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  1. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

    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...
  2. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

    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...
  3. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

    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...
  4. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

    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...
  5. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.
    Threadmarks: THE WISE MAN OF ASTRAKHAN APRIL-MAY 1840

    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...
  6. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

    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...
  7. Jonathan Edelstein

    Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)

    Or maybe film.
  8. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

    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...
  9. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

    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...
  10. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

    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...
  11. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

    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...
  12. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.
    Threadmarks: THOSE WHO HUNGER MARCH 1840

    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...
  13. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

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

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

    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.
  15. Jonathan Edelstein

    How long can Decolonization be delayed?

    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.
  16. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

    The incident in the story involved one prosecutor and one bishop, but Charles X's reign in general was reactionary and repressive - the Anti-Sacrilege Act was from OTL, and some people really did go to jail because of it. And while Jewish emancipation in France was a done deal by then, there...
  17. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

    Notes on The Consul 1. While New York City (which at the time was limited to the island of Manhattan) didn’t actually double in population between 1830 and 1840, it did grow by more than 50 percent, from 202,589 to 312,710. The period from 1820-60 was one of very fast growth for NYC, with the...
  18. Jonathan Edelstein

    What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.
    Threadmarks: THE CONSUL JANUARY 1840

    THE CONSUL JANUARY 1840 The voyage from Bordeaux to New York would have been more pleasant had Achille David Seligmann been able to make it in the spring, but the ship was well-found and the winds were favorable, so it wasn’t past enduring. And when the voyage passed, as all things eventually...
  19. Jonathan Edelstein

    Languedocian Jewish history/culture without the Albigensian crusade

    He was already Count of Toulouse, he wouldn't have to take it -- what he'd need to do is establish direct rule over the territories of all the vassals who've gone crusading. Which would make him a major villain to nearly everyone with any power in Christian Europe, but if he could survive the...
  20. Jonathan Edelstein

    Languedocian Jewish history/culture without the Albigensian crusade

    The issue with the late 11th and early 12th-century counts is that they tended to be more interested in crusading and/or fighting their relatives over fiefdoms than ruling Toulouse. What you might need is one who has the military and administrative chops to centralize the county - not an easy...
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