Hi All,
I am looking for books that speak to the Jewish experience in MENA* including the time after the diaspora (Roman Conquest) to the founding of Islam and the experiences of Jews under Islamic rule up until their expulsion from the same, most in 1948 but until 1978 in Iran. I have Lewis' The Jews of Islam, which I've started but I was hoping for some more.
I know that is a large time frame but I am having some difficulties finding anything.
I have read a few books on Arabic History which talk in general about the Jewish experience and some on Israel as well, I will list those here in case it adds anything/so they don't get recommended again:
A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, Kramer
A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, Axeworthy
Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry, Lewis
The Arabs: A History, Rogan
A History of the Arab Peoples, Hourani
The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, Lewis
What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam & Modernity in the Middle East, Lewis
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, Lewis
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Wright
Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, Oren
Herzl's Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State, Avineri
Israel, Gordis
My Promised Land, Shavit
Jerusalem: The Biography, Montefiore
Thanks!
By NMEA did you mean MENA? There is a lot of great new scholarship out on the history of Jews in MENA regions and countries in the modern era. Also I hope you are open to non-books but also articles, chapters, other media, etc. as a lot of junior scholars are working on this (or just due to different norms in different professional settings) so a lot of material may not be in book form.
On Morocco, Susan Gilson Miller is a major historian of Jews of the Maghreb. Alma Heckman's book is coming out later this year, and in the meantime she has podcast episodes and articles out about Jews of Morocco in the early to mid 20th century, with a lot on Moroccan Jewish Communists and politics of nationalism/internationalism that is very interesting. The Holocaust and North Africa (Stanford University Press, 2018) is an edited volume with great contributions, and you can then look into some of the scholars in the volume to learn more.
Stanford University Press is an academic press with great titles in both their Jewish studies and Middle East studies series, with a lot more overlap between those two fields than many other presses publishing on those topics. New books from the press on MENA and Ottoman Jewish experiences include The Jews of Ottoman Izmir A Modern History by Dina Danon (2020); Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran by Lior Sternfeld (2018); and The Merchants of Oran: A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire by Joshua Schreier (2017) (about Algeria).
Joel Beinin has written a lot on both Jewish Communists in the Arab world and Egyptian Jewry in particular; his foundational book on Egyptian Jewry is probably The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (University of California Press, 1998).
Orit Bashkin is a great historian of Iraqi Jews in the modern era. Her earlier book New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2012) covers modern Jewish identity and issues of nationalism leading up to the displacement of the Iraqi Jewish community after the founding of the state of Israel; her latest book is on Iraqi Jews after their arrival to Israel, Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel (Stanford University Press, 2017).