulsion from Spain.
The Kahal Shalom Synagogue is an Orthodox Jewish congregation and synagogue, located in La Juderia, the Jewish quarter of the city of Rhodes on the island of Rhodes, in the South Aegean region of Greece. Completed in 1577, the synagogue building is the oldest synagogue in Greece. The congregation worships in the Eastern Sephardi rite, predominately in summer months only.
Musta'arabi Jews were the Arabic-speaking Jews, largely Mizrahi Jews and Maghrebi Jews, who lived in the Middle East and North Africa prior to the arrival and integration of Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, following their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Following their expulsion, Sephardi Jewish exiles moved into the Middle East and North Africa, and settled among the Musta'arabi.
The American Sephardi Federation, a founding member of the Center for Jewish History, is a non-profit Jewish organization that strengthens and organizes the religious and cultural activities of Sephardic Jews, preserves Sephardic heritage, tradition and culture in the United States, and assists in the publication of books and literature dealing with the Sephardic culture and tradition. The federation also works to further awareness of the former existence of large Jewish communities in the Muslim and Arab world.
By the time the Ottoman Empire rose to power in the 14th and 15th centuries, there had been Jewish communities established throughout the region. The Ottoman Empire lasted from the early 12th century until the end of World War I and covered parts of Southeastern Europe, Anatolia, and much of the Middle East. The experience of Jews in the Ottoman Empire is particularly significant because the region "provided a principal place of refuge for Jews driven out of Western Europe by massacres and persecution."
Conditions worsened for the Jews of Libya after the passage of Italy's Manifesto of Race in 1938. Following the German intervention in 1941, some Jews were sent to camps in continental Europe, where those who survived stayed until the end of World War II.
North African Sephardim are a distinct sub-group of Sephardi Jews, who descend from exiled Iberian Jewish families of the late 15th century and North African Maghrebi Jewish communities.
Eastern Sephardim are a distinctive sub-group of Sephardic Jews mostly descended from Jewish families which were exiled from Iberia in the 15th century, following the Alhambra Decree of 1492 in Spain and a similar decree in Portugal five years later. This branch of descendants of Iberian Jews settled across the Eastern Mediterranean.
Moshe ben Rafael Attias, also known as Moshe Rafajlović and Zeki Effendi, was a Bosnian Jew who became a scholar of the Islamic faith and of medieval Persian literature.
Balkan Jews refers to Jews who live or lived in the Balkans.
Aron Rodrigue is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University.
Le Jeune Turc was a French language pro-CUP Zionist newspaper published in the late Ottoman Empire. It was one of two leading Zionist publications in Istanbul. The other one was L'Aurore which was also published in French. However, the circulation of Le Jeune Turc was much higher than that of L'Aurore, 15,000 copies and 1,500 copies, respectively. The newspaper had Vladimir Jabotinsky, a prominent member of the Zionist Organization, as editor-in-chief, and included the participation of such important Jewish figures as the revolutionary Alexander Parvus.
Žamila Andžela Kolonomos was a Sephardi Jewish partisan, writer, academic, and political activist in what is now North Macedonia.
Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington. He is descended from Greek Sephardic Jews who emigrated to the United States in the 1920s.
Zvi Hirsch Koretz, also written as Tzevi or SeviKoretz, was an Ashkenazi Jew who served as the Chief Rabbi of Saloniki's Jewish community from 1933 to 1945. His role as president of the Judenrat during World War II has been called into controversy, with many accusing him of being a Nazi collaborator.
La Epoca was a Ladino language newspaper published between 1875 and 1911 in Thessaloniki, Ottoman Empire. Published nearly for forty years it was the leading Ladino publication in the Empire and first Ladino newspaper in Thessaloniki.