Staff Publications | The Parkes Institute | University of Southampton

The following are some examples of our publications and give a sense of the breadth of research undertaken at the Parkes Institute.

Ambiguous Gender in Early Modern Spain and Portugal

Book Cover — Ambiguous Gender in Early Modern Spain and Portugal

François Soyer

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions conducted a number of trials against individuals accused by members of their communities of being of the other gender men accused of being women and women accused of being men or even hermaphrodites. Using new inquisitorial sources, this study examines the complexities revolving around transgenderism and the construction of gender identity in the early modern Iberian World. It throws light upon the manner in which the Inquisition, medical practitioners and the wider society in Spain and Portugal responded to transgenderism and on the self-perception of individuals whose behaviour, whether consciously or unconsciously, flouted these social and sexual conventions.

Anglo-Jewry since 1066: Place, locality and memory

Tony Kushner

Anglo-Jewry since 1066: Place, locality and memory is a study of the history and memory of Anglo-Jewry from medieval times to the present and is the first to explore the construction of identities, both Jewish and non-Jewish, in relation to the concept of place. The introductory chapters provide a theoretical overview focusing on the nature of local studies then moves into a chronological frame, starting with medieval Winchester, moving to early modern Portsmouth and then chapters covering the evolution of Anglo-Jewry from emancipation to the twentieth century. Emphasis is placed on the impact on identities resulting from the complex relationship between migration (including transmigration) and settlement of minority groups.

The Battle of Britishness: Migrant Journeys, 1685 to the Present

Tony Kushner

This pioneering study of migrant journeys to Britain begins with Huguenot refugees in the 1680s and continues to asylum seekers and east European workers today. Analyzing the history and memory of migrant journeys, covering not only the response of politicians and the public but also literary and artistic representations, then and now, Kushner's volume sheds new light on the nature and construction of Britishness from the early modern era onwards. It is an essential tool for those wanting to understand why people come to Britain (or are denied entry) and how migrants have been viewed by state and society alike.

The Book of Genesis in Late Antiquity

Emmanouela Grypeou and Helen Spurling

The Book of Genesis in Late Antiquity examines the relationship between rabbinic and Christian exegetical writings in the Eastern Roman Empire and Mesopotamia. The research focuses on exegesis of the book of Genesis, a text that has considerable importance in both Christian and Jewish exegesis, and identifies and analyses evidence of potential ‘encounters’ between the rabbinic and Christian traditions in their interpretation of Scripture. The volume sheds light on the history of the relations between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity, and offers a substantial methodology for analysis of exegetical encounters.

Contemporary Jewish Writing: Austria After Waldheim

Andrea Reiter

This book examines Jewish writers and intellectuals in Austria, analyzing filmic and electronic media alongside more traditional publication formats over the last 25 years. Beginning with the Waldheim affair and the rhetorical response by the three most prominent members of the survivor generation (Leon Zelman, Simon Wiesenthal and Bruno Kreisky) author Andrea Reiter sets a complicated standard for ‘who is Jewish’ and what constitutes a ‘Jewish response.’ She reformulates the concepts of religious and secular Jewish cultural expression, cutting across gender and Holocaust studies. The work proceeds to questions of enacting or performing identity, looking at how these Jewish writers and filmmakers in Austria ‘perform’ their Jewishness not only in their public appearances and engagements but also in their works

A Corpus of Magic Bowls: Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity

Dan Levene

This book is a unique collection of Jewish magical texts from Late Antiquity. The magic bowls from which the incantations in this book have been transcribed are a form of amulet which was peculiar to the Mesopotamian regions of modern day Iran and Iraq of the fourth to seventh centuries A.D. These magical texts were individually commissioned by people whose names are usually mentioned within the texts. After having been written by sorcerer -scribes on the inside of earthenware bowls these were buried upside down under the floor of the client's house. These texts are an early testament to Jewish magical textual traditions, elements of which can be traced throughout history to modern-day practices.

The Crisis of Genocide: Devastation: Volume I: The European Rimlands 1912-1938

Mark Levene

From the years leading up to the First World War to the aftermath of the Second, Europe experienced an era of genocide. As well as the Holocaust, this period also witnessed the Armenian genocide in 1915, mass killings in Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia, and a host of further ethnic cleansings in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Crisis of Genocide seeks to integrate these genocidal events into a single, coherent history. Over two volumes, Mark Levene demonstrates how the relationship between geography, nation, and power came to play a key role in the emergence of genocide in a collapsed or collapsing European imperial zone - the Rimlands - and how the continuing geopolitical contest for control of these regions destabilised relationships between diverse and multifaceted ethnic communities who traditionally had lived side by side.

L'école artistique de Vitebsk (1897-1923). Eveil et rayonnement autour de Pen, Chagall et Malévitch

Claire Le Foll

L’école artistique de Vitebsk (1897-1923). Eveil et rayonnement autour de Pen, Chagall et Malevitch (Vitebsk art school: its birth and Golden age in days of Pen, Chagall and Malevich), Paris, L’Harmattan, 2002

Translated into Russian : Vitebskaia khudozhestvennaia shkola (1897-1923). Zarozhdenie i rastsvet v epokhu Iu. Pena, M. Shagala i K. Malevitsh, Minsk, Propilei, 2007

This monograph presents for the first time to a Western audience the multiple dimensions of the Vitebsk art school. Apart from being one of the most vibrant centres of Russian avant-garde and artistic experimentation between 1918 and 1922, this school trained a generation of young Jewish artists such as Marc Chagall, and became a rallying point for many artists of Jewish origin. Based on archival researches and contemporary publications, this book illuminates the contribution of the Vitebsk art school to modern Jewish, Russian and European art.

La Biélorussie dans l’histoire et l’imaginaire des Juifs de l’empire russe, 1772-1905

Claire Le Foll

La Biélorussie dans l’histoire et l’imaginaire des Juifs de l’empire russe, 1772-1905 (Belarus in the history and imagination of Jews in the Russian empire, 1772-1905) Paris, Honoré Champion, 2017.

This first monograph on the relation of Jews to Belarus and Belarusians, and reciprocally, is a significant and original contribution based on archival material from the Belarusian, Russian and Israeli archives, as well as a variety of literary and visual sources. It fills a gap in our understanding of the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe, as well as emphasises the importance of ‘regional approaches in Jewish and Russian history.

The Exegetical Encounter Between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity

Emmanouela Grypeou and Helen Spurling

The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity is a collection of essays examining the relationship between Jewish and Christian biblical commentators. The contributions focus on analysis of interpretations of the book of Genesis, a text which has considerable importance in both Christian and Jewish traditions. The essays cover a wide range of Jewish and Christian literature, including primarily rabbinic and patristic sources, but also apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus and Gnostic texts. In bringing together the studies of a variety of eminent scholars on the topic of Exegetical Encounter, the book presents a variety of original approaches to analysis of exegetical contacts between the religious groups.

Feeling Jewish: (A Book for Just About Anyone)

Devorah Baum

Self-hatred. Guilt. Resentment. Paranoia. Hysteria. Overbearing Mother-Love. In this witty, insightful, and poignant book, Devorah Baum delves into fiction, film, memoir, and psychoanalysis to present a dazzlingly original exploration of a series of feelings famously associated with modern Jews. Reflecting on why Jews have so often been depicted, both by others and by themselves, as prone to "negative" feelings, she queries how negative these feelings really are. And as the pace of globalization leaves countless people feeling more marginalized, uprooted, and existentially threatened, she argues that such "Jewish" feelings are becoming increasingly common to us all.

From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film

James Jordan

From Nuremberg to Hollywood is a transformative book that explores the evolving relationship between the act of bearing witness to the Holocaust in the courtroom, and how this is perceived and imagined by American film. The book transforms the discipline by providing a cultural history of the intersection of the courtroom and the Holocaust in American film from 1944-2008, using case studies to question the ever-changing relationship between testimony, history, memory, truth, and film. The book seeks to understand how one of the most horrific and chaotic of events of the 20th century is contained and controlled by the strict demands of the courtroom and the courtroom film genre.

From Things Lost: Forgotten Letters and the Legacy of the Holocaust

Shirli Gilbert

In May 1933, a young man named Rudolf Schwab fled Nazi-occupied Germany. His departure came at the insistence of a close friend who later joined the Party. Schwab eventually arrived in South Africa, one of the few countries left where Jews could seek refuge, and years later, resumed a relationship in letters with the Nazi who in many ways saved his life. From Things Lost is a story of displacement, survival, and an unlikely friendship in the wake of the Holocaust, via an extraordinary collection of letters discovered in a forgotten trunk.

Governments-in-Exile and the Jews during the Second World War

Jan Láníček and James Jordan

While the examination of bystanders to the Holocaust has constituted an important part of Holocaust research in the last decades, historians have focused mainly on the two major Western Allied powers, the United States and the United Kingdom. This book broadens this important research area to include the other members of the anti-Hitler alliance and how they helped to shape the attitudes and responses to the Nazi persecution and extermination of European Jewry. Specifically, it looks at the 'Jewish policy' of the various governments-in-exile that were established during the war in London and elsewhere, offering for the first time a comparative perspective on an important topic.

The Image and Its Prohibition in Jewish Antiquity

Sarah Pearce

Against the commonly held opinion that ancient Judaism was an artless culture, this sumptuously illustrated book offers new ways of looking at art in Jewish antiquity. Leading experts, under the editorship of Sarah Pearce, skilfully explore different functions of images in relation to their prohibition by the second of the Ten Commandments. This book is aimed at the both the scholarly world and all readers interested in religion and art.

Jewish Aramaic Curse Texts from Late-Antique Mesopotamia

Dan Levene

In this book, Dan Levene analyses a corpus of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls from Mesopotamia, whose purpose was to curse or return curses against human adversaries. He presents new editions of thirty texts, with an introduction, commentary and glossaries.

Jewish Identities in Contemporary Europe

Andrea Reiter and Lucille Cairns

Providing an assessment of Jewish identity, this volume presents critical engagements with a number of Jewish writers and filmmakers from a variety of European countries, including Austria, France, Germany, Poland, and the UK. The novels and films discussed explore the meaning of being Jewish in Europe today, and investigate the extent to which this experience is shaped by factors that lie outside the national context, notably by the relationship to Israel. As the recent attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the targeting of a Jewish supermarket in Paris, demonstrate, these questions are more pressing than ever, and will challenge Jews, as well as Jewish writers and intellectuals, as they explore the answers.

The Jewish Joke: An essay with examples (less essay, more examples)

Devorah Baum

The Jewish joke is as old as Abraham, and like the Jews themselves it has wandered over the world, learned countless new languages, worked with a range of different materials, been performed in front of some pretty hostile crowds, but still retained its own distinctive identity. So what is it that animates the Jewish joke? Why are Jews so often thought of as 'funny'? And how old can a joke get? The Jewish Joke is a brilliant - and very funny - riff on Jewish jokes, about what marks them apart from other jokes, why they are important to Jewish identity and how they work. Ranging from self-deprecation to anti-Semitism, politics to sex, it looks at the past of Jewish joking and asks whether the Jewish joke has a future.

Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps

Shirli Gilbert

Music in the Holocaust documents a wide scope of musical activities, ranging from orchestras and chamber groups to choirs, theatres, communal sing-songs, and cabarets, in some of the most important internment centres in Nazi-occupied Europe. Music opens a unique window onto the internal world of Nazism’s victims, offering insight into how they understood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time.

Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840-1930

Joachim Schlör

This elegantly written book describes the changes in the perception and experience of the night in three great European cities: Paris, Berlin and London. The lighting up of the European city by gas and electricity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about a new relationship with the night, in respect of both work and pleasure. Nights in the Big City explores this new awareness of the city in all its ramifications.

Popularizing Anti-Semitism in Early Modern Spain and Its Empire: Francisco de Torrejoncillo and the Centinela Contra Judios (1674)

François Soyer

This book charts the history of the most vitriolic and successful anti-Semitic polemic printed in the early modern Hispanic world, offering the first analysis, edition and translation of the text: the Centinela contra judíos of the Franciscan Francisco de Torrejoncillo.

Tel Aviv – From Dream to City

Joachim Schlör

In Tel Aviv – From Dream to City Joachim Schloer brings the reader closer to this "most talked about city." The author interviewed numerous inhabitants and gathered information from books, travel accounts, newspaper articles and memoirs. He looks at the city from its origins right up to the present: Tel Aviv as a centre of immigration that contains reminders of each immigrant's mother country; as a catalyst between East and West; and – not least – as a place of transformation for Jews who fled the Nazi terror

War, Jews, and the New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914-1919

Mark Levene

The First World War was a major watershed in modern Jewish history. Out of it came the Balfour Declaration, a first critical step in the creation of the State of Israel, but also a radical redrafting of the political map of eastern and central Europe, with dramatic and potentially tragic consequences for its dispersed but substantial Jewish minority. In this lucid work, which was awarded the 1991 Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History, Mark Levene approaches these developments through the diplomatic endeavours of Lucien Wolf, a British Jew who was both one of the chief exponents of the Balfour Declaration and as co-architect of the Minorities Treaty that provided an internationally endorsed framework for Jewish existence in Europe after World War I.

The Words of Moses

Sarah J.K Pearce

Recent stuides highlight the character of Deuteronomy's laws of public officials (Deut. 16. 18-18.22) as the first draft for a constitutional government of the future. Sarah Pearce explores what these laws meant for Jewish interpreters and their communities in the Second Temple period. Her focus is on the reception and transformation of Deuteronomy's laws on the organisation of justice (Deut. 16.18-17.13): the appointment of local judicaries; the authority and function of the central court; and the prohibition of single testimony. The author offers a detailed commentary on these laws in sources including the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, Greek Deuteronomy, the Books of Chronicles, the Temple Scroll, the Damascus Document, Philo of Alexandira, and Josephus.