The work presents an account of modern Jerusalem’s demographic evolution and a description of the city’s socio-demographic profile at present. The demographic evolution will be traced back succinctly for about 150 years. The last two decades, since the reunification is treated more intensively. The enormous contrast between the conditions that existed in the mid-19th century at the threshold of modernization, and those prevailing in contemporary Jerusalem, as residents and visitors can experience and study them, should convey an inkling of the progress made. This progress was not achieved by constructing a completely new city – as in the case of Tel-Aviv and many other places in Israel and elsewhere – but by the more intricate processes of reforming a historic and in this instance even a holy city, and developing it through additions of large areas and the innovations of modern life.

The radical transformation of the Jews during the last century has not ceased to arouse curiosity. Once a widely scattered, mostly isolated and rather backward, and often despised minority-group, Jews have risen in the world. Today they are an advanced and outgoing sector of western society, which having established themselves as a sovereign nation in their ancient homeland. What is the difference between Jewry and Judaism? Are Jews an ethnic minority, a religious community, a political entity? This book faces such issues by depicting their historical background and analyzing their intellectual underpinnings. Thus Zionism at the turn of the century is presented as a thorough-going renaissance movement that changed Jewish life from within, and transformed the relations between the Jews and the outside world.

This book is based on papers presented at a workshop on modernization and development in Latin America. The papers included reflect a theoretical and comparative perspective of the political, economic and educational problems of Latin America.

This book examines and compares the musical phenomena and their purpose in the scheme of life in the main different cultures outside the Western World.

It was a widespread practice in the area of Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor during the fourth to the seventh centuries of the current era to use talismans written on metal sheets in order to ward off the powers of evil, to heal people, or to gain the love of a person. The common Babylonian practice of the same period was to write incantation texts on earthenware bowls. This book contains the texts of all the legible amulets in Aramaic known today, as well as 13 hitherto unpublished bowls. The texts are proved with translations and commentaries, and a detailed glossary of all the words is given. The study of these incantations provides a glimpse into the religious feelings and practices of common people in the Talmudic period and enriches our knowledge of Palestinian and Babylonian Aramaic usage. This book contains a wealth of new material for the history of magic in the Near East, edited and interpreted with meticulous scholarship. Sample pages A digital version of this book is available here