Monthly Archives: January 2023

11th annual Jewish Studies Graduate Student Association conference, 2–3 February 2023

The Jewish Studies Graduate Student Association at IU Bloomington invites you all to our 11th Annual Conference, “Judaisms, Jewishness, and Time,” on February 2 and 3, 2023. It is a virtual event that is free to attend. Please see the pdf schedule of panels, presenters, and events (with Zoom links).

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Talk: La «sagesse de la Bible»: un espace de dialogue by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger

15 March 2023, 18 h 30 – 20 h, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Richelieu – Salle des conférences; 5, rue Vivienne – 75002 Paris

Bible hébraïque du nord de la Péninsule ibérique, texte calligraphié vers la fin du XVe siècle. BnF, département des Manuscrits – – BnF

As part of the Léopold Delisle Lectures, Judith Olszowy-Schlanger dedicates two sessions to medieval Hebrew manuscripts from Northern France. This first session focuses on both the Christian interest in Jewish books, particularly the Bible, and the impact of Christian books on the materiality of the Jewish book. It will also look at how the ancient Hebrew book tradition was able to integrate new techniques and aesthetics in its own way.

New Book by Oded Zinger about “Living with the Law”

You can now read Oded Zinger’S book Living with the Law. Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt. Jewish Culture and Contexts (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).

Living with the Law explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000–1250), relating medieval gossip, marital woes, and the voices of men and women of a world long gone. Probing the rich documents of the Cairo Geniza, a unique repository of discarded paper discovered in a Cairo synagogue, the book recovers the life stories of Jewish women and men working through their marital problems at home, with their families, in the streets of old Cairo, and in Jewish and Muslim courts. Despite a voluminous literature on Jewish law, the everyday practice of Jewish courts has only recently begun to be investigated systematically. The experiences of those at a legal, social, and cultural disadvantage allow us to go beyond the image propagated by legal institutions and offer a view “from below” of Jewish communal life and Jewish law as it was lived.

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Toward a Comparative (and Connected) History of Expulsion

Rowan Dorin, Stanford University

Thanks to the many decades of work by many wonderful scholars, we know a great deal about the recurring expulsions of Jews that scar the history of late medieval Europe. Several monographs have been devoted to the circumstances and aftermaths of particular expulsions, while other fine studies have explored the dynamics of the successive expulsions within the kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire. Historians studying the Jewish diaspora have meticulously retraced the pathways of exile and the destinations of refugees, while specialists in literature and liturgy—here I’m thinking especially of the work of Susan Einbinder—have movingly evoked the impact of these forced dislocations on the shared rituals and cultural life of Europe’s Jewish communities.

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EAJS Conference Grant Programme in European Jewish Studies

The European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS) invites applications to the EAJS Conference Grant Programme in European Jewish Studies for the academic year 2023/24, funded by the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe. The purpose of this programme is twofold: to foster cooperation among scholars involved in Jewish Studies across Europe, and to support early career researchers in this field to develop a professional network.

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New book: Andreas Weber, Die Nürnberger Judengemeinde 1349–1499: Politische Handlungsspielräume jüdischer Akteure im Spätmittelalter

Stadt Nürnberg, 2022, ISBN 978-3-9817369-4-6

The PhD thesis “Die Nürnberger Judengemeinde 1349-1499. Politische Handlungsspielräume jüdischer Akteure im Spätmittelalter” by Andreas Weber was accepted by the University of Trier in the winter semester 2019/2020. The study, revised for print, has now been published as volume 6 of the “Schriften des Geschäftsbereichs Kultur der Bürgermeisterin der Stadt Nürnberg”.