The their annual graduate conference Diaspora, Identity and BelongingTransnational and Global History Seminar’s Annual Graduate Conference, June 5-6, 2023
Online and in-person at the University of Oxford, the Oxford Transnational and Global History Seminar invites their “fellow graduate students, early career historians and scholars in adjacent disciplines whose work engages with diaspora(s) to apply. The conference will investigate diasporic histories and identities as a way to disrupt the fiction of geopolitical borders, unsettle the nation as a unit of analysis, and destabilise colonial logic that coerces (dis)placement.
Monthly Archives: March 2023
New Issue of Zion is out
Read now the new issue of Zion. A Quarterly for Research in Jewish History 88.3 (2023), which contains medieval content (in Hebrew):
- Avital Davidovich Eshed and Moshe Halbertal: A Threat and Its Annulment: Coping with the Sexuality of the Gentile Man in Medieval Ashkenaz
- Avraham David: An Unknown Commemorative List of Communities in Ashkenaz that were Obliterated in the Black Death Violence
Fein & Lapidus Fellowships 2023
The Fein & Lapidus Fellowships are intended to support substantive academic research utilizing the archival collections held by the American Jewish Historical Society, at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.
Continue reading Fein & Lapidus Fellowships 2023New Book by Pierre Savy: Les princes et les Juifs dans l’Italie de la Renaissance (Les Presses universitaires de France, 2023)
When the Western kingdoms expelled the Jews, the princes of Renaissance Italy kept them at their side or welcomed them. Why, in the Duchy of Milan or that of Savoy, in the Ferrara of the Estes or the Mantua of the Gonzagas, are the Jews even better accepted than in the neighboring oligarchic republics, such as Venice, Genoa or Florence?
Exhibition: Geniza in the Gulf
Read this report by Ben Outhwaite about the exhibition “Geniza in the Gulf” via the Blog of the Genizah Research Unit.
CfA: Ph.D. Student Workshop”Textual Communities in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Formation, Influence, and Afterlife” Jerusalem, 5-7 September 2023
The Israeli Forum of Early Medieval Studies and Utrecht University invite Ph.D. students to submit their proposals. The aim of this workshop is to open up the discussion of textual communities in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. We welcome speakers from various disciplines, studying varying periods and religions (such as late-antique Judaism, early Islam, and Eastern, Western, and Syriac Christianity).
Deadline for proposals: April 23rd, 2023
New book: Perception and Awareness: Artefacts and Imageries in Medieval European Jewish Cultures
by Elisheva Baumgarten, Elisabeth Hollender, Katrin Kogman Appel, Ephraim Shoham – Steiner (eds)
What did the world look like for Jews living in medieval Europe? How did they perceive and make use of the elements of their daily life, from items on the street to religious iconography within holy spaces — in particular synagogues and at the exterior of churches — and profane elements from the home? And how did they experience the visual and material cultures of their non-Jewish neighbours?
These questions form the core of this volume, which explores pre-modern Jewish approaches to images and material objects from a variety of perspectives. From clothing to manuscripts, and from lighting devices to the understanding of the invisible, the chapters gathered together in this multifaceted volume combine analyses of images and artefacts together with in-depth analyses of texts to offer fresh insights into the visual cultures that informed the world of European Jews in the Middle Ages.
New paper by Annett Martini: Die Buchstabenkrönchen als Erinnerungsanker der Josefsgeschichte: Auf den Spuren eines mittelalterlichen Torarollenfragments
Read now the new paper by Annett Martini on a medieval Torah scroll fragment in the Reckendorf Genizah.
Rabbi Joseph Karo: Contexts Near and Far, September 4 – 5, 2023 at The Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East
Five hundred years ago, in the city of Adrianople, R. Joseph Karo began the composition of his monumental work, Beit Yosef, which he completed several decades later in Safed. Since its publication, Beit Yosef has become the bedrock of halachic discussions. His later composition, the Shulchan Aruch, became a synonym for traditional Judaism as a whole, and Karo himself became one of the principal symbols of Sephardi Judaism from its inception until today. In the modern period, the figure of Karo was often instrumental in the shaping and articulation, by Rabbis, reformers, thinkers and scholars, of attitudes towards the Halakha, the Kabbala, Jewish political life and the relations between “tradition” and “progress”. His figure was used to align oneself within the divisions typical of modern life, its internal contradictions and great controversies. Karo’s extensive halakhic enterprise, as an author and a public figure, has made “maran” an emblematic figure of his time, and his work is often presented in the Jewish collective memory as a transitionary point between the periods of the Rishonim and the Ahronim. Indeed, research in recent years has demonstrated that in many ways, the activity of Karo has defined and shaped vital aspects of Jewish modernity.
Continue reading Rabbi Joseph Karo: Contexts Near and Far, September 4 – 5, 2023 at The Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the EastNew Issue of The Jewish Quarterly Review
Read now the new issue of The Jewish Quarterly Review Winter 2023 Volume 113.1 with some medieval content.