Recent content by Jonathan Edelstein

Thanks! I'm also going to take up a suggestion of yours - I've decided that I'll do another arc after 1840, and that it will consist of four or five stories of Ulysses and Julia Grant's 1878 visit to Egypt, the Holy Land and Syria. They'll stay a few months longer and go more places than OTL...

This was true to some extent IOTL - obviously there was no historical exodus to Astrakhan, but many Central Asian Jews welcomed the Russian conquest because they would now be equal to the Muslims. It helped that the worst abuses of Nicholas I had ended by that time, and the weird Tsarist...

The Nakshbandi sheikhs were (and are) well known throughout Central Asia. It wouldn't be unusual for a rabbi in a crossroads like Astrakhan (or at least one with Melek's curiosity) to know of them. The last of whom, IOTL, moved to Jerusalem about this time, didn't she? Maybe she will bring...

Notes to The Wise Man of Astrakhan: 1. Astrakhan was part of the initial Pale of Settlement in 1791, which, as has been mentioned before, allowed Jews to live in certain parts of the Russian Empire where they hadn’t lived before but where the empire wanted non-Muslim colonists. IOTL, Nicholas I...

THE WISE MAN OF ASTRAKHAN APRIL-MAY 1840 Nahum Groysman, as fitting for a man with that name, was big. In fact he was almost a caricature of his name: six foot five, tipping the scales at a seventh of a ton, heavily-built and muscular like the carter’s son he was. His beard and sidelocks were...

It's not so much that the Sanhedrin would want to change them - as mentioned in the story, the rabbis told them there was nothing to forbid - as that, as a small and mostly illiterate minority among the Jews of the Yishuv, they wouldn't be able to avoid assimilating. If they don't stay...

Or maybe film.

They'll also remember the first years of the revival (1538-41) when their ascetic/flagellant tendencies started riots and almost brought them down before they'd got fairly started, and they'll know the history of the infighting during the Hasmonean period. There's a lot of institutional history...

The problem is Deuteronomy 23:4-7, which forbid Ammonites and Moabites from becoming Jews. There was a Mishnaic-era ruling that this prohibition applied only to male Ammonites; the justification was that the women didn't participate in refusing to give bread and water to the Israelites, but the...

The absolute last thing the Sanhedrin will want to do is open up a can of worms about whether the Transjordan Bedouin tribes are descended from Ammonites, but there may be poetic references to that name, and eventually archaeology. Amman will indeed end up a mostly Arab Muslim city - it won't...

Notes to Those Who Hunger: 1. I’m grateful to @Meshakhad for sending me a copy of Anatoly Khazanov’s 1989 research paper on the Krymchaks; they are neither numerous nor widely studied, and the sources available online are sketchy and sometimes contradictory. If I had to describe the Krymchaks...

THOSE WHO HUNGER MARCH 1840 “There are too many Jews here,” said Pesakh Kaia, taking a deep pull on his pipe. “It is true,” said Chaim Bakshi. He spoke the tongue of the Crimean Tatars, as all the yakhudiler did when they spoke among themselves. “This is a good land. It is a prosperous...

Thank you! I think it tied together several of the themes of this world.

Consul, not ambassador. Consuls can serve anywhere. You'll notice that he presented his credentials to the mayor, not the president. The ambassador would be in Washington.

IOTL, Portugal did just about everything to keep its colonies, but in the end, the financial, military, diplomatic and domestic political cost proved to be too much. They lasted until the mid-1970s, so with a post-WW2 POD, that might be the outer limit.