Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture Online

The term  falsafah (pl.  falāsifah), derived from the Greek  philosophia, designates philosophy in Arabic. Medieval Jews usually translated the term into Hebrew as  filoso fyah, by which, corresponding to Greek etymology, they understood the love of wisdom ( ahavat ḥokhmah). In a broader sense, Islamic  falsafah includes all schools of philosophy; in a more narrow sense it stands for the school founded by al-Fārābī (Alpharabius, ca. 870–950). It focused on the systematic study of the sciences on the basis of the works of Aristotle and…

Farhūd (Arab.; “destruction of order,” “robbery”) is the name for the pogrom committed at the beginning of June 1941 by Muslim attackers against the Jews of Baghdad. The  farhūd, inspired by Nazi propaganda, was the first and only anti-Jewish pogrom in modern Iraq and marked a break in Jewish-Muslim relations in that country. After the  farhūd, life seemed to return to normal; however, its memory formed the background for the mass emigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel in the context of an airlift in 1950-1951.1. Development of the incidentThe disturbances began when, on June 1, 1941…

Events in Petrograd between February 23 and March 4, 1917 (March 8-17 according to the Gregorian calendar), which led to the fall of the Romanovs and to the complete emancipation of the Russian Jews. The democracy introduced in February existed until the Bolshevik coup d’état on October 25-26 (November 7-8). The Jewish population welcomed the Revolution; in 1917, the political parties and public activities of Jews in Russia experienced an unprecedented flourishing.At the beginning of 1917, Russia was shaken from within. Growing general dissatisfaction with governm…

A Jewish charitable institution founded in 1819 in Philadelphia, which initially provided destitute women with food, clothing, and other essentials. The founder and long-time leader of the institution, Rebecca Gratz (1781–1869) had become aware that Christian charitable associations were carrying out missionary activities among the Jewish poor; she sought to protect needy women against such attempts. Beyond this commitment, in 1838 the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society founded the first Jewish Su…

An uprising, lasting from 1612 to 1614, of townspeople in Frankfurt am Main, which was directed against both the reigning patriciate and against the Jewish inhabitants of the city. The Fettmilch Uprising, which in September 1614 transformed into violence against the Frankfurt Jews and led to their temporary expulsion, is one of the best-known cases of anti-Jewish disturbances in 17th century Central Europe. Because of its complex nature, in which anti-Jewish attitudes were combined with protests…

The designation both for a journalistic genre, and for a type of text situated on the border between literature and journalism, which as a “minor prose form” is characterized by multiple variations of stylistic composition. From a Jewish perspective, the feuilleton, as a medium of cultural exchange, is a prominent locus for the politicization and popularization of Jewish topics. This is illustrated especially by the work of Ludwig Börne. The feuilleton – together with “feuilletonism” – is associ…