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From Les Petites Jérusalems to Jerusalem: North African Postcolonial Racialization and Orthodoxy
Author(s): Everett, Samuel Sami
Date: 2022
Topics: Aliyah, Baal Teshuvah, Hassidim, North African Jewry, Orthodox Judaism, Main Topic: Other, Jewish - Muslim Relations
Abstract: In this paper I engage with identification to North Africa within the return to religion (teshuvah and Aliyah) for the Banlieusard (Parisian suburb-dweller) turned Breslover, Shmuel Benisrah. Through a close analysis of Shmuel Benisrah's trajectory—from Garges, greater Paris, to Jerusalem and from Arab Jew to Breslover—I seek to add complexity to the category of contemporary French Breslov Orthodoxy by revealing its close relationship to and increasing abstraction from postcolonial Maghribi (North African) identification and an intergenerational feeling of social alienation from French national cultural and secular norms. My observations show the power of religious praxis and its importance to new and politicized forms of Breslover community formation in Jerusalem. These community formations include perceived tensions between French Jewish and Muslim groups of North African descent in France and their manifestation in Jerusalem.
Conceptualizing Diaspora: Tales of Jewish Travelers in Search of the Lost Tribes
Author(s): Cooper, Alanna E.
Date: 1996
Topics: Bukharian Jews, Ethnography, Film, Main Topic: Culture and Heritage
Abstract: I met Simcha Jacobovici in 1998 while doing my dissertation research in Uzbekistan. Long-haired, fair-skinned, and dressed in American garb, he was clearly an outsider like myself, and we introduced ourselves. I told him I was a cultural anthropologist doing fieldwork among the Bukharan Jews. He told me that he was a filmmaker collecting footage for a documentary about the ten lost tribes. I had heard the theory that the Bukharan Jews were among the lost Israelite tribes, but I considered it far-fetched and had trouble taking Simcha's enthusiasm about the possibility seriously.