EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2016/17

REPORT

Report on the Summer School “Jews and Christians between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean: Co-existence and Conflict”, 10-21 July 2017, Central European University (CEU), Budapest

Organisers: István Perczel (CEU), Alexandra Cuffel (Ruhr University Bochum [RUB])

Report prepared by István Perczel

Introduction

The course was organised as the first popularising event for the ERC project “Jews and Christians in the East: Strategies of Interaction between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean”; a European Research Council project based at the Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and carried out in cooperation with the Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at CEU. The principal investigator of the project is Alexandra Cuffel, Professor of Jewish Studies at Ruhr University Bochum. During the five-year duration of the project, we plan four such summer schools, which we deem to be one of the most powerful means for distributing the new knowledge gained through our research. Thanks to the generous grant received from the EAJS, we could offer fellowships and support to students coming from all over the world (India, the Caucasus, Israel, Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia and throughout Europe), who might not have been able to participate otherwise. These students were exposed to the results of the latest research into the history and the culture of the Jewish populations of the East and into their contacts and interaction with their Christian neighbours. In exchange, the students contributed to our subjects with their own, often ground-breaking, research. Our experience is that this construction is a powerful means not only for disseminating new knowledge in this field but also for gaining it.

The original mission statement (event rationale)

Here I provide an abridged version of the original proposal for the summer school as it was submitted to Central European University:

a) Statement of purpose:

Aim and subject of the summer school: This course will introduce students to the ways in which Jews and Christians interacted in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Caucasus and the Indian Ocean in the period 600-1800; that is, from the beginning of Islam to the defeat and death of Tippu Sultan, marking the takeover of the colonial power of the Medieval trade routes. Thus, the course will examine and present Jewish-Christian relations in the East, in diverse regions and cultures within the period of the rise and expansion of Islam, from Arabia and via Persia before and during the expansion of the colonial European powers.

Importance of the SUN course: The course will highlight and disseminate at all levels research performed in a European network, and will contribute to the enhancement of CEU’s mission of being a bridge-institution between East and West. It contributes to the research and teaching programs of two dynamic research centres at CEU, namely the Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies and the Center for Religious Studies. Moreover, the course is expected to contribute to the social, political and cultural analysis of areas that are currently acute conflict zones. The methods will employ a critical evaluation of the underlying historical trends of interreligious, multi-ethnic and inter-communal relations. Therefore, the course targets both historians and students of contemporary issues in the Middle East, Central Asia and Southeast Asia. The course is aimed at providing basic tools for cultural competence that is indispensable in both the academia and the political and state-management job markets. In this way, this SUN program is also linked to the university-wide intellectual theme of the “Social Mind”; the course seeks to bridge the gap between the social sciences, anthropology and political science on the one hand, and the typical humanities oriented towards textual studies, art-history, archaeology, history and linguistics on the other hand.

b) Targeted audience and required skills

The targeted audience is advanced PhD and MA students, young researchers, advanced BA students (requires special approval). The call for applications will address students of history and culture as well as of contemporary studies in both the humanities and the social sciences, who would benefit from a deeper understanding and the reconceptualization of contemporary zones of conflict and religious tension in the regions under investigation.

Required skills: (1. historians) background in the history of at least one of the regions being covered. Familiarity with at least one “classical” language such as Arabic, Syriac/Aramaic, Hebrew, Persian, or in a medieval vernacular language such as: Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian, Malayalam, or, alternately, training in art history, material culture or archaeology of one of the regions specified above. (2. social sciences students) enhanced acquaintance – linguistic, political or cultural – with at least one nation-state included in the region under scrutiny.

How to bridge between the disciplinary fields: The course will provide an interdisciplinary teaching method built into its structure: introductory lectures before a diverse audience of students followed by discussions will form the fundamental teaching, while the – often elective – tutorials will address smaller groups and give in-depth disciplinary training in textual analysis (source-language training) or fieldwork (anthropological/archeological methods).

c) Brief overview of the course

On the subject: Whereas the social and inter-religious encounters of Jews and Christians have been thoroughly studied in Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, Central Asia, East Africa and Southeast Asia remain under-researched in this respect. This topic is the focus of a research group at the Ruhr-University-Bochum and CEU, entitled “Jews and Christians between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean”, funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant, which intends to organise a series of summer schools based alternately at CEU Budapest and at RUB in Bochum. The present course will be the first in a series, inaugurating its aims and methods.

On the research group/teaching body: The group consists of Alexandra Cuffel (Principal Investigator, RUB), Barbara Roggema, Zara Pogossian, Sophia Dege-Müller and Ophira Gamliel (RUB), Verena Krebs, Bar Kribus (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), István Perczel and Radu Mustaţă (CEU).

On the ERC project: Until this project, the study of Jewish-Christian interactions during the Middle Ages and the early modern period had focused on the asymmetrical power relationship in which Jews were a minority group living within a dominant Christian or Muslim culture. Such research had been extensive especially in the context of medieval Western Europe and, more recently, the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphates. This historiographic bias necessarily implies that previous studies had focussed on majority-minority relations. The project explores Jewish-Christian relations in the Muslim world, in Eastern Christian kingdoms and in polytheist South India, examining the relevant sources written in Coptic, Arabic, Syriac, Ge’ez, Armenian, Georgian and Malayalam after the late antique period. The underlying postulation is that inter-relational paradigms of conflicts and collaborations evolve in diverse ways depending on changing balances of power and regional factors beyond the dogmas and belief systems at the ‘universal’ core of the three Abrahamic religions.

On the course: The instructors will introduce participants to the complex dynamics of Jewish-Christian interaction as outlined above in three major patterns:

1) Jews and Christians under Christian monarchies in the ‘buffer states’ between the Christian and the Islamicate world: Ethiopia, Armenia, Georgia;

2) Jews and Christians under Islam: Eastern Mediterranean and Persia;

3) Jews, Christians and Muslims as minorities in South Asia. in Southeast Asia and India.

Knowledge and skills to be acquired in the course:

The course is about imparting knowledge but, even more so, about imparting skills. These will be theoretical and methodological/linguistic skills.

1) Theoretical skills

• Participating students will deconstruct various stereotypes, including the “civilizational model”, which postulates and essentializes independent “cultures” or “civilizations” that allegedly developed on their own and were united into a global economic and cultural system only through the colonial conquests and the subsequent opening of free trade across the oceans. Instead, our research shows a global world avant la lettre.
• Participating students will be encouraged to examine how religions and related cultural phenomena developed in interaction – both through co-existence and through conflict alike. Such an approach to analysing the pre-modern past will encourage students to realize that religious identities and the forces that influence religious interactions are as complex in the modern world as they were in the past. The course aims at alerting the participants to the problems facing modern decision-makers in approaching contemporary conflicts through the concepts of “civilizations” determined by religions, and through their eventual “clash”, deemed inevitable according to the presently accepted theories.

The format for learning these skills will be lectures/discussions.

2) Methodological/linguistic skills:

• Participating students will be introduced to little known linguistic and philological phenomena, such as the role of religiolects and minority community-based scriptures, such as the use of the Judaeo-Arabic, Christian Arabic, Judaeo-Persian, Christian Persian, Jewish Malayalam and Syro-Malayalam dialects, the use of the Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic alphabets for writing foreign languages etc. These will be taught at the advanced and the basic levels according to the needs of the students.
• Participating students will be introduced to the monuments and the methodological tools to deal with elements of the communities’ material culture: artworks, architecture, manuscripts.

The main format for learning these skills will be tutorials in smaller groups.

A note on the application procedure: As students will be invited to present their particular research topic and discuss it with their peers and the instructors, a description of the students’ research topic and a proposal for the questions to be discussed will be part of the application material.

Narrative Report on the Summer Course

General issues

The course was planned as a two-week programme. Nobody could foresee that the summer school would fall within a troubled period of the life of Central European University, when its survival in Hungary became questioned because of the political upheaval around the university and its founder, Mr George Soros. Yet, there were only very few cancellations, so that we were able to hold the summer school with 20 students, who earnestly participated in the programs. The level of those selected was very high, as testified to by the research proposals and definitively proven by the student presentations at the end. The required readings were uploaded before the beginning of the course to the course’s e-learning website (http://sunlearning.ceu.hu/course/view.php?id=460), so that the students may study them before coming to Budapest. During the course, additional material, such as the power-point presentations used at the lectures, additional readings, material requested by the students and student presentations, were added to the website.

The general concept was to apply a uniform schedule throughout the course: in the first morning session, a general introduction to a general or area-specific subject; in the second morning session, discussion of the readings; in the first afternoon section, introduction to a source language permitting to study Jewish-Christian relations in the East: Judeo-Arabic, Syriac, Ge’ez, Georgian, Classical Armenian and Malayalam, as well as to the handling of objects belonging to material culture; in the fourth afternoon session, reading texts in the original, or in translation, or reading objects of material culture. We scheduled the student presentations for the last two days.

Somewhat beyond our own expectations, there were enough students capable of reading texts in some of the source languages, namely Syriac, Malayalam and Ge’ez. However, there was general interest in all the source languages, so that we were presenting texts in a mixed manner: while the Judeo-Arabic, Syriac, Armenian and Malayalam texts were given to the students, we discussed the texts in English translation, either from accepted translations, or prepared by us for the sake of the summer course. These language classes were particularly engaging: Barbara Roggema, while discussing the Syriac version of the Christian Bahira legend – a text of crucial importance for Jewish-Christian relations under early Muslim rule – engaged those in the audience knowing Syriac to translate the text orally into English, so that the whole group, consisting mainly of people not knowing Syriac, were able to follow and enjoy the readings as well as entering the discussion. In a similar way, Ophira Gamliel could give a part of the Malayalam text of the Keralolpatti (“The Origins of Kerala”), on the conversion of the Cheraman Perumal to Islam, as there were students from Kerala and members of the faculty, who were able to read Malayalam. Sophia Dege-Müller gave two well-constructed classes on Ge’ez; one was an introduction to the script and phonology, and the second was reading the source language with three capable students, while the others remained seated to enjoy an unmediated contact with the language, regardless of their ignorance, as was also the case with the other language classes. The rest of the language classes first introduced the respective languages, and, then, turned to reading texts in English translations. Importantly, all the primary source material dealt with interreligious subjects and topics.

Thanks to the generous funding received from diverse sources – the EAJS, the ERC and CEU – the long programme of the summer school was interspersed with social events. There was a reception in the evening of the first day for all the students and faculty, an excursion to the picturesque city of Szentendre in the week-end, where the museum tickets and the lunch of the entire group was covered, a faculty dinner organised, as well as other outdoor events, such as a musical concert by two students, Hugo Maat, who played the piano, and Mark Aranha, who was playing the guitar and singing his own compositions. Arnab Dutta sang a chant by Rabindranath Tagore.

Detailed Report on the Summer Course

Here we provide an updated version of the course syllabus, including corrections for how the courses actually ran:

Week I

Day 1, morning sessions

Introduction

First, István Perczel presented the aims and prospects of the summer school. This was followed by all the teaching team members, the students and the course coordinator introducing themselves to the community. Then, Alexandra Cuffel presented the motivation and scope of research into Eastern Jewish and Christian relations. She used a colourful Powerpoint presentation, Jews and Christians in the East: Strategies of Interaction between the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, 500-1800, which illustrated the framework of the ERC-funded research project, which is the basis both for the research of the team and for the summer course.

Subject no. 1: Concepts and Theories of Otherness

Alexandra Cuffel and Barbara Roggema

The introductory lecture into the subject of ‘otherness’ was given by Alexandra Cuffel, who examined broadly various theories of othering, particularly as they had been applied to religious and ethnic minorities in medieval Europe and Byzantium. Then, we discussed the degree and ways in which these models may apply to medieval and early modern Jewish-Christian groups in Caucasus, West and Central Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, Ethiopia and South India.

The discussion of the readings was led by Barbara Roggema. She patiently guided the students through a philosophical-logical text on Otherness, demonstrating an important aspect of our project, namely interdisciplinarity, bridging the gap between specific issues in medieval studies and frontline post-colonial contemporary studies.

Afternoon session: Source Languages – Introduction

Every language teacher introduced the respective language and sources in 15 minutes, with a few words about the programme for the coming two weeks.

Evening: reception for all the participants

Day 2, morning sessions

Inter-religious Relations: Eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean

Ophira Gamliel and István Perczel

The Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean constituted a vast area of long-distance trade routes of transfer of goods and cultural exchange. The political powers in the respective regions kept on shifting through the centuries, as from the Roman Empire to the Byzantine and, later on, the Umayyads, Abbasids, Seljuqs, Mamluks etc. in the Eastern Mediterranean. In Central Asia, the Sassanian Empire gave way to the Abbasids, Ghaznavids and Safavids. In South India, there were also rising and vanishing states and dominant dynasties such as the Chola, Pandya and Chera. Opposed to this, the structure of the trade networks remained more or less the same in the longue durée. Religious minorities, such as Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, Muslims in the South, Jews, Christians, Manicheans and others in the North formed interreligious trade guilds and were the main actors of this transmission.

On this background, two presentations were made, one by István Perczel on Arabian Sea trade and the pre-modern Oikumene – this treated the subject from the 1^st to the 9^th century, with a little outlook to later development – and one by Ophira Gamliel on Interreligious Relations between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean 900s-1500s, treating the continuation.

As the two presentations occupied much time and there was intense debate, there remained little time for discussing the readings.

Afternoon sessions: Introduction to Arabic and Judeo-Arabic

Alexandra Cuffel and Barbara Roggema

What are the sources in Arabic and Judeo-Arabic relevant for the study of the history of inter-religious relations between Eastern Jews and Christians? This class was a general introduction to the language family of Hebrew and Arabic and on issues concerning palaeography and codicology.

Source Readings in Arabic and Judeo-Arabic

Guided readings in Christian Arabic and Judeo-Arabic (supplemented with translations)

Day 3, morning sessions

Conversion, conquest and cultural transfer in the Caucasus and Anatolia

Zara Pogossian and Stephen Rapp

This lecture had two foci. On the one hand, conversion to Christianity in Southern Caucasus and narratives about conversion were discussed. In this part of the lecture, the role of the Jews and Judaism as well as of Jerusalem was compared and set against the backdrop of each other in the Caucasian conversion narratives. Then, the kind of attitudes (or changes of attitudes) towards Jews that seem to take place after Islamic conquests were discussed, as they are traced in the sources. These attitudes were placed in a larger Persian context and its integration with and into early Christian and Jewish sources.

Discussion of Readings

Afternoon session: Introduction to Material Culture

Verena Krebs

How to read something that does not necessarily contain writing? And what role can non-written, material sources play in our study of medieval history? This class presented a case study to demonstrate the possibilities involved in the emerging field of medieval art-historiography, where material sources are not used to merely illustrate or supplement information gathered from written sources but are ‘read’ as independent, complementary historical sources in their own right.

Source Readings of Material Culture Objects

The aim of this class was to look at a number of material culture sources – from murals and icons to objects of everyday life – to tease out what this category of historical sources may reveal about Jewish-Christian interaction in pre-modern times. After a brief discussion of the readings, the class was continued outside CEU, in a more informal context.

Day 4, morning sessions

Identity and community as factual fiction or fictitious fact

Alexandra Cuffel and Sophia Dege-Müller

The idea or understanding of a “Jewish” identity was perceived in very different ways according to context. An “Israelite” background might have had a very positive connotation, while a “Jewish” one was often equated with being a heretic. Yet it was clearly understood from the Christian perspective that Jews and Christians shared the same communal origin, while the origin of Muslims was taken as something else. This class was focusing on such modes of referring to communities and how these modes changed or adapted according to purpose and needs at a given time.

Discussion of Readings

Afternoon sessions: Introduction to Georgian

Stephen Rapp

This class presented the history of the script and of literary evolution from a comparative perspective with Armenian language and literature. Also, it introduced the students to the sources on the history of the Georgian language, especially those relevant for the study of Jewish-Christian relations in ancient and medieval Georgia.

Georgian Source Reading

Selected portions of medieval Georgian literature were read, namely from the Moktsevai Kartlisai (“Conversion of Kartli”) and the Kartlis Tskhovreba (“History of Kartli”). As there was nobody in the audience knowing Georgian, all the texts were read in English.

Day 5, morning sessions

Deciphering Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Apocalyptic Traditions

Barbara H Roggema and Zara Pogossian

Apocalyptic sources, especially those that fall into the category of “political apocalypses”, often become vectors of inter-religious polemic. This lecture provided a brief theoretical background to the genre of apocalyptic sources. Then, some of the topoi that appear in this type of texts with regard to Jews were discussed, for example in relation to the Antichrist or the “Life of the Antichrist”, but also theological reflections about Jews and the End of the World, giving rise to different responses and different configurations. The lecture stressed the difficulty of simple classifications of “positive” or “negative” attitudes towards the religious “Others” as emerges in these texts.

Discussion on Readings

Afternoon sessions: Introduction to Syriac

Radu Mustaƫă

The class introduced the Aramaic language family and the place of Classical Syriac and of Modern Aramaic dialects within it. The three traditions of writing and pronouncing Classical Syriac were presented, namely Eastern/Nestorian, Western/Jacobite and Melkite, with a detour to Syriac in India. The class briefly dealt with writing systems, the use of the dots, the introduction of vowel signs in the 8th-9th centuries, Garshuni scripts (Syriac alphabet used to write Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Malayalam), the range and scope of Syriac literature, and also with Classical Syriac in the Middle Ages and in Modernity.

Syriac Source Reading

Barbara H. Roggema and István Perczel

Sources on Jews from the Middle East and India were confronted. Barbara Roggema presented the Christian Bahira Legend, while Radu Mustaƫă and István Perczel presented Kadavil Chandy Kattanar’s newly found poems on the Hebrew and Syriac languages. The aim of the confrontation was to show that while the image of the Jews in the Middle East is negative and polemical, in India it is rather friendly.

Day 6, Excursion to the city of Szentendre, visiting museums, lunch covered by the summer course in a Serbian restaurant

Week II

Day 1, morning sessions

Shared Religious Practices and Cultural Diversity

Ophira Gamliel and Alexandra Cuffel

Jews and Christians in the Islamic world and beyond have shared many religious practices with Muslims and with each other. The most prominent example is of shared festivals and pilgrimage sites. The presentation discussed the relation between sharing sacred spaces and times, the formation of trade networks and the impact of the two on cultural diversity.

Discussion on Readings

Afternoon sessions: Introduction to Ge’ez

Sophia Dege-Müller

The class gave the students an introduction to the written heritage of Christians and Jews in Ethiopia. It introduced the relevant sources and how to access and work with them. Here the specificity is that there is no such thing as Ethiopian Jewish literature proper as the tradition of the Beta Israel is purely oral. Yet, Jews were using Christian manuscripts for their own purposes and corrected them. The class also provided a brief outline of sources available in Ge’ez and discussed literary Ethiopian Christian topoi about Jews from collections of Marian miracles as well as anti-Judaic excerpts from the writings coming from Zar’a Ya’qob (15th century).

Ge’ez Source Reading

Selected passages from collections of Marian miracles as well as anti-Judaic excerpts from the writings coming from Zar’a Ya’qob were read.

Day 2, morning sessions

Jews and Christians in Contact: The Archaeological Evidence

Bar Kribus

What premodern archaeological sources exist for the study of Jewish-Christian contact and interactions? Do such sources simply demonstrate literal co-existence of both groups in the same locations? In Armenia, the discovery of a Jewish graveyard upended assumptions about Jewish life based on written sources over the last few years and, in Ethiopia, both Jews and Christians formed monastic groups and maintained monasteries, whose archaeological remains have recently garnered scholarly attention. The session presented examples of archaeological source material and showed how archaeological studies and historical research can reveal hitherto unexplored – and unexpected – facets of Jewish-Christian history.

Jewish customs in Ethiopian Christianity and the Beta Israel: Archaeological and Anthropological Evidence

Instead of the originally planned discussion on readings, Bar Kribus presented the Jewish traits in Ethiopian Christianity, as well as the evidence on the history, the customs and the archaeological remains of the Beta Israel, treating also the theories about their origins.

Afternoon sessions: Introduction to Malayalam

Ophira Gamliel

The class presented the linguistic and literary history of Malayalam as inherently related to the advent of the Arabs along the Indian Ocean maritime trade routes. Issues such as script, dialects, language documentation and regional literature were treated, and a brief survey was given on the sources relevant for the study of the sociocultural history of Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Malayalam-speaking region.

Source Readings in Malayalam

Selected sections from Christian and Hindu sources were read in comparative view and in relation to the history of inter-religious relations.

Day 3, morning sessions

Oral Sources for the History of Jewish-Christian Relations

Ophira Gamliel and Bar Kribus

The study of the history of minorities in certain regions – and especially in South India and in Ethiopia – is often obstructed by the lack of written sources and archaeological evidence. For this reason, scholars tend to relate to oral narratives and linguistic practices and infer from them about the past. While this is problematic, it can nevertheless serve as a tool in a critical construction of the history of such minority groups and their inter-religious relations. Some results of fieldwork in interviews and language documentation and their implications on the broader field of the history of inter-minorities relations were presented.

Discussion on Readings

Afternoon sessions: Introduction to Classical Armenian

Zara Pogossian

The lecture provided a basic introduction to Armenian (classical Armenian, later developments and basic notions on the dialects). Then, students were introduced into the kind of sources preserved in this language. Thus, Agathangelos, Movses Khorenatsi, Paustos Buzant, Sebeos were briefly presented, with their relevant information on Jewish-Christian relations, be those real or imagined.

This was followed by Classical Armenian Source Reading, which turned out a slow and focused reading under Pogossian’s guidance, who inspired the students to engage in textual hermeneutic practices.

Excerpts from the aforementioned sources in English translation were read and analysed.

Day 4, morning sessions

World History beyond the Civilisational Model

István Perczel and Verena Krebs

The purpose of this class was to summarise the classes taken during the summer course with conclusive remarks on related theoretical concerns. The claim was made that the unfolding history of Eastern Jewish-Christian relations as presented during the summer school is seriously challenging the “civilisational model” until recently dominating the historical sciences, public discourse and, even political decision making. István Perczel gave a brief history of the civilizational model. During the discussion we questioned the claim of authorities such as Weber, Jaspers, Spengler, Toynbee and, more recently, Eisenstein and Huntington, that postulates separate homogenous “civilisational units” more or less corresponding to empires and based on religion. It was proposed that, rather, we find an interconnected network with durable structures, resisting ephemeral political change and creating a world economy and world culture with smaller economic and cultural units organically living within the whole. An alternative model is needed to address the role of religious and other minorities as mediators between socioeconomic sub-units within larger political and cultural complexes.

Instead of a discussion on readings, Verena Krebs gave a presentation on recent changes in the conception of Medieval Studies as also witnessed by the last International Congress of Medieval Studies in Leeds, which testifies to a post-colonial, subaltern and gendered turn in the field.

The afternoon sessions were dedicated to student presentations.

In the evening, students were giving a concert: Hugo Maat was playing the piano, Mark Aranha was playing the guitar and singing his own compositions, while Arnab Dutta sang a poem by Rabindranath Tagore.

Day 5 was dedicated to student presentations and to a concluding discussion.

What we have learned and the tasks ahead

The original idea was to distribute to a wider audience the results of innovative research into the everyday contacts and relations of Jews and Christians in the East, in a context that, before our project, had received hardly any attention in the research on Jewish-Christian relations. The summer school, perhaps not entirely anticipated as such, turned out as an opportunity for us to engage in each other’s research. The challenge to translate new results for a wider, non-specialist audience coincides with the challenge to understand our own results at a deeper level and to be able to set our own specific research, restricted to certain areas and languages, into the larger picture. Thus, perhaps, we have learned from each other as much as the students. Also, we have received very high-level student contributions; Some students presented ground-breaking research, not necessarily in our specific field of medieval inter-religious encounters, though all of them were about some sort of inter-religious and cross-cultural exchanges. Thus, we have decided to maintain the scholarly network created by the summer course, to remain in contact with our younger colleagues, and to involve them, as far as possible, in the JewsEast research.

Hopefully these trends will be consolidated through the summer schools of the next years. We have received abundant student feed-back, which we will incorporate in our future endeavours aimed at public outreach and the dissemination of the research results.

Planned outcomes

The most important continuation is the next summer school, which will take place in Bochum, at the Ruhr University, in the summer of 2018. The publications are those of the ERC project, which are in the pipeline. Because our intention is to maintain the network created for the course, the e-learning website will be live at least for one more year after the end of the course. During this year, all the participants, instructors and students alike, will have access to the website and will be able to download material directly, or to upload material via the coordinator of the summer course. The students were encouraged to approach us for further tuition, information on activities and contributions for publishing or presenting in the framework of the ERC-funded project.

The actual programme of the event, including the necessary changes

Link for the programme of the event, as it was advertised on the course website. For the necessary changes, please see the narrative report above.

For more information, please visit the course website at: https://summeruniversity.ceu.edu/jewschristians-2017

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2016/17

REPORT

24th International Annual Conference on Jewish Studies and International Youth Conference on Jewish Studies in Moscow

Sefer Centre, Moscow, 30 January – 2 February 2017

Organisers: Dr. Victoria Mochalova, Mrs Svetlana Amosova, Mrs Irina Kopchenova

Introduction

On 29-31 January 2017, the Twenty Fourth Annual International Conference on Jewish Studies was held in Moscow Hotel Izmailovo. About two hundred researches from scholarly centers and universities in the USA, Israel, Lebanon, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Serbia, Hungary, Czech, Poland, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine and Russia took part in this event. The conference was organized by the Sefer Center with the financial support of the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee, Russian Jewish Congress, Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, Philanthropy Group Genesis, and sponsors who prefer to remain anonymous. Furthermore, as a result of EAJS travel grants, 18 PhD students and early career researchers had the opportunity to participate in the Conference.

This year we decided to combine the Conference with the Young Students conference, which usually takes place in summer. Our goal was to unite generations of Jewish studies students, and to raise the level of research through discussions at the sessions planned in advance. Included in the conference was a young researchers sections. At the Conference, there were also the presentations of new publications and projects in Jewish Studies, as well as award presentations for the Professor Eugene Weiner grants. The conference program included 18 sessions, as well as the meeting of the Sefer Academic Board; discussions with Polish colleagues about the planned Summer School in Poland; and consultations about the new scholarly magazine publication.

Event Rationale

Since 1993 the Sefer Conference has become a major meeting place for the exchange of ideas between researchers in the field of Russian-speaking Jewish Studies. At the moment our conference is the largest in this field and brings together a large number of researchers in the former Soviet space (approx. 200 people meet annually at the conference).International conferences on Jewish Studies organized by Sefer Center take place every year in Moscow. It is a meeting place for researchers from all over the world (most of them are Russian speakers) who work with different aspects of Jewish Studies – from Biblical Studies to the History of the State of Israel, from Jewish philosophy to Jewish-Christian relations, Jewish literature and art, history of the Jews in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, etc.The main working language of the conference is Russian. There are several large conventions in the field of Jewish studies, but the working language is mostly English. For Russian researchers and researchers from a number of Eastern European countries the question of language is often a very important point. English is the second working language.

Each summer during the students’ holidays (generally in the first half of June), Sefer organizes the International youth conference on Jewish Studies. We are planning to connect the two conferences on the same site this year. Holding two conferences on the same site at the same time will allow young researchers to communicate with experienced scientists in the field of Jewish studies in post-Soviet community and to present their own research projects.

Many sections covering such topics as Biblical study and Semitology, Jewish thought, Jewish history, Ethnocultural ties, Israel studies, Jewish literature, arts and music, social studies and psychology, and others are in work during the conferences. Attention of the conferences’ participants is also paid to the contemporary State of Israel, its internal situation and foreign affairs. Students from Russian and FSU countries benefit from these conferences, as they contribute to solving a problem of learning and teaching academic Jewish studies and its aspects, enlarging their knowledge in culture, history, arts and traditions of the Hebrew nation, and learning Hebrew and the Yiddish languages.

Event Programme

Aramaic and Hebraic Studies (Chairs: Alexey Lyavdansky, Matthew Morgenstern).

The session was organized by Alexey Lyavdansky of Moscow State University, who spoke about the use of the qa-particle in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, and demonstrated that it seems to be used with certain types of verbs alone. Matthew Morgenstern of Tel Aviv University (Israel) discussed grammatical forms in Babylonian Aramaic and Mandaic which fell out of use or were lost in the process of later textual transmission. Kristina Benyaminova of Moscow State University (Russia) talked about some unusual features the North-East New Aramaic Dialect Tal (subdialect Badaraye), while Tatiana Fine discussed some problems in defining the fine semantic meaning of some words in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. Gaby Abou Samra of the Lebanese University in Beirut brought evidence for connections between the magic bowl texts from Late Antiquity and later Syriac magical manuscripts. Two papers dealt with Hebrew. Victor Golinetz of the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg (Germany) adduced evidence of Greek translations to propose that in several cases the matres lectionis in the Massoretic Text of the Hebrew bible reflect an erroneous textual reading. Finally, Yulia Budman examined the terms for “root” in the works of mediaeval Hebrew linguists.

Scriptures of Ancient Israel in Historical Perspective (Chairs: Dr. Sergey Tischenko, Dr. Mikhail Seleznev, 18 presentations).

Vera Duerrschnabel from Bern delivered a very good presentation on the magic bowls (with spells written on them in Aramaic). The highlight of the meeting was the report of Alexey Volchkov about the Book of Jonah in the context of deconstruction, and many participants of the meeting were involved in the subsequent debate. The youth session was generally successful, bright and stimulating, not only for young scientists, but also for the more experienced members of the academic community. The section was also honoured by the participation of the well-known scientist, Alexander Grishchenko.

Yiddish Literature (Chiars: Dr. Valery Dymshits, Dr. Alexandra Polyan)

The session, “Yiddish Literature,” included 8 papers, two of which were in the youth part. Presentations were given in three languages: six papers were in Russian, one in English (Arnaud Bikard (PhD), “About what shall I bear witness? Expressing the trauma of life as a refugee in the USSR during World War Two in Yiddish literature”), and one in Yiddish (Leonid Roitman, “Lexical Wordplays in Sholem Aleichem`s Works”). Other papers in first section were: Valery Dymshits, “The Jewish Chronotope. Space and Time in the Traditional East European Jewish Mentality”; Alexandra Polyan (PhD), “Glueckel of Hammeln’s Memoirs as a Baroque Text”; Ber Kotlerman (Prof.), “Der Nister the Publicist on the Post-Holocaust Jewish Reconstruction”; and Valentina Fedchenko (PhD), “I. Bashevis-Singer`s Double Corpus: Soul expeditions vs. Shosha”. In the youth section there was my paper, and a presentation by Victoria Alexeeva (BA), “Comparison of Literarishe bleter Magazine and Kultur Lige Organization: Historical and Ideological Aspects”. The geography of the section was wide: two persons from Israel (Ber Kotlerman and Leonid Roitman), one from Germany (Ekaterina Kuznetsova), one from Moscow (Alexandra Polyan), and the others from St. Petersburg. The section was interesting both for professional researchers and for the wider audience. Comparing the session to that of previous years, it was a sign of the success and effective development of the Yiddish section. The themes of papers were focused on the Yiddish literature and its different aspects: historical, linguistic and social. The order of papers in the section was chronological: from the medieval Yiddish texts through to the 20^th century. Valery Dymshits spoke about a specific attitude to geography that exists in Yiddish written texts starting from Binyomin of Tudela to Tevye der milkhiker. Particularly he concentrated on the fact that locations with no Jewish population are “blind spots” in the Jewish geographical mentality. Then he demonstrated that Sholem Aleichem showed a very interesting fusion in the concept of time in his character Tevye the Dairyman, using in the text Jewish religious, Christian religious, and Russian state holidays as time markers. Dymshits’ presentation was followed by an intensive discussion with many questions, mostly about the Tevye’s regularity of exceptionality for the Yiddish culture of the end of the 19^th century. Alexandra Polyan proposed a new view on the well-known text – memoires of Gluckel of Hammeln. This text was never before analyzed as an example of baroque literature, and Alexandra Polyan proved that it bears all the necessary features to be viewed as such. Leonid Roitman analyzed linguistic games in Sholem Aleichem’s works, particularly in Tevye the Dairyman and Railroad stories. He detected several types of distinct bilingual humor in them, concentrating on the examples of misinterpretation of Hebrew quotes. Arnaud Bikard presented research based on the analysis of diaries and memoires written by the Jewish refugees (mostly from Poland) in the USSR during the 1930-1940s. The second most discussed paper was the one by Ber Kotlerman. He used different sources, including Soviet movies about WWII and the partisan movement, personal memoires, and literary essays by Der Nister. Prof. Kotlerman showed the shift in Der Nister’s views on the future of the Jewish nation in the USSR – the writer used Biblical prophetic hints in his articles which can be understood as sympathy to the Zionistic movement. The fact of appearance of such texts in the mid-1940s is very interesting. Valentina Fedchenko presented a very thorough comparison between English and Yiddish versions of the novel “Shosha” by I.B.Singer. It has been the subject of her research for several years. Particularly she explained the differences in literary methods in two versions, the presence and absence of irony in them, and the difference in the general meaning (i.e. English version is more psychological, while Yiddish one is more mystical and philosophical).

Jews in Diaspora: Contacts and Conflicts (Chairs: Dr. Maxim Khizhy, Dr. Victor Shnirelman)

This session included 10 presentations. The presented papers were on very diverse topics covering almost 400 years, and a wide geographical area, including Poland, Russia, Latvia, and even France. In principle, our proposed experiment to combine the meeting with the youth section was quite justified. Victoria Mochalova’s paper, “The Image of the Jews in the Polemic Literature of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the XVII century,” was dedicated to the analysis of published texts written by Polish Catholic intellectuals which discussed the so-called demonic origin of Jews. One of the most impressive details of the presented research was the social background of Polish authors who were not only nobles but commoners as well. Maxim Khizhiy’s paper, “Rabbi Shneerson and Russian Authorities in 40-50-s of the XIX century: the attempt of dialogue,” dealt mainly with the case of the imprisonment of Lyubavich Rebe Menachem-Mendl Shneerson. This case was described in the article of Israeli researcher Zoya Kopelman, but the author of the paper analyzed the materials which were not studied by Kopelman. Dr. Khiziy tended to examine this case in the general imperial political, legal and confessional context, and came to some very important conclusions. The key idea of the author is that whilst it may sound paradoxical, the Russian empire, in the case of Rabbi Shneerson, appeared to be a real legal state where the law stood above all confessional and social issues, and no anti-Semitic or confessional conflict in general was relevant in this case. In my opinion this idea deserves special attention since it shows that every case in Jewish-Russian relations must be studied carefully before judging it as anti-Semitic and aimed specifically against Jews. Dmitriy Bratkin’s paper, “Unpublished Biography of D.A. Khvolson from Saint Petersburg Brunch of the Archive of Russian Academy of Science: semitologist-amateur, blood label and Soviet Russia,” was dedicated to the detailed study of the unknown personal archival collection of a famous scholar of Jewish origin Daniil Khvolson. To my mind, the most important part of this research was connected to Khvolson’s activity in the sphere of Russian-Jewish dialogue. As Dr. Bratkin said, professor Khvolson was “the most eastern” representative of Wissenschaft des Judentums and did a lot to bring Jewish topics to a scientific level. Khvolson hardly recognized himself separate from the Jewish people. Gita Umanovskaya’s paper, “It happened in Varaklyany: How Jews beat Latvian students (1925),” presented a close study of one local episode of violence in Jewish-Latvian relations. Opposite to the common situation, the Jews of small shtetl Varaklyany became not victims but aggressors who decided to use physical violence against their offenders. In the paper, there were some very important details, such as that the leader of Jewish aggressors was an Old Believer and that the reaction of local representatives of the Catholic Church was very tolerant to Jews (they actually defended Jews from students’ accusations).

Jewish Thought session (Chairs: Dr. Arkady Kovelman, Mikhail Wogman)

This session included 13 presentations which were connected by the common theme, “the Thought – and the Commentary”. The chronological spectrum was wide: from the ancient times to the 20th century. Some of the participants shared their own experience of the translation of Jewish philosophical texts from Hebrew into Russian.

Field Research: Epigraphy (Chairs: Ida Shenderovich, Michail Vasilyev)

This session became a meeting point for both young and amateur researches engaged in documenting, preserving and cataloguing Jewish Cemeteries across Eastern Europe. The session included 5 presentations. The first lecturer, Alexanda Fishel (Kiev), analyzed the phenomenon of extensive quotation of the biblical Book of Job in Hebrew inscriptions on traditional Jewish tombstones. Ida Shenderovich, as an invited speaker, provided a comprehensive overview of the Jewish cemeteries remaining in the Mogilev region (Belarus). The young career researchers Ekaterina Karaseva (Saint-Petersburg) and Julia Len’(Minsk) presented some preliminary results of documenting the Jewish Cemeteries in Sestroretsk and Berdichev respectively. Finally, Mikhail Karanaev (Kazan), addressed the methodical issues of the epigraphic field expeditions organized by Center Sefer.

Field Research: Linguistics, Folklore Studies and Oral History (Chairs: Dr. Dov-Ber Kerler, Dr. Olga Belova)

All the reports in this session were very interesting due to the new field and archival data. There were materials presented from the regions which in recent years have led the folklore-ethnographic and linguistic studies by Russian and foreign scientists (Belarus, Moldova, Romania, Latgale, Russia, Ukraine). The participants were not only able to compare the subjects that represent today the Jewish tradition in different regions, but also to discuss the problem of cataloging and digitalization of materials.

History of Jews in the USSR and Post-Soviet Countries (Chairs: Dr. Gennady Kostyrchenko, Alexander Ivanov, Dr. D. Shevelev)

The first presentation, by A. Ivanov, was devoted to the expedition of the St. Petersburg State museum of ethnography to Birobidzhan in 1937. The presenter has noticed that a main objective of the specified expedition was to demonstrate the process of modernisation of the Jewish population in the USSR in the post-revolution period. In this connection, participants of the expedition (D. Pozdnev, I. Pulner, etc.) were engaged in the gathering of statistical data about developments in agriculture and industry, and were engaged in the search of ethnographic materials. The author has drawn conclusions that the expedition work was not effective as Birobidzhan was boundary territory, and their research was supervised by bodies of People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. On a life of the Jewish population, small exhibits which have caused negative responses in visitors of exhibitions have been collected. A. Lokshin’s presentation was devoted to “not opened secrets of black years of the Soviet Jewry: 1946 – 1953”. The lecturer noticed that the specified period as a whole has already been thoroughly studied by historians. Nevertheless, in his opinion, there are such “white stains”, such as the reasons of concealment of the facts of reprisals against Jews, the reasons of difference of the Anti-Jewish reprisals of 1930 and post-war years, and the reasons of masking murder of Mihoelsa as accident. According to A. Lokshin, during the second half of the 1940s, Jews in general began to present as enemies of the people, without accusing them of concrete crimes. The third presenter discussed two questions: the reason of registration of the press of the Minsk community in Hebrew and whether by believer of the prayer book to the representative of local authorities (with the latest request to return) the fact of transfer has been connected with political policy change. According to the lecturer, the press of the Jewish religious communities throughout the 20th century was made out in Hebrew (sometimes – also in Russian) as Hebrew was the language of religious divine services. In Yiddish, the press of the Jewish Soviet establishments (it was characteristic for the 1920s-1930s) could be made out only. Concerning the second question it has been noticed that delivery and prayer book return have occurred throughout a short time interval and have not been connected with power change in republic. It is possible to explain such behaviour of the believer that fact that about the fact of receipt of prayer books from abroad anyway it would become known in KGB, on the other hand inhabitants of the Belarus cities felt sharp deficiency of the new divine service literature. G. Kostyrchenko, in his presentation, analyzed reprisals against the “Helsinki group”. Problems of cooperation of representatives of intelligentsia with bodies of the KGB, position “otkaznik” in the USSR, rehabilitation have been mentioned. The presentation of A.M. Basauri-Zjuzinoj was devoted to the works of Ukrainian scientist M. Shahnovich. D. Shevelev’s presentation was devoted to the revival of the Jewish religion in Belarus in 1990. The youth section, which had A. Krohichev, K. Barkan, M. Shishigina and J. Stonchius as participants, contained reports on topics such as Zionism, the activities of religious communities, and anti-Semitism in the Soviet republics.

The State of Israel (Chairs: Dr Dmitry Mar’yasis and Dr Mikhail Shapovalov)

This session consisted of three parts: the History of the Zionist Movement, the State, and the Society of Contemporary Israel. Together with the seasoned participants who have attended the conference for many years, there were also young researchers who presented their first serious scientific results.

Jewish Art: Music and Theatre (Chairs: Dr. Eugenia Khazdan and Svetlana Pakhomova)

Participants from Russia (Moscow and St. Petersburg.), Switzerland (Geneva), Belgrade (Serbia) and Israel, presented on various aspects from the spectra of musicology. Questions were raised about the theory and practice of academic and folklore studies, the interaction of music and poetry, music and theater, and music anthropology, covering the period from the formation of Jewish musicology to the present. All the speakers demonstrated a very high level of research.

Jewish Arts: Cinema (Chair: Dr. Eugenia Khazdan and Svetlana Pakhomova)

This area is a very young, developing area of research. The presentation, mostly relating to the language of cinema itself, was by Elina Vasilyeva from Daugavpils.

Jewish Art (Chair: Lidia Chakovskaya)

Lidia Chakovskaya (Moscow), “The New Perspectives in the Research of Byzantine Synagogues in the Light of the New Finds”; Irina Chernetsky (Jerusalem), “The Presence of Jerusalem in Florence in the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Centuries”. Dagmara Budzioch (Krakow), “Two engraved amulets against Lilith (Nitra 1832, Wroclaw 1839) – their description and comparison”; Anna Moiseeva (Moscow), “Decorative Arts of the Jewish community in Yemen”.

Jewish Literature (Chair: Leonid Katsis)

This literary communications session consisted of 10 presentations, of which 3 were by young scholars. The themes were various: poetry, prose, drama. Special attention was paid to the problems of translation (Olga Karasik), to the problem of literary influences and allusions (Anna Waisman, Yury Orlicky), and to the reflection of the relations between Jews and other nations in literature. The panel focused on the methodology of the history of literature and the problems of the Jewish (Hebrew) literature in general.

Round Table on Khazarian History and Culture

In this round table session, the discussions were extremely interesting and vibrant, especially as this is not a regular topic for Sefer conferences. The participants had plenty of things to discuss in the limited time available. Three presentations were delivered, by Olga Kulikova, Oleg Bubenok and Igor’ Semenov.

List of PhD students and early career researchers who received travel grants

1. Basauri Ziuzina Anna Mariya (Kiev, Ukraine), PhD, Early Career Researchers
2. Blagojević Gordana (Belgrade, Serbia), PhD, Early Career Researchers
3. Budzioch Dagmara (Krakow, Poland), PhD, Early Career Researchers
4. Chernetsky Irina (Jerusalem, Israel) PhD, Early Career Researchers
5. Duerrschnabel Vera (Bern, Switzerland) PhD student
6. Fleck Einav (Tel Aviv, Israel) MA student
7. Gerasimova Victoria A. (Omsk, Russia), PhD, Early Career Researchers
8. Hain Milan (Olomouc, Czech Republic) PhD, Early Career Researchers
9. Karpekin Konstantin (Vitebsk, Belarus) PhD, Early Career Researchers
10. Kladova Victoria (Barnaul, Russia), PhD student
11. Kuznetsova-Wolfrum Ekaterina (Regensburg, Germany) PhD student
12. Legenovich Juliana (Vilnus, Lieteau) MA student
13. Olszewska Magdalena M. (Warsaw, Poland) PhD student
14. Podbelska Alicia (Worchester, USA) PhD student
15. Shapiro Grigory (Rostov-on-Don, Russia), PhD student
16. Shishigina Maria (Perm, Russia), MA student
17. Sinilo Anatoly (Bogushevichy, Belarus) Early Career Researchers
18. Van Camp Bieke (Montpelier, France), PhD student

Personal feedback from PhD students and early career researchers

Thank you so much for your generosity, helpfulness and kindness during the Sefer conference. I really enjoyed to participate and to be in Moscow. Sefer was the perfect place for me to find new impulses for my own work, to meet interesting people and share mutual research interests. I look forward to come back to Moscow next year. In order to facilitate the communication, I had my first Russian lesson this week and I will continue to learn the language because I think that it will be a real benefit for my scientific work.  (Vera Duerrschnabel)

I liked the atmosphere of the conference but – given my inadequacy in Russian language – couldn’t attend most panels and presentations. In spite of it, I was glad to be a part of an event with such tradition and prestige and I hope I’ll be able to come back some time in the future. Big thanks to the organizers! (Milan Hain)

It was a very nice meeting with interesting people. The conference gave me the opportunity to get know a lot of things and stories. For the future it will be nice to know earlier about a participation’s confirmation in the conference (more time for preparing a visa). Probably, it will be better to have an opportunity to stay longer in a hotel’s room during the last day of the conference. It will be great if we visit and see some special Jews collection in Moscow. (Magdalena M. Olszewska)

My general feedback on the conference and its organization is over all very positive, the timeframes were respected, and everything was organized in a clear and punctual way. The fact that the organization asked for powerpoint presentations to be in English helped the understanding of the presentations in Russian. (Bieke Van Camp)

There is no doubt that annual conference organized by “Sefer” is the most remarkable event in Jewish Studies on the post-Soviet space. It brings together researchers from quite distant parts of the world and gives them the unique opportunity to share their ideas, observations and conclusions. This conference provides a multidisciplinary field for research, helps to create new connections, build new projects based on personal communication, and educate a new generation of scholars. In my opinion, the experiment of the unite conference for both experienced and young researchers held this year appeared to be a successful and promising one. I would like to thank all the organizers, promoters and sponsors for giving me the chance to be a part of this amazing event. (Victoria Gerasimova)

I would like to thank the Sefer Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization for inviting me to this conference and for proving me a grant that made my participation possible. The conference included a variety of interesting topics, spread from Biblical to modern times, fascinating lectures and insightful discussions. The atmosphere was pleasant and friendly. The organization was perfect. In this context, I would like to particularly thank Svetlana Amosova for her boundless patience and help! (Irina Chernetsky)

It was a very rewarding experience for me to participate in my first academic conference, and particularly so since the conference took place in Russia, a country that I have never visited before. Our convener, Alexey Lyavdansky, took great effort to ensure that we were all welcome. The papers covered a variety of topics, and our session was extremely warm and friendly. I am looking forward to further collaborations with the other participants, and it was a great opportunity to get to know researchers from around the world. (Einav Fleck)

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2016/17

REPORT

‘New Approaches to the History of the Jews under Communism’

Prague, 23-25 May 2017

Event rationale

The main goal of the conference was to establish new perspectives for research on the Jewish experience under Communism, both in the Soviet Union and in the Communist states of eastern and east-central Europe. Acknowledging the substantial achievements in the field and considering mainly state policies towards Jewish communities, antisemitism, emigration, and political and diplomatic history, the conference aimed to go beyond those topics. In the call for papers, we, the organizers, encouraged potential participants to propose papers related to the social, cultural and political history of the Jewish communities, to dwell on complexities, contradictions, and hitherto unknown features, to present these communities as subjective historical actors rather than mere objects of state policy or of the history of the non-Jewish majorities. We wanted to transcend the most discussed and highly politicized topics such as attitudes of non-Jews to the Jewish communities in Communist states and questions of Jewish representatives’ engagement in the Communist project. The conference was also intended to launch an intense debate that would propose not only new research topics, but also new methodologies and new sources, which would transcend previous ideological and nationalistic biases. Consequently, in the call for papers we emphasized topics, methodologies, and sources related to everyday Jewish life and experiences, religious life, the persistence of old social and cultural structures from before the Communist period, transnationalism (also transgressing the boundaries of the ‘Iron Curtain’), daily vernacular and linguistic questions, non-elite and peripheral aspects of Jewish life, unofficial social and cultural networks ‘slipping’ over the legal and ideological boundaries drawn by the authoritarian states.

A particular breakthrough on this path was made in the last ten years in the history of the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union. The conference sought to invite leading experts on this topic to join in a conversation with historians of other east-central European Jewish communities, to share and discuss their perspectives and thereby enrich both fields. Another goal of the conference was to achieve an inter-generational dialogue. In order to do so, besides inviting world-renowned scholars, we reserved several conference places for young European scholars, to ensure that they would be well represented at the event and to give them a chance to present their research and to exchange ideas with leading researchers in the field.

Detailed conference description

The conference was opened at 8 pm, on 23 May, with a presentation by Oleg Zhidkov (University of Ber Sheva), ‘The Jewish Movement in the USSR: New Sources and Perspectives’. This was a discussion of a project recently concluded by a research team led by Professor Yaacov Ro’i of the Hebrew University and carried out in cooperation with the Jerusalem Jewish National Library. Zhidkov presented snippets of a few of the hundreds of video testimonies of veterans of the ‘refusenik’ movement in the Soviet Union, and discussed the interview surveys, his method for choosing the interviewees, the time and geographical scope of the project, and its potential for the research of the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union.

The main part of the conference began at 9 am, on 24 May, with opening remarks by one of the conference organizers, Stephan Stach (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague). This was followed by the first conference panel, ‘Jewish Life, Religious Practice and Folklore under Soviet Communism, Pt I’, chaired by Kateřina Čapková (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague), with papers by Valery Dymshits (European University, Saint Petersburg), Victoria Gerasimova (Omsk State University) and Diana Dumitru (Ion Creangă State University of Moldova). The first of the speakers, reporting on historical and ethnographic research in the Mogilev Podolskiy area and a few other former ‘shtetls’ in Soviet Ukraine and Belarus, discussed the connections between legal, illegal, and unofficial Jewish religious practices in these areas in the last two decades of the Soviet Union and their connections to the ‘shadow’ or private economy of the time. During the panel discussions, Dymshits was encouraged by Kamil Kijek (University of Wrocław) to discuss the pre-revolutionary stratification in the Jewish community, social prestige divisions between ‘balebatim’ and ‘balei meluche’, and their development and restructuring in the late Soviet state.

In her paper ‘The Jewish Community of Omsk under the Soviets, from 1940 to the 1960s: Between Tradition and Survival’, Victoria Gerasimova discussed the social composition of one of the three biggest official Jewish communities in Siberia (consisting in large part of Second World War Jewish evacuees from the western Soviet Union but also of ancestors of Jewish cantonists and merchants from the last decades of the Tsarist period), the internal social and power dynamics, and religious practices, official and unofficial. In her paper ‘“It is Better to Live in Romania Than in the Soviet Union”: How Bessarabian Jews Tried and Frequently Failed to Become Soviet Citizens during Late Stalinism’, Diana Dumitru looked at the dynamics of the unsuccessful integration of the Bessarabian Jews into the political and social structures of the Soviet Union in the first years after the Second World War. She discussed matters such as popular antisemitism, the perception of the Jews as agents of Sovietization, post-1945 Jewish immigration to Bessarabia, and juxtaposed it with the complicated political stance of the Bessarabian Jews and their fresh memories of life in interwar Romania. In the discussion that followed, Zvi Gitelman (University of Michigan) commented on the similarities between the Jewish policies of the State and its reactions to anti-Communist popular antisemitism in other parts of the Soviet Union and in the Eastern Bloc.

The second conference panel was entitled ‘Literature and Jewish Identity’. It was chaired by Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov (Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw). Its first panelist, Daria Vakhrushova (University of Düsseldorf), discussed the ideas of the most important Yiddish avant-garde writers and critics in the early years of the Soviet Union towards the main lines of discussion and conflicts in Soviet literary criticism in general. She pointed to their ‘Soviet integration’ on the one hand and the uniqueness of Soviet Yiddish literature of the period on the other. Magdalena Ruta (Jagiellonian University, Cracow), in her paper ‘Nusekh Poyln and the “New Jewish Man”: The Image of the Jewish Communist in Yiddish Literature of Post-war Poland’, discussed how Yiddish writers in post-1945 Poland negotiated the images of the new Jewish man when faced with the requirements of state propaganda and cultural policies, as it changed in various periods of the Polish Peoples Republic (1945–47, 1948–50, 1950–56, and 1956–68). Gennadiy Estraikh (New York University), in his paper ‘Soviet Yiddish Cultural Diplomacy, from the 1950s to 1991’, considered unknown initiatives taken in official Soviet circles and by some representatives of the official Jewish community, to change the antisemitic image of the Soviet State after the late-Stalinist 1940s and early 1950s with their campaigns against alleged cosmopolitism and the ‘doctors’ plots’, by sending representatives of Soviet Yiddish culture to the West and various countries of the Eastern Bloc, in the Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and later Soviet periods.

The third conference panel was called ‘Paths of Integration/Disintegration in the Communist Political System and Society’, and it was chaired by Michal Kopeček (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague). It began with a paper by Galina Zelenina (Russian State University of the Humanities, Moscow), ‘“Po Kurskoi, Kazanskoi zheleznoi doroge”: Jewish Private Life in the Moscow Oblast between Leisure, Underground Religion, and National Revival’, a microstudy of a Moscow suburb, presenting a panorama of Jewish political, social, and cultural pluralism in the Soviet period. In the Malakhovka suburb, Soviet Jewish elites, who owned prestigious dachas, took part in ‘refusenik’ gatherings and unofficial Jewish religious practice, all of which attests to the density and importance of informal social networks in Jewish life in the Soviet period. Agata Maksimowska (University of Warsaw), in her paper ‘Being Jewish in Soviet Birobidzhan’, juxtaposed her interviews with long-standing members of the Jewish community in Birobidzhan – including their narratives of unofficial Jewish life, stigmas of being Jewish and being from ‘Jewish’ Birobidzhan – with the official Soviet narratives and policies of the ‘Jewish Autonomous Oblast’. She thus showed how Yiddish had practically disappeared from the public sphere in Birobidzhan and had become the language of the older members of families, eventually vanishing as the link of cultural transmission from one generation to the next. In her paper ‘Centre and Periphery: Jewish Experience in Communist Czechoslovakia’, Kateřina Čapková challenged the Prague/centre oriented narrative of the assimilation and ‘disappearance’ of the Czechoslovak Jewish community under Communism, and demonstrated the importance of Sub-Carpathian and Slovak Jewish immigration to the Sudetenland region after the Second World War and also the richness of newly established Jewish life there in the first few decades of the Communist period. Contrary to the common narratives of prosecution, economic degradation, and willing or enforced emigration from Czechoslovakia, Yiddish-speaking Jews from Subcarpathian Ruthenia and Slovakia remember those years not only as a time of political repression. It was for them also a time of a better standard of living than what they had experienced in their pre-war milieux and of less antisemitism from their non-Jewish neighbours than what they had known in their place of origin.

The conference was at its mid-point with the last event of 24 May, a panel discussion entitled ‘The Diversity of Jewish Experiences under Communism’. It was chaired by Marcos Silber (Haifa University) and participated in by Zvi Gitelman (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov (Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw), Bożena Szaynok (University of Wrocław), and Andrea Pető (Central European University, Budapest). The first of the panellists, Gitelman, mainly emphasized various differences between the Soviet line of so-called ‘Jewish policies’ and their post-1945 versions in the various satellite states. He claimed, in opposition to the popular misconception, that the ‘Jewish question’ was of relative unimportance in Eastern-Bloc policy, and that there was thus a lack of sustained Soviet pressure to transplant the Soviet model of Jewish policies into the other states under Soviet domination. Nalewajko-Kulikov shared her views on what had been done so far on the topic of the Yiddish language in Communist Eastern Europe, both in the field of literature and in everyday life, and also on what still needed thorough study. These fields of future research should, she argued, include the question of the influence that Yiddish, a recently abandoned everyday language, has had on the ways Polish, Romanian, and Soviet Jews spoke and used the ‘majority languages’ with a still clearly audible ‘minority tinge’. Another so far neglected field of research is the real readership and impact of officially published Yiddish literature in the Soviet Bloc. Szaynok, in her talk, summarized the existing knowledge and state of the field regarding the history of the Polish Jews under Communist government. Pető discussed methodological nationalism and the impact that the illiberal turn in today’s east-central Europe has had on the study of the Jewish experience under Communism in general and in Hungary in particular.

The second day of the conference started with the panel ‘Jewish Identities and Ways of Life under Communism’. The participants considered the questions of Jewish identities, and life decisions taken in the various circumstances of the different Communist regimes. The panel began with a paper by Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto), ‘“I was not like everyone else”: Soviet Jewish Doctors Remember the Doctors’ Plot of 1953’. Based on a few hundred oral interviews with Soviet Jewish doctors, her paper evaluated their narratives on how they struggled with discrimination and what kind of strategies were individually and collectively employed by them to resist it. Anna Koch (University of Southampton), in her paper ‘“After Auschwitz You Must Take Your Origin Seriously”: Perceptions of Jewishness among Communists of Jewish Origin in the Emerging German Democratic Republic’, discussed how the clandestine, marginal, seemingly irrelevant, or denied feelings of Jewishness in the East German Communist regime affected Jews’ political decisions and attitudes in the early years of the German Democratic Republic. Despite official state policies, the strong feelings left by the Holocaust and its uniqueness among other Nazi-period martyrologies became the central element of the identity of Communists of Jewish origin. Kata Bohus (Jewish Museum in Frankfurt am Main), in her paper ‘Opposition of the Opposition: New Jewish Identities in the Samizdat of Late Communist Hungary’, analysed the role of the then young Hungarian Jewish generation in the anti-Communist opposition of the late 1970s and the 1980s and its positions regarding the future shape of the Jewish community, based on new, ethnic, or para-national and non-religious paradigms. In the discussion that followed her paper, conference participants debated the similarities and singularities between this case and cases in the other countries of the Communist bloc, particularly Poland.

The next panel of the day was entitled ‘Jewish Religious Life and Folklore under Soviet Communism’. Ella Stiniguță (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca), in her paper ‘Mountain Jews and the Challenges of Ritual Life in the Soviet Caucasus’, spoke about the religious, cultural, and social life of the Mountain Jews of Soviet Azerbaijan and Georgia. Lacking official and institutional venues, their religious life became increasingly organized around family structures. An interesting aspect of this was the strong contact and mutual help amongst Jewish families and their practising Muslim neighbours. Mikhail Mitsel (JDC Archives, New York), in a paper entitled ‘Jewish Religious Communities in Ukraine, 1945–81’, demonstrated that the representatives of these Jewish communities were not passive towards the political system, but rather were active participants in it, negotiating and seeking to present their positions to the Soviet Council on Religious Affairs and the local authorities, white maintaining their ties to Israeli or American Jewish organizations, sometimes against official state policy. Karina Barkane (University of Riga), in a paper entitled ‘Beyond Assimilation: Jewish Religious Communities in the Latvian SSR’, presented a picture of a vibrant, active Jewish religious community that achieved and created various possibilities for religious observance, including synagogues.

The final conference panel was entitled ‘Jewish Transnational Encounters’. In the first presentation, David Shneer (University of Colorado, Boulder), in his paper ‘Maintaining Collective Identity after Fascism: East Germany’s Jews, Their Transnational Networks, and East German Anti-Fascism’, showed how East German Jews, through places of official contact amongst Soviet Bloc countries, kept in touch with the Jewish communities. This included visits by Yiddish singers and theatre companies, concerts by American artists involved in the ‘anti-imperialist’ campaign, and, by commemorating anti-fascist struggles and victims of concentration camps. Eliyana Adler (Penn State University), in her paper ‘Strange Bedfellows: The Soviet Red Cross, Polish Jewish Refugees, and the American Joint Distribution Committee’, spoke about the activities of the Joint, which, through the good offices of the Soviet Red Cross and, after the Polish-Soviet Agreement of 1941, also the Polish government-in-exile in the Soviet Union, organized help for the Polish Jewish refugees in the country. Such transnational contacts of Polish Jews were one of the decisive arguments for allowing them to emigrate from the Soviet Union after the Second World War.

The purpose of the final roundtable was to summarize the proceedings of the conference. This panel was chaired by Kamil Kijek (University of Wrocław), and included summary remarks of Audrey Kichelewski (Strasbourg University) and Arkadi Zeltser (Yad Vashem, Jerusalem). The panellists underlined the impact of migration on the realities of Jewish life in the Communist States as well as official and unofficial transnational links, both within and beyond the Eastern Bloc. What was unanimously emphasized by the panellists and also by the other conference participants was the importance of broadening the range of Jewish voices and sources, stepping beyond officially produced state documents, and undertaking comparative analyses of sources such as oral history testimonies, internal Jewish documents, and documents on Jewish life in the Soviet Bloc produced abroad or ones not intended for government institutions, which were produced in Eastern Europe but had found their way to Israeli or American archives. During the panel discussion, Gitelman had complained about the lack of discussion here about the relations between the Jews and the non-Jews of Communist Europe and the Soviet Union. These relations, he argued, should be analysed in comparative perspective between various Communist countries. He was opposed on this point by several other participants who argued that there had indeed been papers on these relations at the local level and that it was very hard to do comparisons without having detailed research from the different regions. Dimshits argued that not only comparisons were necessary; we also needed, he said, to consider the diversity of the situation of Jews within each single country (which he demonstrated with the Soviet case). Another problem that was apparently insufficiently discussed at the conference was mixed marriages, families, and identities, which were so prominent in the Soviet Bloc.

Summary: Outcomes of the conference and the tasks ahead

The conference achieved most of its aims. Its participants not merely outlined current research projects, but also presented fully developed projects that will come to fruition in new, innovative accounts of the Jewish experience under Communism, in the Soviet Union and in the Communist states of east-central Europe. As planned, the conference participants went beyond the narrowly defined borders of political history, and presented papers on Jewish social and cultural life, showing Jews not only as the objects of state policy but also, indeed mostly, as subjective historical actors. Various new, previously ignored sources and previously unemployed methodologies were presented. The conference brought together promising young scholars, whose papers were often of high academic quality, as well as most of the leading scholars in the field from all over the world.

The main tangible result of the conference will be a volume of edited articles based on selected papers presented in Prague. It will be published in English in an American university publishing house and, later, in Czech translation.

Reports on the conference

A report by Ilana Miller, University of Chicago, is published at H-Soz-Kult:

http://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-7217

A Czech version of this report will be published in Soudobé dějiny, the journal of the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague.

There will be an article about the conference published in Roš Chodeš, the journal of the Jewish communities of the Czech and the Slovak Republics.

A link to the report on Czech Radio:

http://www.rozhlas.cz/nabozenstvi/zpravy/_zprava/nove-pristupy-k-vyzkumu-dejin-zidu-za-zeleznou-oponou–1735794

It appears as news on the website of the Czech Academy of Sciences:

http://www.avcr.cz/cs/pro-media/aktuality/Zacina-mezinarodni-konference-o-zivote-Zidu-za-zeleznou-oponou/

And here is a link to photographs from the conference, which are also available in much higher quality on demand (copyright of the photographer, David Kumermann).

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B122g4Qb49PqaG1zMWwwTEJDdVU?usp=sharing

Conference programme

The full conference programme and the biographies of the participants are available on the conference website:

http://www.jewishhistory.usd.cas.cz/conferences/new-approaches-to-the-history-of-the-jews-under-communism/

 

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2016/17

REPORT

‘Jewish books and their Christian collectors in Europe, the New World and Czarist Russia’

Christ Church, University of Oxford, 22-23 May 2017

Convener: Dr Rahel Fronda, Deputy Curator of Hebraica and Judaica, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

The two day international conference, ‘Jewish books and their Christian collectors in Europe, the New World and Czarist Russia’ took place between 22 and 23 May at Christ Church College, University of Oxford and brought together 50 scholars from the UK, Europe, Israel, North America and Russia. The programme was organised in collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries and Christ Church College (Dr Rahel Fronda), and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (Professor Joanna Weinberg) and staff from Christ Church Library. A related exhibition, ‘Jewish Books and their Christian Readers: Christ Church Connections’ was launched on 22 May and remains open until 20 October 2017 in the Upper Library at Christ Church, and has attracted attention from scholars as well as the general public.

Event Rationale

In his pioneering study, The Order of Books, Roger Chartier described the formation of ‘readers’ communities’ and the multivalent nature of libraries. In the last decades the effort to describe and analyse these ‘readers’ communities’ has become a central preoccupation of scholars. Intrinsically related to these various studies have been the many attempts to understand how book collections whether private or public, were acquired and assembled, and in what way they could be said to represent the cultural universe of their owners. Necessarily, the process of gathering books under one roof meant that choices were being made that expressed the collectors’ own agendas. Though there have been a proliferation of studies and books on the manifold ways that Latin and vernacular books were read and collected there have been as yet few attempts to interpret the widespread phenomenon of Hebrew books read, collected and deposited (and sometimes catalogued) in the libraries of non-Jewish (Christian) scholars and merchants, as well as in universities and theological seminaries. For over the centuries Christians (and Jews) were constantly in search of Jewish texts of all types, in both manuscript and print. This quest was carried out over a remarkable range of locations, from libraries in the heartlands of the various Christian confessions, to the studies of Jewish scholars and readers in both Europe and the Near East.

The purpose of this conference, therefore, is to begin to explore the conspicuous presence of the Hebrew book (and manuscript) in a wide range of libraries in the non-Jewish (Christian) domain in England and Continental Europe as well as in Czarist Russia. It will examine how and why prominent individuals (not all known for their Hebraic scholarship) such as Matthew Parker, Ralph Cudworth, Edward Pococke, and Isaac Newton accumulated their collections of books. Many of these private collections were donated to or bought by public institutions, and became central in establishing a basic curriculum for the study of Hebrew and Judaica. The topic necessarily raises the question of the availability of Hebrew books. German humanists in the sixteenth-century circle of Johann Reuchlin and later in the ever wider republic of letters surrounding the great Hebraist Johann Buxtorf and Joseph Scaliger shared information about their latest acquisitions of Hebrew books and their dealings with booksellers and printers. Other collectors such as the Christian Kabbalist Francesco Zorzi left detailed information about their library of Hebrew books in catalogues, which Chartier has described as ‘libraries without walls’, revealing precious data about prices of books and numbers of copies of individual works in circulation.

Although the main focus of the conference will be on Hebrew collections in England and Continental Europe, some attention will also be given to collections in Czarist Russia and in the New World. James Logan’s library which became absorbed into the Library Company in Philadelphia attests to the importance of biblical and rabbinic literature in the New World. As the foremost learned collection of its kind in colonial America Logan’s library demonstrates how the European Republic of Letters had not only reached the western shores of the Atlantic by the early eighteenth century but was also an important part of it. No less significant were the outstandingly important Russian public and private libraries that were created and moulded by prominent Hebraists of distinctively different backgrounds – the Protestant theologian and Bible scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf and the Russian Orthodox Church archimandrite, Antonin, head of the Russian Orthodox mission in Jerusalem. The Russian case highlights the main questions that this conference seeks to address. What was the motivation for collecting Hebrew books, how were they collected, and did confessional difference affect the criteria for building libraries? To bring these questions into even greater relief the conference will end with a response from an expert on one of the greatest Jewish collections of Hebrew books, that of David Oppenheim, chief rabbi of Prague, whose library was bought by the Bodleian library in the 19th century and became one of its greatest assets.

Event Abstract

The role of the library as a crucial element for ‘readers’ communities’ has become a central issue of scholarly debate. How were book collections acquired and assembled, and in what way they could be said to represent the cultural universe of their owners? The purpose of this conference is to consider this crucial question in relation to the widespread phenomenon of Hebrew books read, collected, deposited, and sometimes catalogued, in the libraries of Christian scholars and merchants, as well as in universities and theological seminaries. We will explore the diverse reasons for collecting Hebrew books, how were they collected, and whether confessional difference affected the criteria for building libraries? The discussions will range from Europe to the New World.

Event Programme

The conference was hosted by Christ Church, the college which was re-founded by Henry VIII in 1546 and is one of the largest colleges in Oxford. In 1630, through the influence of Archbishop William Laud, a canonry of Christ Church was perpetually annexed to the Regius Professorship of Hebrew. Teaching Hebrew and collecting Hebraica books have been integral part of academic life at Christ Church since its establishment. Today, it holds one of the most significant collection of Hebrew manuscripts and printed books: in Oxford, it is second only to the Bodleian Library. Among its approximately 3000 early Hebraica and Judaica prints, there are works in Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish and Ladino, but also books in Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Coptic and Ethiopic. Its magnificent collection of twenty Hebrew manuscripts are mostly of early modern origin and range from biblical commentaries and rabbinic texts to works of kabbalah, science and philosophy.

The conference convened a group of senior and junior academics from around the world to discuss various aspects of the topic ‘Jewish books and their Collectors’. Geographically it  extended from Oxford and Cambridge to Germany, the Netherlands and Italy as well as to Czarist Russia and the New World. The participants were able to attend the launch of the related exhibition ‘Jewish Books and their Christian Readers: Christ Church Connections’ and the presentation of the accompanying volume. Lunch and formal dinner in the historical Great Hall of the college gave the participants and visitors not only an opportunity to continue the discussion but also to get a glimpse of college life in Oxford. The conference concluded with a special tour of Merton College and its Old Library. An impressive display of Hebraica was organized by Merton’s Fellow Librarian Dr Julia Walworth.

Session 1

The conference was opened by The Very Revd Professor Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church College and Jan Joosten, Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Oxford.

Professor Saverio Campanini (University of Bologna) spoke about the Hebrew library of the Christian Kabbalist Francesco Zorzi (1466-1550) as manifested in his De harmonia mundi (1525). Campanini raised the problem of identifying Hebrew books as listed in such works and the issue of possibly fictitious titles which once having been included in the bibliography had a posthumous existence and were in subsequent years referred to by other authors.

Dr Ilona Steimann (University of Münster) discussed the notion of a ‘canon’ of Jewish literature in relation to Christian owners of Jewish books in the 1500’s. She examined the intellectual network of German scholars of Jewish literature including Johann Reuchlin, Johann Böschenstein, and Kaspar Amman.

Session 2

Dr Piet van Boxel (University of Oxford) analysed a manuscript presently held in Ferrara’s Biblioteca Ariostea which had been categorised as an Index expurgatorius. Van Boxel argued that an original index had been transformed into an anthology of Hebrew books for the purpose of Jewish-Christian polemic.

Session 3

Professor Joanna Weinberg (University of Oxford) discussed the extensive library of Johann Buxtorf the Elder which for the most part is still in Basel where he was Professor of Hebrew for the greater part of his life. Weinberg demonstrated the various ways Buxtorf acquired and used his collection, in particular, as bibliographer and censor.

Dr Kasper van Ommen (University of Leiden) discussed the reconstruction of the Oriental legacy of Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), identifying the copies of the books that were originally part of his library. Hebrew books and manuscripts formed a significant part of Scaliger’s library.

Session 4

Dr Benjamin Williams (King’s College London) presented a focussed paper on Edward Pococke’s monumental edition of Maimonides’s Commentary on the Mishnah, the Porta Mosis. He demonstrated Pococke’s work in progress, outlining the various phases in the production of the text, which was based on the compilation and collation of several manuscripts.

Dr Rahel Fronda (University of Oxford) presented the exhibition Jewish Books and their Christian Readers: Christ Church Connections which she had organized in collaboration with the Bodleian Library, Oxford Conservation Consortium, Lincoln college, Merton college, Queens’s college in Cambridge, as well as Westminster Abbey The purpose of the exhibition was to address the themes of reading, acquiring and assembling collections of Hebrew books. The four cases on display present the wealth of Hebraica and Judaica at Christ Church College and in Oxford more generally, telling the story of Hebrew studies in Oxford from the late 16th century until the beginning of 19th century.

Dr César Merchan-Hamann (University of Oxford) gave an overview of Hebraica in Oxford, focussing on college libraries which contain important but less well known collections of Hebrew books and manuscripts. He emphasised the importance of collaboration and spoke about the current state of cataloguing antiquarian Hebraica material in Oxford.

Emeritus Regius Professor Hugh Williamson (University of Oxford) spoke about his predecessors at Christ Church in his address marking the new publication which serves as a guide to the exhibition Jewish Books and their Christian Readers: Christ Church Connections.

Session 5

Mr Scott Mandelbrote (University of Cambridge) and Dr Theodor Dunkelgrün (University of Cambridge) talked about Hebrew books that were acquired by Christian scholars in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Cambridge. The presentation focussed on the private collections of Matthew Parker, Andrew Perne, Edmund Castell, Ralph Cudworth, and Isaac Newton.

Session 6

Professor Shimon Iakerson (University of St. Petersburg) discussed the Russian collections of Hebrew manuscripts and early printed books. Apart from Jewish collectors of Hebraica in Czarist Russia (such as Abaraham Firkovich and Moses Friedland), Christians scholars had also systematically accumulated collections of Hebrew manuscripts and prints. Notable are the Protestant theologian and Bible scholar Konstantin von Tiscendorf and Russian Orthodox Church archimandrite Antonin. Iakerson showed how the collections were shaped by the historical circumstances in which the librarians worked.

Dr Arthur Kiron (University of Pennsylvania) spoke about sources of knowledge found in colonial American libraries about post-Biblical Judaism and Jews. He focussed on the books collected by James Logan which are now part of the Library Company in Philadelphia.

Session 7

In his response to the papers, Joshua Teplitsky (Stony Brook University, NY) used the library of a Jewish collector—David Oppenheim of Prague (1664-1736)—to reflect on the proceedings by considering five themes that emerged as points of contact between different papers: book lists and bibliographies as a mean of acquiring and imagining a Jewish library; Jewish books in the practice of scholarship and inter-religious contact (and conflict); political power, patronage, and collecting; considerations of physical space and geographical place; ephemera and print outside of the codex and beyond the Hebrew language. He invited further inquiry into points of divergence between Jews and Christians in terms of prioritization of certain fields of knowledge and approaches to the uses of such knowledge, as well as to the political and social circumstances under which their libraries and collections were constituted.

Outcomes

• Network of scholars, including both early career researchers and established scholars, as well as librarians and archivists
• Promotion of Hebrew and Judaica collections in various libraries in Oxford, Cambridge, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Philadelphia and Russia
• Exhibition including important early printed Hebrew books and manuscripts, with loans from the Bodleian Library, Lincoln College, Merton College, Westminster Abbey and Queens’ college, Cambridge. The exhibition at Christ Church Library is open between 22 May and 20 October 2017, free of charge
• Rahel Fronda’s volume that accompanies the exhibition, Jewish Books and their Christian Readers: Christ Church Connections is available from Christ Church Library

Outputs

Printed conference proceedings (a reputed press has already approached Dr Fronda about publishing the Proceedings). Additional contributions will be solicited including an article on John Morris’s collection of Hebrew books in Christ Church College, Oxford. Christ Church Library’s web page will include, in due course, an account of the conference with some photos. Later in the year a virtual exhibition will be mounted on the Christ Church web site.

Event Programme

http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/events/library-and-archives/jewish-books-and-their-christian-collectors-europe-new-world-and-czarist

Publicity

1) Christ Church website:

http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/events/library-and-archives/jewish-books-and-their-christian-collectors-europe-new-world-and-czarist

http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/library-and-archives/christ-church-library-exhibitions

2) BAJS website:

https://britishjewishstudies.org/2017/04/25/eajs-conference-jewish-books-and-their-christian-collectors-in-europe-the-new-world-and-czarist-russia-22-23-may-2017/

3) EAJS website

4) The mailing lists of the following:

• Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies
• Centre for Early Modern Studies
• Centre for the Study of the Book
• UCL, Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies
• Manchester, Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies
• Cambridge, Hebrew and Jewish Studies Unit
• Ha-Safran
• Christ Church alumni, fellows, graduate and undergraduate students
• Bodleian Library
• Oxford colleges

5) Academia.edu

6) Facebook

7) Posters around the libraries and colleges in Oxford

Signed by

Dr Rahel Fronda

Professor Joanna Weinberg

Professor Jan Joosten

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2016/17

REPORT

Report on the 2017 conference of the British Association for Jewish Studies

Jews on the Move: Exploring the movement of Jews, objects, texts, and ideas in space and time

The conference took place 10-12 July 2017 at New College, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh.

Main organiser: Dr Hannah Holtschneider, University of Edinburgh, BAJS President 2017

The conference was the largest in the series of annual BAJS conferences with more than 120 papers being presented, 4 keynote speakers, and around 160 attendees. With the generous support of the EAJS we were able to fund Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s keynote address, and award 4 travel bursaries to postgraduate research students from universities on the European continent (Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Turkey). Additional matching funding from the Astaire Seminar Series in Jewish Studies included the sponsorship of Professor Hana Wirth-Nesher’s keynote, and conference fee bursaries for 9 research students based at UK and European institutions.

Event Rationale

From the earliest accounts, travel and migration, movement across space and time have been a definitive feature of Jewish history. This is more than a historical fact, it is also a characteristic feature of the representation of Jewishness: Jews are associated with travel and migration, historically and in cultural production. In this history, no less crucial than the movement of people we will see the movement of texts, objects, and ideas, which travel both physically and intellectually as generations in distant locations engage with them at different times and places. This conference theme is very topical and brought together a rich offering of papers, interpreting the conference theme in innovative ways, through various academic disciplines and time periods.

Evaluating the conference, the topic generated an intellectual feast on a topic relevant throughout Jewish history and which continues to have much contemporary relevance for Jews and non-Jews.

As the BAJS conference is the annual British meeting of scholars in all disciplines and time periods associated with Jewish Studies the conference theme is usually broadly conceived to enable the participation of as many scholars as possible while remaining within their own core area of expertise. Movement and migration proved to be just such a theme. In addition, particularly graduate research students were invited to present papers on their research even if not linked to the conference theme. Thus the conference was a venue for networking and feedback on ongoing PhD projects.

Papers and discussion

The fact that over 3 days more than 120 papers in 6 parallel sessions were presented makes it impossible to discuss each one. However, the documents submitted as additional material include the conference booklet, which includes abstracts and affiliations for each presenter, and the full conference programme. The following will reflect on the keynotes only and draw out major conference themes from these.

Keynote Lecture by Professor Charlotte Hempel.

People and Ideas on the Move: the evidence from Qumran.

The settlement by the north western shore of the Dead Sea occupied by a Jewish movement from the 1st c. BCE onwards has for a long time been seen as indicative of the move of a small Jewish community into isolated withdrawal away from Jerusalem. More recently such a perception has been challenged both by archaeologists and experts on the literature from Qumran. This paper will suggest that, by contrast, the Scrolls tell us a great deal about the temple, the establishment, scribal practices and elites. Even if there was a move from Jerusalem then much of the culture and learning moved with those Jews from Jerusalem to the Judean Desert making Qumran, paradoxically, an outstanding resource on key aspects of Second Temple Jerusalem intellectual and religious life.

The Q&A offered a discussion on the disciplines involved in the investigation of Qumran texts, and highlighted the contextual nature of the inquiry and the development and expansion of scholarship in the past decades. Indirectly, the keynote and discussion brought about a lively engagement with the work of George Brooke. The keynote related well to the papers offered in the wide field of the study of the ancient world. Scholars from Europe, Israel and North America engaged in the reflection on travel and movement across the Graeco-Roman world.

Keynote Lecture by Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

Expanded geography: an epilogue to the history of Polish Jews at POLIN Museum.

An estimated 70 percent of the world’s Jewish population can trace its history to the historical territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, today Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, and neighboring regions. This territory was once home to the largest Jewish community in the world. Today, as a result of mass emigration, from the second half of the nineteenth century, and the Holocaust, it is home to the smallest. Facing the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes on the site of the Warsaw ghetto and prewar Jewish neighborhood, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews presents the thousand-year history of Jews living in this territory. That history is not complete without the story of those who left. The epilogue, which is now being developed, explores the following questions: Where did Jews from this territory go? What did they take with them? How does the legacy of the civilization created by Polish Jews shape their lives today?

The lecture’s walk through the exhibition with a focus on the theme of migration and movement produced discussion about the nature of the representation of history, and the current Polish political context into which the exhibition speaks. Whether or not POLIN is challenging, disrupting or correcting current commemorations of the Holocaust and Polish history, and expressions of antisemitism was questioned. This keynote connected a number of themes relevant in the study of Jewish history and its representation from the middle ages to the present. Papers engaging with pilgrimages, travel, and exhibitions drew from this keynote.

Keynote Lecture by Professor Hana Wirth-Nesher.

To move, to translate, to write: Jewish American immigrant voices.

An immigrant’s geographical journey is followed by a linguistic and cultural one, where translation both to and from the mother tongue and culture becomes a daily preoccupation. Since not every word or concept is translatable, immigrant writers are often drawn to untranslatability, which they dramatize as moments of estrangement. This lecture will examine the significance of diverse forms of the untranslatable in the works of Jewish immigrant writers who wrote both in English and in Yiddish, among them Isaac Raboy, Lamed Shapiro, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. This keynote was also part of the Astaire Seminar Series in Jewish Studies.

The discussion focused on identity and belonging in literary and cultural self-expression of Jews and the representation of Jews in popular media. The nature and representation of ‘accent’ was debated and connections between the North American and the European contexts were made. The conference had a strong representation of literary scholars, often working in contemporary literature, but also papers relating to early modern times and the past 200 years.

Keynote Lecture by Professor Tony Kushner.

Jewish Refugees and Other Forced Migrants: From Exodus 1947 to Lampedusa

In the 1930s and 40s, tens of thousands of Jews tried to reach Palestine by sea, many against the wishes of the British mandatory authorities. Today, the number of migrants trying to reach Europe across the Mediterranean has run into the millions. This keynote will explore the continuities and parallels, as well as differences, between the two movements and especially the idea of migrants being ‘illegal’. More generally it asks whether Jewish refugees from Nazism can be better understood in a longer tradition of forced migration in and beyond the twentieth century or whether their experiences were exceptional.

The discussion focused on the long view on migration and movement, and with it the ability to draw on longer term developments with regards to British relationships to migrants in Britain and in the Middle East during the Mandate period. The discussion also centred on method and discipline examining the contribution of a historian to current political, social, and cultural developments in Lampedusa. This was the final keynote and brought the conference reflections into the present. A theme underlying the conference and specifically discussed here was the relationship between the study of history and the current political and social situation.

Summary – highlighting the most significant and productive threads with a reflection on the tasks ahead

In a large conference such as this, it is difficult to pinpoint methodological and thematic discussion threads. However, I would argue that the main gain of this conference was international networking of scholars, particularly research students. The conference included a session about research grant applications aimed at postgraduate and early career researchers. This session was scheduled on the first day and allowed this group of international emerging scholars to learn from each other and form associations right at the start. Another thread becoming apparent in this conference was the international nature of the gathering. While UK-based scholars remained in the overall majority, the strong international representation of scholars from the European continent, Israel, the United States, and Australia facilitated a wide-ranging exchange and networking opportunity. This outcome, not least made possible by the EAJS conference grant, was a significant feature of the conference.

A statement about planned outcomes and outputs

Plans are underway for soliciting full article versions of a selection of papers with a view to publishing these as a special issue of a relevant journal or as a stand-alone edited collection. If possible, such a volume / special issue would be published in time for REF2021.

The actual programme of the event,

Link for a PDF summary version of the conference programme, including changes which may have become necessary: Link

The conference programme is archived on the conference website: http://wp.me/P2HpFu-bo

The conference was widely advertised on relevant mailing lists in the UK, and also on H-Net. The conference had a Twitter feed (#BAJS2017), which generated a number of interesting posts.

Dr Hannah Holtschneider (University of Edinburgh)