A great deal has been written on Israeli religious institutions, activities, and problems, but the treatment of the subject leaves much to be desired. Many studies focus primarily on a specific topic within the subject – the relationship between the polity and religion as reflected in institutional arrangements. But this problem is not coterminous with the subject as a whole. While the problem of relations between synagogue and state can be discussed as a formal constitutional problem, it cannot be understood sociologically, because it merely represents the tip of an iceberg, so to speak. The iceberg itself, still to be uncovered, consists of religious phenomena – the variegated activities of various groups whereby they relate to religious symbols. People engage in these activities in many ways, causing the emergence of various features of society, and the relationship between synagogue and state is only one of them. Another limitation of present writing on religion in Israel lies in the bias whereby the Israeli situation is often evaluated according to a model of separation of church and state of the American or French type. Many writers demonstrate impatience and lack of sympathy when discussing the religious establishment and the current role of religion in the Israeli state.

Britain's strategic interest in Mesopotamia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a consequence of her control over India. The valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates constitute a natural highway from Syria to the Persian Gulf, and thence to the Indian Ocean. Not until a relatively late stage in Imperial history, however, did Britain extend her formal protection to this region. In the nineteenth century successive British governments had refused to finance the establishment of either a Mesopotamian steamer service or railway line. Subsequently, they had first (1903) rejected participation in an international Baghdad railway scheme, and then (1914) sanctioned complete German control over the project as far as Basra. A small Indian force was despatched to the head of the Persian Gulf in October 1914, but the subsequent Mesopotamian campaign was ‘a haphazard affair from start to finish’ lacking political or military direction. Thus, the De Bunsen committee, which reported on Britain's desiderata in Asiatic Turkey in June 1915, had concluded that Ottoman “devolutionary control” over Mesopotamia was preferable to Indian annexation of any part of the region other than the Basra vilayet; that October, the War Cabinet experienced difficulty in deciding whether to sanction an advance on Baghdad. No proclamation of political interest in Mesopotamia was in fact made by a British government until the capture of the city in 1917. The immediate and local arguments impelling that operation have been fully investigated. By contrast, the strategic tradition that deprecated it has been relatively neglected. This paper proposes to survey the latter and to indicate the degree to which the extension of the Mesopotamian campaign contradicted previous British strategy toward the region.

On the whole, King Hussein of the Hijaz, sharif of Mecca, has fared badly at the hands of British historians. To most of them he was an obstinate old man, so overambitious for himself, and so overconfident about his following in the Arab world, that he was a poor judge of his powers and unrealistic to a great extent. Examination of the papers in the British Public Record Office, in conjunction with his own letters and other sources, offers another image. It shows quite a different man – consistent in his beliefs and policy, stubborn about questions of principle, and wholly set on pursuing with dignity the rights that he reckoned the British to have promised to all Arabs ‘liberated’ from the yoke of the Turks.

Afghanistan proceeded along the road of constitutional monarchy for a decade from 1963 to 1973 in the reign of King Muḥammad Ẓāhir (1933–1973) much as it had during the reign of King Amān Allāh (1919–1929). In the 1950s, parliamentary democracy was also practiced for a brief period. But these experiments failed, and the reigning monarchs were forced into exile in Italy. In 1973, Afghanistan was proclaimed a republic. This article examines why, in the last period, the constitutional system of government, as well as the well-established Afghan monarchy, collapsed.

§I. All the Jews of Zakho, together with all the Jews of Iraq, emigrated to Israel in the years 1951 and 1952. Some waves of Kurdish Jews had already arrived in Palestine in the 1920s. In Israel, their Neo-Aramaic speech became strongly influenced and gradually superseded by Israeli Hebrew. The Neo-Aramaic speech of the elders, however, was much less influenced by Modern Hebrew and still retains characteristic Kurdistani features, including a large number of loanwords from Kurdish–Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and old, traditional Hebrew. Another typical feature is the coloring of their Neo-Aramaic speech with numerous proverbs in the languages of their neighboring ethnic groups. The multilingual proverbs are an excellent example of the mutual influence of the various ethnic groups and cultures of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Population movements have always played a dynamic role in the transformation of human society throughout history. Indeed, there is not a single phase of history anywhere in the world which has not been related in some way to low or high rates of birth and mortality, to migration and settlement and to their social, cultural, economic, and political effects. The history of the Middle East supplies excellent examples to support this contention. The Muslim calendar begins with an act of migration, that is the hejira of a.d. 622. Migrants going from the countryside to urban centers or fleeing from areas hostile to Islam have always exerted a crucial influence upon the social and political destiny of Muslim countries. The refugees from Spain to North Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the forced migration of Muslims from Russia (the Caucasus and Crimea) in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, the shift of population in India, Pakistan, and Palestine in the 1940s, to cite just a few examples, have been major factors accounting, at least in part, for the social transformation of the Muslim world in general, and of the Middle East in particular.