Between 1881 and 1914, nearly three million Jews left eastern Europe, of which about 15,000 settled in Glasgow, "second city" of the British Empire. Their integration was cushioned by a Jewish leadership which balanced community discipline with immigrant innovation-in contrast to London which swallowed ten times as many but doled out philanthropy with a large measure of social control. This is ...

The typology of Yiddish and the name Ashkenaz cannot serve as arguments to support the theory put forward by Das et al. (2016) (Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to primeval villages in the ancient Iranian lands of Ashkenaz. Genome Biol Evol 8:1132-1149.) that the origin of Ashkenazic Jews can be located in ancient Iran. Yiddish is a Germanic, not a Slavic language. The history of the use of the term ...

Human society and its religions and cultures have laid out numerous guidelines, often involving dietary restrictions (Deut. 14:4-5; Lev. 11:2-7). One such set of restrictions still observed by many Jews today relates to the distinction between pure and impure, edible and forbidden mammals (Talmud Bavli, Avoda Zara 35b). The ancient Jewish dietary laws (kashrut) have often perplexed both gentile...

We explored the advantages and disadvantages of using ethnic categories in genetic research. With the discovery that certain breast cancer gene mutations appeared to be more prevalent in Ashkenazi Jews, breast cancer researchers moved their focus from high-risk families to ethnicity. The concept of Ashkenazi Jews as genetically unique, a legacy of Tay-Sachs disease research and a particular rea...

Two studies examined the inductive potential of various social categories among 144 kindergarten, 2nd-, and 6th-grade Israeli children from 3 sectors: secular Jews, religious Jews, and Muslim Arabs. Study 1-wherein social categories were labeled-found that ethnic categories were the most inductively powerful, especially for religious Jewish children. Study 2-wherein no social category labels we...

contrary to other jewish communities of iran, kashan’s jewish community has undergone positive social and political developments during qajar period. although they could never enjoy equal social privileges as citizens, in comparison to other iranian jews and comparing the safavid period, they made considerable achievements in social relationships and political experience. the present research f...

This paper is devoted to the preservation and transformation of historical memory about the Jewish population of Galicia among Ukrainians and explores how memory about Jews functions in the town of Burshtyn, although Jews have not lived there for over seventy years. The study is based on 20 in-depth interviews that were conducted in 2009-2010. The subjects, ethnic Ukrainians born before World W...