Introduction: Ten lost tribes and their places -- Assyrian tributes -- An enclosed nation in Arzareth and Sambatyon -- Tricksters and travels -- "A mighty multitude of Israelites" -- Concordia mundi -- Hopes of Israel -- Conclusion: To find the ten lost tribes. - The legendary story of the ten lost tribes of Israel has resonated among both Jews and Christians down through the centuries: the compelling idea that some core group of humanity was "lost" and exiled to a secret place, perhaps someday to return triumphant. In this fascinating book, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite shows for the first time the extent to which the search for the lost tribes of Israel became, over two millennia, an engine for global exploration and a key mechanism for understanding the world. --from publisher description
"China's past and present have been in a continuous dialogue throughout history, one that is heavily influenced by time and language: the temporal orientation and the linguistic apparatus used to express and solidify identity, ideas, and practices. Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History argues for and demonstrates the significance of "New Sinology" by bringing language/philology back into the research and understanding of how modern China emerged, and presenting a host of concrete, in-depth, case studies, in which the use of "New Sinology" sheds new light on Chinese history. Reading the modern, therefore, as a careful and ongoing conversation with the past, renders the "new" in a different perspective; taken as a whole, this volume is a significant step towards a new historical narrative of China's modern history, one wherein "ruptures" can exist in tandem with continuities. This collection accentuates the deep connection between language and power--one that spans well across China's long past--and hence the immense consequences of linguistic-related methodology to the comprehension of power structures and identity in China. Each of the essays in this volume tackles these issues--the methodological and the thematic--from a different angle, but they all share the Sinological prism of analysis, and the basic understanding that a much longer timeframe is required to make sense of Chinese modernity. The languages examined are diverse: modern and classical Chinese, of course, but also Manchu and Japanese. Taken together they bring a spectrum of linguistic perspectives and hence a spectrum of power relations and identities to the forefront. While the essays focus on late Qing and early twentieth-century eras, they resort, time and again, to earlier periods, which are necessary to making real sense of later eras. Therefore, the methodological and the thematic do not only converge, but also generate a plea for fostering and expanding this approach in current and future studies. These essays use a variety of angles to examine, with the present moment in mind, questions of Chinese perceptions of and engagement with the past"--
Sad stories of the death of kings : sovereignty and its constraints in Greek tragedy and elsewhere / Glenn W. Most -- Contested sovereignty : heaven, the monarch, the people, and the intellectuals in traditional China / Yuri Pines -- Nurhaci's gambit : sovereignty as concept and praxis in the rise of the Manchus / Nicola Di Cosmo -- The living image of the people / Jason Frank -- Public health, the state, and religious scholarship : sovereignty in Idris al-Bidlisi's arguments for fleeing the plague / Justin Stearns -- The dancing despot : Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the performative symbolism of power / Stanca Scholz-Cionca -- Liberal constitutionalism and the sovereign pardon / Bernadette Meyler -- The vanishing slaves of Paris : the lettre de cachet and the emergence of an imperial legal order in eighteenth-century France / Miranda Spieler -- Re-touching the sovereign : biochemistry of perpetual Leninism / Alexei Yurchak -- Hijra and exile : Islam and dual sovereignty in Qing China / Zvi Ben-Dor Benite -- The neurology of regicide : decapitation experiments and the science of sovereignty / Cathy Gere -- The "millennium" of 1857 : the last performance of the great Mughal / A. Azfar Moin -- Exit the king? : modern theater and the revolution / Nicole Jerr -- Revolution in permanence and the fall of popular sovereignty / Dan Edelstein -- Exile within sovereignty : critique of "the negation of exile" in Israeli culture / Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin -- Affective sovereignty, international law, and China's legal status in the nineteenth century / Li Chen -- The sovereignty of the new man after Wagner : artist and hero, symbolic history, and the staging of origins / Stefanos Geroulanos
"More than three years after the beginning of the wave of Arab uprisings, an understanding of the role of intellectuals in political change across the region has never been more important. This timely volume on Intellectuals in the Modern Middle East combines geographical and chronological breadth and draws on a diverse range of approaches including intellectual history, political science, art history, social policy and political philosophy. Together, the chapters provide a window into the diversity in intellectual trends across the Middle East from the early decades of the 20th century until the present day. While they do not, and cannot, provide a complete, or even representative, picture of intellectual dynamics in the modern Middle East, they collectively address a range of analytical and normative issues that bear on the role of the intellectual in contemporary Middle Eastern politics and society. - This book was published as a special issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies." (Publisher's description)
