Jewish communities in West Africa: book review

Forgotten diaspora: Jewish communities in West Africa and the making of the Atlantic World, by Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta

This book is currently on order for SOAS Library. Its focus is on two communities of Sephardic Jews who settled in Portudal and Joal in Senegambia in the early 17th century

Read a review by Dr. Tobias Green (Centre for West African Studies, University of Birmingham) from the H-Luso-Africa pages of the Humanities and Social Sciences Net online

Jews and Christians in 5th and 6th century Arabia: book review

Professor Hagith Sivan of the Department of History, University of Kansas, writes about the collected 2008 conference proceedings published in Paris in 2010 as Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux Ve et VIe siècles: regards croisés sur les sources (edited by Joëlle Beaucamp, Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet and Christian Julien Robin)


Read her opinions in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Find this book in SOAS Library at QO296.396 / 750253

A qualification in secularism?

Colleges and universities have long offered degree courses in religious studies and theology, but now one college in the USA has moved to offer the first degree programme in secularism.
Pitzer College is "a small liberal arts institution" in Southern California  and the course will comprise modules such as "God, Darwin and Design in America", "Anxiety in the Age of Reason" and "Bible as literature"
Read more in this online article from the New York Times