Publication date:
15 July 2009Length of book:
240 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersDimensions:
238x162mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780742566156
In this first comprehensive history in English of the Jews of Hebron, Jerold S. Auerbach explores one of the oldest and most vilified Jewish communities in the world. Spanning three thousand years, from the biblical narrative of Abraham's purchase of a burial cave for Sarah to the violent present, it offers a controversial analysis of a community located at the crossroads of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over national boundaries and the internal Israeli struggle over the meaning of Jewish statehood.
Hebron Jews sharply challenges conventional Zionist historiography and current media understanding by presenting a community of memory deeply embedded in Zionist history and Jewish tradition. Auerbach shows how the blending of religion and nationalism—Orthodoxy and Zionism—embodied in Hebron Jews is at the core of the struggle within Israel to define the meaning of a Jewish state.
Hebron Jews sharply challenges conventional Zionist historiography and current media understanding by presenting a community of memory deeply embedded in Zionist history and Jewish tradition. Auerbach shows how the blending of religion and nationalism—Orthodoxy and Zionism—embodied in Hebron Jews is at the core of the struggle within Israel to define the meaning of a Jewish state.
Auerbach gives a passionate account of the Jewish presence in Hebron, and in reading the book the reader can truly comprehend what lures Jews to that dangerous place....This is a worthwhile achievement. His book is a long-needed contribution of a serious scholar to an ongoing academic debate, in which the Hebron Jews were left without a decisive, unapologetic, systematically argued voice.