Department of Jewish Studies
As part of Aresty Scholar, Noam Sienna's current research project on Hebrew printing in early 16th-century Constantinople (Istanbul), he has come across a singular text, printed in 1520s Constantinople, which uses the form of paraliturgical poetry (baqqasha) to celebrate the Ottoman conquest of Rhodes in 1522.What might have motivated this composition among the Sephardi communities of the Ottoman Balkans, and what would it have meant to bring this text into print at the time? Using the interdisciplinary methodologies of book history, this talk will attempt to situate this baqqasha in its literary, political, social, and material contexts.
Shaul Tchernichovsky, writing in war-torn Odessa in 1919, chose to articulate his world-view as a vitalistic pantheist and to address large issues of culture and history in a demanding poetic form inherited from the Italian Renaissance, a corona of fifteen tightly interlocked sonnets. The result was one of the outstanding longer poems written in the 20th century. The paganism it expresses does not seem to be ideological gesturing, like the use of pagan motifs elsewhere in modern literature, but an authentic response to the nature of the world as he saw it.
Register by emailing info@JewishStudies.rutgers.edu
In March 1978 a revolutionary group won the elections for the leadership of the Jewish community in Iran. This newly elected leadership hoped to show the support of the community to the mass movement that led to the 1979 revolution, by forming alliances with leaders and active participation in revolutionary operations. From that moment, Jews participated in demonstrations in growing numbers and published newspapers and pamphlets aimed to recruit more members to this movement. This talk will analyze the social and political transformation Iranian Jews had undergone in the second half of the twentieth century and led to an increasing role Jews played in the political parties.
Reception immediately followed by a talk with Lior Sternfeld, Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State University.
Event organized by Neda Blourchi from The Center for Middle Eastern Studies and cosponsored by the Department of Jewish Studies.
Distinguished Lectures in European History presents Deviance, Usury and Religious Difference in Medieval Europe: On the Construction of Jewish Economic Difference with Julie Mell from North Carolina State University.
Sponsored by Rutgers Jewish Studies, the Center for European Studies and the Department of History.
February 13, 2020 at 4:30 PM in Van Dyck 301
This talk, given by Moyagaye Bedward, Rutgers PhD candidate, Department of History, will explore how the Haratin, a community marginalized because of its putative slave history, engages in memory and cultural preservation as means of cultivating a sense of local and national belonging in Morocco. Specifically, it will examine how Haratin preservation of local Jewish history has contributed to combating notions that the Haratin are not indigenous to Morocco and not truly “African.”
Please RSVP to info@JewishStudies.rutgers.edu
The horizons of Jewish Studies and European history have been drawing closer in recent years. Jewish Studies scholars now seek to locate their subjects within European history, and European historians recount transnational histories using the Jewish Diaspora. But convergence is still limited. Rabbinic scholars and European historians still seem to inhabit different intellectual universes, as if their concerns did not matter to each other. Traditional Jewish Studies still do not tell a European story, and European intellectual history does not tell a traditional Jewish one. For traditional Jewish culture to become part of European history, rabbinic discourses must be “Europeanized,” and Jewish European history written, at least in part, out of traditional Jewish sources.
The challenges of Jewish European history exemplify those of writing the histories of other minorities, especially Muslim Europeans. The lecture, given by Malachi Hacohen of Duke University, addresses these challenges, searching for a history that is at one and the same time genuinely Jewish and European, in the hope that it might facilitate other histories written from the margins.
