Intolerance is inclined to censor, and censorship promotes ignorance of the arguments of others and thus intolerance itself: a rigid, vicious circle that is hard to break. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
Diana Darke, Middle East Institute, 2025 A richly illustrated guide to the Ottoman Empire, 100 years since its dissolution, unravelling its complex cultural legacy and profound impact on Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. At its height, the Ottoman…
In Reading Darwin in Arabic, Marwa Elshakry questions current ideas about Islam, science, and secularism by exploring the ways in which Darwin was read in Arabic from the late 1860s to the mid-twentieth century.
Author: Şevket Pamuk, Cambridge University Press, 1987 Originally published in 1987, this book examines the consequences of the nineteenth-century economic penetration of Europe into the Ottoman Empire. Professor Pamuk makes subtle use of a very wide range of sources encompassing…
Author: Nir Shafir, Stanford University Press, 2024 The seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire was rife with polemical debate, around worshipping at saints' graves, medical procedures, smoking tobacco, and other everyday practices. Fueling these debates was a new form of writing—the pamphlet, a…
Author: Davide Trentacoste, Routlege, 2026 The book uncovers a forgotten century-long conversation between Christian Tuscany and Shiʿi Persia —one that reshaped power, politics, and diplomacy in the early modern world. Moving beyond the familiar story of Europe versus the Ottoman…
Author: Ismail E. Erünsal, Academic Studies Press, 2022 A History of Ottoman Libraries tells the story of the development and the organization of Ottoman libraries from the fourteenth through the twentieth century. In the first part, the book surveys the…
Andrea Pisauro and Gianluca Fantoni, The Conversation An elegantly dressed Italian gets off a train in central London on the evening of April 22 1924. He is on a secret mission to meet representatives of Britain’s ruling Labour party –…
By Gianna Pontecorboli in La Voce di New York
By Julia M. Klein in The Forward From an Italian Holocaust survivor, a Kafkaesque nightmare of imprisonment under fascism Set in the Lanciano internment camp, Maria Eisenstein’s ‘Internee Number 6’ is a testament to the power of writing The Italian…
By Abigail Klein Leichman in The Jerusalem Post
