Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1999, 282p.
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Both Norman Stillman's Sephardi Religious Responses to Modernity and Marc Angel's Loving Truth and Peace: The Grand Religious Worldview of Rabbi Benzion Uziel would be enormously helpful in expanding our students' knowledge about and interest in Sephardic history, culture, and religious ideology. While it's fairly obvious that both books could be assigned in a class on Sephardic life, it is also important to note that they would make a fruitful contribution to surveys of modern Jewish history, courses on modern Jewish thought and/or the history of Zionism/Israel, as well as more specialized classes on responsa literature, religious responses to modernity, Jews in the Middle East, etc.
Angel's Loving Truth and Peace: The Grand Religious Worldview of Rabbi Benzion Uziel is a somewhat less engaging and lively book that Norman Stillman's. I recommend that the instructor make use of excerpts, rather than the entire book. The author is a prominent modern Orthodox rabbi, and he aims his work somewhere between scholarship and a more "frum" approach. It offers a detailed study of Rabbi Benzion Uziel's piske halakha on a wide range of issues: conversion, the status of women, the study of non-Jewish subjects such as philosophy, the education of children, particularism vs. universalism, and the halakhic framework for a modern Jewish state. Uziel was famous for his flexible, open-minded, and tolerant approach, and Angel compares his ideas (favorably) with the more stringent views of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Rabbi Yitzhak Herzog. For the most part, R. Uziel was more open to modern trends and to universalism than other leading Orthodox rabbis from his time period (the former was born in 1880 and died in 1953, having served as Israel's first Sephardic chief rabbi).
The book contains many fascinating details that could illuminate the unique religious world of Sephardic Jews in the "old Yishuv" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Uziel was born in Jerusalem and was fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and French), as well as the remarkably flexible halakhic perspective of one of the products of that world, his openness to modernity, etc. On the other hand, after a few chapters one begins to grow somewhat weary of the accumulation of details Angel has collected; there is no organizing theme or "story," but rather, a number of case studies. Again, these case studies are often illuminating, and could prove useful in a number of courses as noted in the first paragraph.
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