Monthly Archives: August 2021

The Cloisters and the Jews in Medieval Spain: A Conversation on Art, Literature, and History

This special program is organized in conjunction with the exhibition at The Met Cloisters, Spain, 1000-1200: Art at the Frontiers of Faith. The roundtable will feature three scholars who have pioneered work on Jewish life in medieval Spain. The discussion will respond to the themes of the Frontiers of Faith exhibition, focusing particularly on Jewish presence within and across the geopolitical regions at the meeting points of Christian- and Muslim-ruled Spain, as well as the other kinds of “frontier zones,” or sites of intensive interaction between faiths, from urban markets to princely courts.

Job Announcement: Medieval/Early Modern Jewish History, Emory University, Atlanta, GA (USA)

The Department of History and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, invite applications for a jointly-appointed, tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Medieval/Early Modern Jewish History to begin Fall 2022. 

Geographical and chronological focus open, but applicants whose teaching and/or research connect European Jewry to other global regions are particularly encouraged to apply.

Deadline: Review of applications begins on 26/10/2021.

Researcher of the Week

Aaron Pattee

Post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Art History
Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany

(English/Deutsch)

“I am interested in Jewish-Christian relations in Medieval History and Architecture in the regions of the German Palatinate and Upper-Rhineland. Although my current research regards the application of Artificial Intelligence to searching 3D models of historical architecture, I am fascinated by how social networks and economic and political events ultimately impacted the designs of buildings. My completed doctoral project (2021) focused on 4 castles. For each of them, I carried out detailed architectural analyses, geo-spatial analyses of their landscapes, and network analyses of proceedings by their inhabitants derived from over 700 medieval charters. The information from the individual analyses were then combined using a graph database to search for convergences in the data, garnering new interpretations regarding the socio-political contexts of medieval buildings and who their builders most likely were. Various Jewish people were active in these castle networks, a research topic that I seek to explore more.

Continue reading Researcher of the Week

Hebrew Manuscripts on Display in Exhibition “Torah, Talmud, Tefillot. Jewish Literature from Five Centuries” in the Thuringian University and State Library Jena

by Peter Stein, University of Jena

(English/Deutsch)

Since November of last year, the Thuringian University and State Library Jena (ThULB) has been hosting the exhibition “Tora, Talmud, Tefillot. Jewish Literature from Five Centuries in the Thuringian University and State Library Jena”. The ThULB has a collection of more than 1000 titles of Jewish works (or works closely related to Judaism) from the 13th to the 19th centuries, a representative selection of which is now being shown to the public for the first time.

Continue reading Hebrew Manuscripts on Display in Exhibition “Torah, Talmud, Tefillot. Jewish Literature from Five Centuries” in the Thuringian University and State Library Jena