Menahem Blondheim Bücher

The eastern part of the Mediterranean is witnessing some of the most intriguing, and dangerous events in today’s world. It features weak or collapsed states, direct and proxy wars, and a confluence of great power stakes. In recent years a new and significant element has been added to the region’s troubled search for the discovery of substantial treasures of offshore energy. These energy discoveries are widely recognized as a game-changer. This volume investigates the extent of this change and the range of its implications. The Eastern Mediterranean has historically been a meeting point of east and west, of the economic north and south and of three major world Christianity, Islam and Judaism. However, this volume proposes to view the Eastern Mediterranean as a separate “new” region, and not as a mere extension of neighboring continents or even of the Middle East. This analytical frame stands at the center of the book.

The Jewish diasporic experience stands out in its remarkable scope, duration and cohesiveness. Communication is the dynamic mechanism that negotiates the interplay of these factors; hence this volume on Jewish Diasporic Communications. The Jewish Diaspora is unique in another way through most of their exilic experience, Jews did not have a geographical center to which they could orient themselves. The perspective guiding this volume is that the center of the Jewish Diaspora has been the communicative network linking its scattered communities in space, and the media serving its continuity through historical time. This Diasporic network has sustained a common flow of shared content between Jews and Jewish communities, let alone the imagination of connectedness. Thus, Diaspora Jews as Jews, and the People they comprise, existed—to invoke John Dewey—“in communication.” The studies in this volume, spanning antiquity and modernity and crossing disciplinary boundaries, provide together a broad-ranging and in-depth account of how a People can survive for millennia, without a homeland, but in communication.