Jewish Historical Studies: A Journal of English-Speaking Jewry

Journal aims and scope

Jewish Historical Studies: A Journal of English-Speaking Jewry publishes original, peer reviewed research that explores the historical experience of Jews across the English-speaking Jewish world. First published in 1893 as Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, the journal is the official publication of the Jewish Historical Society of England.

In concert with its founding mission, JHS encourages and solicits research focused on the Jewish past in pre-modern and modern England. However, from 2023, reflecting its change of name, the journal will embrace a broader vision, devoting attention to other Jewish communities with which Anglo-Jewry shares intimate historical ties: South Africa, Canada, Australia, and the English-speaking Caribbean.

The journal invites articles that address both the distinct histories of these communities, while also encouraging comparative historical work across communities that otherwise have been typically studied as discrete units. We seek contributions that deepen and broaden our understanding of the characteristics of English-speaking Jewry, particularly the challenges and opportunities that liberal host societies presented to the development of Jewish life. We also seek articles that trace the transnational connections between these communities and identify the ways in which a common language facilitated the emergence of a distinctive anglophone Jewish sphere.

While predominantly historical in its focus, JHS encourages contributions that augment historical perspectives with the insights and methodologies of complementary disciplines.

Owning society information

Jewish Historical Studies: A Journal of English-Speaking Jewry is owned by the Jewish Historical Society of England. The society is the oldest historical and learned society of its kind in Europe. The society was founded in 1893 by the foremost Anglo-Jewish scholars and communal leaders of the day. Past presidents have included Lucien Wolf, F.D. Mocatta, Israel Zangwill, Cecil Roth and Sir Isaiah Berlin. The society is based in London, and has branches in Essex, Leeds, Liverpool, Herts and Middlesex, Sussex and Jerusalem. Read more here.

Editors-in-Chief

Prof Shirli Gilbert, Professor of Modern Jewish History,
UCL Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies (UCL, UK)

Dr Avril Alba, Associate Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation,
Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies (University of Sydney, Australia)

Dr Adam Mendelsohn, Associate Professor in Historical Studies,
Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies & Research (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Book Reviews editor

Dr Roni Mikel Arieli, The Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry,
Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)

Dr Miriamne Krummel, Professor of English,
College of Arts and Sciences: English (University of Dayton, US)

Editorial Board Members

Professor Anthony Bale, Professor of Medieval Studies,
Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing (Birkbeck, UK)

Dr Ruth Balint, Associate Professor in History,
School of Humanities & Languages (UNSW, Australia)

Dr Louise Bethlehem, Associate Professor, Program in Cultural Studies,
Department of English (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)

Dr Sarah Phillips Casteel, Professor of English,
Department of English Language and Literature (Carleton University, Canada)

Prof Todd Endelman, William Haber Professor of Modern Jewish History,
Frankel Center for Judaic Studies (University of Michigan, US)

Dr Hannah Ewence, Senior Lecturer in Modern History,
Department of History and Archaeology (University of Chester, UK)

Prof David Feldman, Professor of History and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism,
Department of History, Classics & Archaeology (Birkbeck, UK)

Dr Hannah Holtschneider, Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies,
School of Divinity (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Dr Elizabeth Imber, Assistant Professor of History,
Assistant Professor and Leffell Chair in Modern Jewish History,
Department of History, (Clark University, US)

Prof Tony Kushner, James Parkes Professor of History,
Department of History (University of Southampton, UK)

Dr Jonathan Judaken, Spence L. Wilson Chair in the Humanities,
Department of History (Rhodes College, US)

Dr Jan Lanicek, Associate Professor,
School of Humanities and Languages (UNSW, Australia)

Professor (Emeritus) Eli Lederhendler, Stephen S. Wise Chair in American Jewish History,
Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)

Dr Laura Leibman, Professor of English and Humanities,
English Department, Division of Literature and Languages (Reed College, US)

Professor Rebecca Margolis, Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilisation,
School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies (Monash University, Australia)

Dr Jessica Vance Roitman, Professor of Jewish Studies,
Faculty of Religion and Theology (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Dr Michael Rom, Postdoctoral Research Fellow,
Department of History (University of British Columbia, Canada)

Prof Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History,
School of History (Queen Mary, UK)

Professor (Emeritus) Gideon Shimoni, Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry,
Department of Jewish History (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Dr David Slucki, Loti Smorgon Associate Professor in Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture,
School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies (Monash University, Australia)

Journal information

ISSN: 2397-1290
Homepage: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/jhs

Published by:
UCL Press
University College London (UCL)
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT

UCL Press website: https://www.uclpress.co.uk
UCL Press email: uclpresspublishing@ucl.ac.uk
UCL Press twitter: @uclpress
UCL Press Journals Editorial Policy: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/pages/journals-editorial-policy

Publication frequency: Jewish Historical Studies publishes one issue a year.

Contact the journal

All general enquiries should be made to the Editor.

Open-access policy

All articles published in Jewish Historical Studies are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0 international license agreement and published open access, making them immediately and freely available to read and download. The CC-BY license agreement allows authors to retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of the work. Further information regarding this can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ and licensing terms and conditions can be found on our Editorial Policy pages.  

Abstracting & indexing

UCL Press works with subject specific indexers to deposit published articles in relevant repositories and search databases. Articles published in Jewish Historical Studies are indexed in the following:

• Web of Science AHCI
• Dimensions  
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• EBSCOHost
• Google Scholar
• OCLC
• OpenAIRE
• Portico digital archive
• RAMBI – The Index of Articles on Jewish Studies (National library of Israel)
• ScienceOpen database
• UCL Discovery 
• Baidu

Peer review

Jewish Historical Studies operates double blind peer review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review. Authors should submit an anonymous version of the manuscript, stripped of all identifying references, to the author(s) for peer review.

Further information regarding peer review can be found on our Editorial Policy pages.

Article publication charges (APC)

UCL Press journals do not charge an Article-Processing Charge (APC) for submission or publication in this journal. Jewish Historical Studies authors will not be required to make an APC payment for submission or publication of their article.

Archival Content

Previous volumes of Jewish Historical Studies are available via the Jewish Historical Society of England and JSTOR. Please contact the society for further information.

How to submit

Authors should follow the journal’s author guidelines. Manuscripts that are not formatted appropriately for the journal will be referred to edit accordingly before peer review.

All submissions should be sent to the Editor. Please email your full manuscript, author CV, as well as a 300 word abstract to the Managing Editor Jemima Jarman at jemimajarman@outlook.com.

Before submitting to the journal, all authors must have read and agreed to the journal’s Editorial Policy.

Preparing your manuscript

Authors are requested to follow the UCL Press author guidelines, as well as the following specific instructions outlined here.

All manuscripts for consideration should be e-mailed as an attachment in an MS Word file. All prospective authors must include a 300-word abstract with their articles.

Substantial articles of around 8000 words as well as other submissions, should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. (This is a departure from previous policy.) The entire manuscript (including footnotes) should be double-spaced and pages must be numbered consecutively. Authors of accepted articles will be asked to prepare a final version in accordance with the style of Transactions and to submit it as an email attachment. Footnotes should be reserved for references only.

There is an important exception to the guidelines of the Chicago Manual: in the text and footnotes, please place close-quotation marks before any related punctuation, unless the quotation is a complete sentence. This is British practice, but a good one.

Examples:

Salomons suggested it be called “a peace congress”.

“Israelis have developed a normal life”, wrote Berlin in 1975.

Quotations should appear in English, in double inverted commas (this is a change from previous practice). Quotations within quotations should be in single inverted commas. Longer quotations – of about 100 words or ten typed lines – should be indented, preceded and followed by an empty line, and without inverted commas. Words omitted in the course of a quotation should be indicated by three full stops (periods). If the end of a sentence is omitted, four full stops (periods) should be used. Square brackets (parentheses) should be placed around comments inserted by the author in a quotation.

Figures

• Figures must be ready for photographic reproduction.
• Charts and graphs must be professionally prepared and computer-generated on a laser printer, in black ink on white paper, and should remain legible after a 50% reduction.
• Photographs and reproductions of works of art must be high-quality and high-resolution. These must be submitted in separate electronic files of not less than 1 MB each.
• All labels and details on figures must be clearly printed.
• Authors are required to obtain rights and permission for all images and to supply full captions with necessary credits

Citations of texts

• With the exceptions listed above, Transactions follows the documentation guidelines as set out in the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition
• All notes should appear as footnotes (that is, not as in the “Harvard” or social-science style of references).
• The titles of works not in English should appear in the original language or in transliteration. All titles of works in Hebrew, Yiddish and other Jewish languages should appear in transliteration, with only the first word of the article and proper names capitalized.
• The shortened version of edited by (ed.), translated by (trans.), and compiled by (comp.) are preferred.
• Please include first names of authors where known.
• Publication details: (place: publisher, date) is preferred to (place, date). Please note that this is a change from earlier practice.
• When citing a note, the page number should be listed first followed by n. and the note number: 20 n. 17.

Some examples of books

Stuart A. Cohen, English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics of Anglo- Jewry, 1895–1920(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

short form after first use: Cohen, English Zionists, 39.

Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds., Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky (London: Peter Halban, 1988).

Lloyd P. Gartner, “Jewish Historiography in the United States and Britain”, in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (London: Peter Halban, 1988), 199–227.

short form after first use: Gartner, “Jewish Historiography”, 202.

Journals

David Conway, “John Braham: From meshorrer to Tenor”, Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 41 (2007): 37–61.

short form after first use: Conway, “John Braham”, 42.

Theses and dissertations

Milton Gold, “Nordau on Degeneration: A Study of the Book and its Cultural Significance” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1957), 108–17.

Article types

Original research article
Research articles are detailed studies reporting research classified as primary literature.

Review article
Reviews provide critical and systematic appraisal of the current research to provide authoritative judgement to its particular context, topic, and field.

Book review
Book reviews are brief concise articles that provide an evaluation of a published scholarly book. Book reviews are generally invited only, however suggestions are welcome and should be sent to the Editors of the journal. A book review might assess the importance of a book's contribution to a particular field covered by the journal’s aims and scope and should aim to objectively review the strengths and weaknesses that concern the journal’s audience. (Please refer to the journal's aims and scope).

Special issues

Jewish Historical Studies welcomes proposals from Guest Editors for specific special issues. These special issues are themed and focused publications that fit within the overarching remit of the journal. Proposals are welcome from editors with a specialism in any relevant field. All general enquiries should be sent to the Editors by emailing Managing Editor Jemima Jarman at jemimajarman@outlook.com.