A Jewish kingdom in Arabia

Professor Glen Bowersock of the School of Historical Studies (Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton) writes on the rise and fall of the little known Jewish kingdom of Himyar which flourished in what is now Yemen between the 5th and 6th centuries C.E.

CLICK HERE TO READ PROFESSOR BOWERSOCK'S ARTICLE

His book on the subject, entitled The Adulis throne, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press

Minority Christian communities

Two features examine the culture of minority Christian communities in the Near and Middle East, past and present

•  The InterPress Service News Agency looks at the problems facing the Mandaean community in contemporary Iraq 

•  Today's Zaman looks at the historic Syriac heritage of Tur Abdin in Turkey

Ethiopian Jews in Israel: news report

Many Falash (Ethiopian Jews) were settled in Israel after being airlifted away from the wars and famines that beset their homeland in the 1980s and 1990s

This ARTICLE FROM THE BOSTON NEWS looks at the experience of the Falash (whom some believe to be descended from the "lost tribe" of Dan) in Israeli society and the cultural clash between the Orthodox rabbinate and the Ethiopian clergy (the kaddosh) who have retained "the traditions of Biblical-era priests"

Concordance of the Sahidic New Testament

Published in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium series, this is "an invaluable resource for the study of Coptic literature" (linked from Alin Suciu's blog for "Research on Patristics, Apocrypha, Coptic literature and manuscripts) 

Click on the link below to go directly to the Concordances

Concordance of the Sahidic New Testament 

Jewish communities in North Africa & the Arab world: new web resource

'Diarna' is Judeo-Arabic for 'our homes' and this new web project gathers multimedia resources such as videos, digital images and oral histories of the Jewish communities of the Arab world, from North Africa to Iran.

Archive material is drawn in part from the Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Beit Hatfusot (Museum of the Jewish People)

Click on the link below :

Diarna : mapping Mizrahi heritage

The Bible and mythology

An article from the online LaCross Tribune examines how the ancient Israelites may have expressed their own theology through an adaptation of the Mesopotamian creation story in their own Book of Genesis

New resource for Coptic studies

The website Coptica gives access to over 100 digitized texts of European studies on Coptic language and literature dating from the 19th century onward. Some of the texts are hosted by different collections such as the Internet Archive.
There are over 30 texts on ancient and Oriental Christianity, including Manichaeism
The website has been created by Pierre Cherix of the University of Geneva