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The paper focuses on the emergence of a new religious-ethnic educational stream in Israel, Maayan Hachinuch Hatorani, ("The Wellspring of Torah Education"). It was founded in 1984 and is controlled by the leadership of Shas, a movement of religious renewal and Sephardic-Oriental identity. Discriminatory policies, implemented by the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi establishment, brought the leaders of the Shas movement to initiate a new system capable of responding to the hardship of a marginalized population. Shas schools, functioning within and being supported by the Ministry of Education, also became socializing agents for children and parents that were far from religious lifestyle. Thus, through the creation of strategies for the transmission of knowledge and behavior, the new stream challenges the secular national project, and contributes to the formation of a new cultural sphere. In this paper we explore how a religious movement embraces education to foster social mobilization and group solidarity. The research is an ethnographic study that was conducted between 2000-2005 in three cities in Israel. By transforming cultural boundaries and institutionalizing norms that contradict in some respects the principles underlying the relationship between government and mass schooling, Shas's education systems contributes to forge an Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Judaism based on an ethnic type of primordial identity. The case contributes to understand the challenges that religion holds to modern systems of education and to analyze new developments in Judaism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the arrival of the early Sephardim during the Colony, the Jewish community has faced many challenges, being judeophobia the most persistent and dangerous. This judeophobia has come from many fronts, especially from the far right and its Nazi wing. During the eighties of the last century the major figures of the Chilean judeophobia of far right changed: coinciding with the fall of Franz Pfeiffer's WUNS brand, the figure of Miguel Serrano raised as the most important Chilean Nazi and judeophobic thinker in Spanish language. In this paper we will analyze the judeophobic books of this period, with emphasis on his main contributions to the judeophobic discourse of the far right in Spanish language, and we will finish with a reflection about the operation of his judeophobia from a semiotic point of view. We think that when we do it, we are contributing to the study and to break down the discourses of the present far right groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider different perspectives on Chilean and Argentinean Judaism, related to four main traits: a) the organization of Jewish and secular identities, with progressive and liberal components, although religion is not the central identity element; b) the consolidation of a religious orthodox space; c) the formation of new Jewish identities, that are not integrated into the structures of institutional Jewish communities; e) the emergence of some dissidence in Chilean and Argentinean Judaism, as part and parcel of a reaction to the official discourse about the Arab-Israeli Conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, part of a larger work, underlines the contributions of Maimonides, Ramban, to Sephardic Jewish-Spanish culture in general and particularly to the development of medical science in Medieval Spain. After a historical and biographic sketch, it points to the relations between religion and medicine as shown by his medical practice. As a conclusion it offers a pair of traditional narratives on the life of the Rabbi in the Muslim court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]