Who set the time in eighteenth-century Istanbul and how? When did government officials arrive at their offices? How did new technologies like the train and the steamer affect conventions of punctuality and lateness and what were the social and political implications of waiting? This book analyzes the "temporal culture" of the late Ottoman Empire and follows its transformation from the late eighteenth century to the establishment of the Turkish Republic. In an attempt to cope with the rapid changes that swept the region during that period, various bodies of the Ottoman state began to subject work routines to mechanical clocks and schedules in order to achieve higher levels of regularity, punctuality and efficiency. A new time web gradually spread from governmental facilities such as military bases, bureaus and schools to traffic arteries and city centers, subjecting more and more people to clock time and the new conventions linked to it. These changes, in turn, raised difficulties, tensions and even resistance, which were related not only to practical problems of coordination, but also to questions of identity, ideology and cultural orientation. The clocks of the early twentieth century thus showed Ottoman time with all its complexity.

The Adventurous Simplicissimus , the great literary monument of the Thirty-Years War (1618–1648) published in nearly real time – 20 years after it took place – combines a picaresque, historical, satirical, autobiographic, realistic and fantastic novel. This war which devastated Europe was the first example of a "world war" in history. The author, Hans Jacob Christoffel Grimmelshausen (1622–1676), experienced it in person and also took part in it at a young age. As author, he avoids taking sides with anyone of the fighting parties, or, as he declares, "For the future generations I will describe the atrocities that were committed again and again in our German war." The strange adventures of the hero are depicted sometimes with lurid detail, but always with a pinch of humor, ridiculing any admiration of heroes or personality cult. Thus Simplicissimus has become one of the most powerful anti-war literary works of all times.

This book discusses Emile Habibi's stories "The Pessoptimist," "Ekhtayyeh" and "Saraya" and their revolutunary translation into Hebrew by Anton Shammas.

The Jewish Haskalah movement heralded a profound, unprecedented cultural-spiritual revolution in the Jewish world. Beginning in the German lands in the second half of the eighteenth century and subsequently spreading to central Europe, it called for reconstituting traditional Jewish society in line with maskilic values. This volume spotlights the early-nineteenth-century Galician Haskalah. Although a backwater annexed to the Austrian Empire from Poland but two generations earlier, Galicia’s impressive gallery of outstanding individuals and literary activity has granted the Galician Haskalah its place as one of the most productive, influential centers of the Haskalah movement. This collection of articles is based on lectures delivered at the "Revealers of Secrets—200 Years of Galician Haskalah" conference. Held in Jerusalem in 2013, this fifth annual conference for the study of the Haskalah movement aimed to submit the Galician Haskalah to renewed scholarly examination. Organized in five sections, the volume’s twenty-three essays by outstanding scholars portray the variegated aspects of this movement, which ranged from attempts to preserve Jewish identity by nurturing modern Jewish culture in Hebrew to radical attempts to reform traditional Jewish society.

Charles Perrault’s “Puss in Boots” was published in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century in his collection Stories or Tales from Times Past or, Tales of Mother Goose . Yigal Schwartz reveals how Perrault dresses the story in a new and colorful literary garment woven from the fairy tale and the contemporary story of the court of Louis XIV. Perrault’s story and the fairy tale both conceal and reveal things about each other and cruelly illuminate the nature of crowds and the royal court. Among the folds of this literary garment, a social, cultural, and political crossroads can be found. And what do the cat’s boots conceal? This question has excited Yigal Schwartz since childhood and is what sent him on a unique, sometimes perplexing, and multifaceted quest for “Puss in Boots.” In this in-depth literary study, Schwartz analyzes the well-known tale and determinedly examines each of its details, comparing style and content. Why does the cat wear boots? Why a miller’s son? Why the Marquis of de Carabas? And why the ogre’s castle? Schwartz draws his answers from a wide range of perspectives—those of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, sociology, and literary studies—all of which meet at the roots of the anxiety he identifies at the foundation of the tale: the anxiety involved in concealment, which is at the same time anxiety about the mask but also about what may not be concealed behind it at all.

Few articles in this issue: Uri Ehrlich and Vered Raziel-Kretzmer | Prose or Poetry? - Clarifying the Eretz Israel Version of the ‘You Smote’ Passage in the Maʿariv Prayer Avi Shmidman | Did Palestinian Qinnot Serve as Seliḥot in the Babylonian Rite? Michael Rand | Interdigitated Piyyutim and the Principle of Polyphonic Performance in Late Eastern Piyyut Ophir Münz-Manor | Analog Piyyut in a Digital World: Towards Computational Study of Payytanic Literature Eden Hacohen | ‘God has made the one as well as the other’ ‒ Parallels and their Deconstruction in Piyyut Dalet of Yannai’s Qedushta’ot

The 33 essays in this book, most of which were published during 1965-1970 in La Stampa , are the diary Natalia Ginzburg never wrote. The essays depict everyday life, its randomness and chaos. Through them she discusses her own self, her literary passions, the thoughts she has while listening to music, watching an opera or a comedy, reading a book or newspaper, or while observing her children and grandchildren. She touches upon subjects like the loneliness of childhood, the dreariness of old age, the belief and disbelief in god. These essays portray an extraordinary portrait of the author as shy, quiet and fragile, but also as determined and aware of the significance of words. Mai devi domandarmi expresses the unique literary quality in Ginzburg's writing, which oscillates between autobiographical and testimonial.

This book offers a cultural biography of Maimonides as a product of his multi-cultural and multi-religious background. It studies “the great eagle” in his multi-faceted historical and cultural context, and highlights the deep impact on him of Islamic culture as a whole: not only his philosophy, but also his legal and scientific writings as well as his correspondences. The aim of the book is twofold. On the one hand, it highlights universal patterns in Maimonides’ thought. On the other hand, it shows Maimonides’ relevance to the study of Medieval Islam. The presentation of Maimonides as a Mediterranean thinker elucidates his consistent interpretation of his own Jewish tradition in contemporary terms, as they were shaped by his Mediterranean legacy.

The book Shamanism and Literary Criticism deals with the unique attention that scholars of art and literature pay to the object of their study. This specific attention is based on a communitarian approach, a special type of research empathy, and a contemplation radically focused on literature, art, and the community of its readers. What do scholars of literature do in a community where literature is created, read, and interpreted by them? What is the attitude of these scholars to literature and its readers? What is the role entrusted to them by their community? This book offers a new theory about the attitude of the study of literature toward literature, art, and communality. It illustrates the theory and its features as a method of research and interpretation in the works of Uri Nissan Gnessin, Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, Shimon Halkin, A. B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Ronit Matalon, Orly Castel-Bloom, and Anna Hermann.

This book focuses on space, borders and ethics in contemporary Hebrew prose written in the shadow of the Occupation and the Intifadas and reads a corpus of works written between 1987 and 2007. Israeli literary representations of the Occupation and the two Intifadas raise critical ethical questions about militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel as a democracy, national identity and its borders, the nature of Zionist education, and the acknowledgment of the Other. The book deals with the portrait of the Israeli soldier, depicts the settings of the Occupied Territories, but also describes life in cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It examines realistic writing as well as fantastic-grotesque, in the works of A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Ronit Matalon, Asher Kravitz, Michal Govrin, and Orly Castel-Bloom and many others.

During the last decades there have occurred significant upheavals in the political and military position of many religious and ethnic communities in the Middle East and North Africa. Communities which had been rejected and discriminated for decades rose to power or strengthened their political position in their countries by means of military struggles. Meanwhile, in Israel/Palestine, the ethnical-religious Jewish minority has become a ruling majority, while excluding the former Arab-Muslim-Sunni majority, following the wars of 1948 and 1976. This book examines these processes.