Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, end of part 1. Cod Hebr 37 fol 112b. Copenhagen Library

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You are here: Home / Archives for EAJS Conference Grant Programme in European Jewish Studies

Stranger in a Land: Late-Antique and Medieval Narratives on Foreigners and Exile

24 April 2020 by EAJS Administrator

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2019/20

REPORT

Stranger in a Land: Late-Antique and Medieval Narratives on Foreigners and Exile

Córdoba, 4–6 March 2020

Academic Organizers: Miriam Lindgren Hjälm (Stockholm School of Theology & Sankt Ignatios Theological Academy); Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, University of Córdoba; Israel Muñoz Gallarte (University of Córdoba); Meira Polliack (Tel Aviv University); Marzena Zawanowska, University of Warsaw & Jewish Historical Institute;

Academic Secretary: Lourdes Bonhome Pulido (University of Córdoba)

Abstract

The aim of the conference was to explore the ways in which representatives of monotheistic traditions perceived and described “the other.” This central category – understood not only as adherent of different religion, but also foreigner, sectarian, or convert – was studied from various perspectives and viewpoints in order to see how Judaism, Christianity and Islam conceptualized their respective “others,” as well as these “others’” sacred texts, their languages and deities. All these is intrinsically related to the idea of exile, another category that was subjected to analyses. The planned outcome of the event is the enhancement of international, multidisciplinary academic cooperation that transgresses the boundaries of distinct scholarly disciplines. The planned output of the event includes the publication of a conference report and of a collective volume of articles based on selected papers presented at the conference.

Main Conference Report

The Original Event Rationale

The medieval “Mediterranean Society” presented a rich tapestry of cultures and religions wherein the adherents of Judaism, Christianity and Islam wished to preserve their different identities vis-à-vis “the others.” These “others” were not necessarily outsiders, i.e., adherents of other monotheistic traditions, or outright heretics, but also insiders, i.e., representatives of the inner varieties of a given tradition, such as Rabbanite and Karaite Jews, Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims, Eastern and Western Syriac Christian communities and Copts, as well as converts. This last category is of special interest as it refers to those who initially had been “others,” until they decided to cross a community’s boundaries and become “one of us.” As such, although well-desired, they were always suspicious to the receiving culture.

The idea of “the other” is intrinsically connected to spacial displacement. To be a refugee, forced from one’s home and homeland, has always been a difficult experience, for some even a death sentence. All monotheistic traditions, but especially Judaism and Islam, preserve collective memories of exile and emigration (e.g., Babylonian exile in Judaism, or the emigration from Mecca to Medinah in Islam) which form an important part of their religious self-identity. The experience of estrangement and hardship involved in sojourning in a foreign land found reflection in the respective sacred texts of both religions, which recount numerous stories of famous emigrants (e.g., Abraham, Muḥammad). The concept of exile is also present in Christianity, though in many texts it became sublimated to reflect the state of human soul as an outsider exiled in one’s material body (e.g., the texts from Nag Hammadi). Yet, in the Middle Ages, the exile was not always imposed. Spectacular military conquests as well as the steadily growing world of trade and commerce made many people abandon their homes and settle in foreign lands of their own will. This notwithstanding, their experience – even if living within their own religious community, and all the more so, if forced to settle among the confessional strangers – was not always an easy one.

The complex reality of vibrant multi-religious and movable society as well as the resulting cross-cultural and cross-sectoral interactions and interchanges find reflection in the respective literatures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The canonical texts of these religions register the authors’ concern with the subject. Later legislations of the monotheistic traditions tried to accommodate the sacred texts to the ever changing reality by means of elaborating legal frames to normalize the life together with “strangers,” while other literary genres provided more abstract conceptualizations of the subject at stake.

So far, more practical, legal aspects of the relations between Jews Christian and Muslims in the Middle Ages have mainly been addressed in research, while theoretical, conceptual dimensions of the ideas of “the other” and “otherness” have not drawn much scholarly attention. In addition, scholars who ventured to explore the subject, usually focused on one particular religion in isolation from others. The purpose of the proposed conference is to redress this unbalance and revisit the ways in which “strangers” and the state of estrangement were perceived and described in the intertwined worlds of the major monotheistic traditions in cross-fertilizing contact.

The papers presented at the conference – to a large extent based on unpublished and understudied sources (e.g., Cairo Genizah manuscripts) – will attempt to answer the following questions: What did the major monotheistic traditions share in common in their approaches to strangers and conceptualization of the state of estrangement? How did their respective views influenced one another and how did they change and transform over time? What were the possible venues of cross cultural transfers and inter-faith transmissions among them: direct or indirect, oral or written?

These as well as other issues will be addressed from different perspectives and viewpoints by scholars representing various disciplines related to Jewish, Christian and Islamic studies, and on the basis of versatile source texts, written in many different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, including Judaeo- and Christian Arabic, Coptic, Syriac, Latin and Greek) representing diverse literary genres (chronographies, exegetical literature, philosophical and grammatical treatises, legal texts, private correspondence, Genizah documents, etc.).

Yet the objective of the proposed conference is not only to give answers, but also to raise questions and map out possible avenues of research based primarily on unpublished and/or understudies sources. The main intention of this initiative is to foster international, multidisciplinary cooperation of established as well as early-career scholars. Therefore, we welcome submissions of papers in English that deal with the broad categories of “the other” and “otherness” in medieval monotheistic traditions and religious denominations.

The conferences met its original rationale. First, it addressed the subject in a pronouncedly interdisciplinary fashion thanks to the diverse fields of interests and scholarly competences of the participants. Accordingly, it explored different perspectives on the notions the “other”/ stranger otherness/ estrangement and exile from the view point of representatives of different monotheistic traditions, as well as of branches (or internal divisions) existing within these traditions (such as Rabbanite and Karaite Jews, or Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims). It did so through a close scrutiny of works written in different time periods (transcending late antiquity and the Middle Ages), in numerous languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Greek, Syriac). As a result, the papers investigated not only the respective sacred scriptures of major monotheistic traditions and/ or exegetical treatment of specific biblical and qur’ānic verses, passages, or broader narratives that refer to various types of strangers, the state of estrangement and exile, but also the conception of the “other” and the condition of otherness and exilic life as reflected in numerous other literary genres such as chronographies and other historical documents, philosophical, grammatical and lexicographic treatises, Genizah sources, legal texts (including fatwās collections and calendar calculations and rulings), mystical and polemical writings, formal letters and private correspondence, poetry, and others. Second, as initially planned many of the sources used by the participants were so far unpublished and/or understudied. Third, the conference not only addressed many of the above mentioned issues, but also raised a fair amount of new questions as testified by the discussion that followed participants’ presentations (see below). Fourth, it enhanced international cooperation of established and early-career scholars which will be continued while working on the post-conference volume.

Detailed Overview of Sections and Papers

There were altogether 24 papers (and not 26 as initially planned) presented at the conference, divided into 9 thematic sessions. Unfortunately, due to the situation caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic, 6 scholars decided to cancel their participation, of whom 4 sent their papers in advance, so that they be read by someone else in their stead).

The first session (chaired by Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, University of Córdoba) was devoted to The Concepts of Stranger and Estrangement in Canonical Texts. Originally, it was planned to be opened with a paper Greece and Judah: Models of Mutual Relationships in Persian and Hellenistic Period in the Light of Common Intellectual Heritage by Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spano (University of Warsaw), who, unfortunately, had to cancel his participation. Therefore the first talk was given by Mette Bjerregaard Mortensen (Université Libre de Bruxelles) who spoke on Enclave Rhetoric in the Qur’ān. It argued that the tension between the early Muslim believers and the surrounding world, including the tension between in-group and out-group, was a prevalent theme throughout the Qur’ān which was evidently preoccupied not only with boundary drawing, but also – and perhaps even more so – with boundary maintenance. Building on the research of the American New Testament scholar, E.P. Sanders, who had introduced a distinction between the ideas of “getting in” and “staying in” in connection with the study of early Judaism and had argued that early Torah piety was concerned mainly with “staying in” (i.e., staying in the covenant with Yahweh), rather than “getting in” (meaning that Torah piety was not essentially missionary, but preserving and upholding in its character), the paper argued that a similar concern was mirrored in the Qur’ān. It demonstrated that the Qur’ān espoused what might be termed “enclave rhetoric,” that is, rhetoric which articulates the world in which the believers live as full of iniquity and rampant sinfulness. Referring to Mary Douglas’ observations that the enclave is particularly preoccupied with reactualizing and refueling the resentment that led to the formation of the enclave in the first place, Bjerregaard Mortensen argued that this tendency is particularly visible in the Qur’ān’s continuous encouragement to the believers to “emigrate in the way of God” (e.g. Q 2:218; Q 8:72; Q 9:20; Q 22:58) from maltreatment and persecution. She showed that the emigrant identity, articulated as a central, even decisive (e.g., Q 8:72) part of being a member of the early qur’ānic community, and upholding the “emigration project” – and, thereby, the boundaries of the early qur’ānic community – was in the Qur’ān enhanced by rhetorical reactualization of the reasons for emigrating in the first place. The following discussion focused on the double meaning of the concept of emigration which may refer to an actual physical displacement, but also spiritual alienation. The discussion also touched upon possible similarities to the Kharājites (Khārijites took their name from the term kharaja, meaning “to leave”), as well as devotional practices referred to in Sufi texts, where the Arabic root hajara – used to denote Muḥammad’s emigration from Mekka to Medinah – means “leaving house to devote oneself to God”).

The last paper in this session, Strangers on the Earth: Two Nag Hammadi Texts on Humans Exile in the Physical World, was presented by F.L. Roig Lanzillotta (University of Groningen). It is a well-established topos that Gnostics had a very low opinion both of their physical body and of the material world in which they were forced to live. In the black-and-white overview provided by anti-heretical writings, indeed, all Gnostic sects are described as being anti-cosmic dualists and pessimists. Roig Lanzillotta demonstrated that thanks to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi corpus, nowadays we have a much more nuanced picture of heterodox Christians, since it offers a broad spectrum of attitudes and concepts regarding both the physical body and the world, running the gamut from radical rejection to implicit acceptance. The paper focused on two Nag Hammadi treatises, namely the Exegesis on the Soul (NHC II, 6; ExSoul) and the Authoritative Teaching (AuthTeach), of supposedly dualistic character that conceive of human life as the soul’s exile on Earth. It showed that while the former mainly described the violence of incarnation in the body, which forced the soul to bear an unnatural, physical relationship, the latter pondered how violently the world imposed itself on the soul. In both these Nag Hammadi texts, therefore, physical life was depicted as that which perpetuates dualism, keeping the soul far removed from the Father and forcing her to live exiled in an alien and distressful environment. Yet, Roig Lanzillotta argued that against the commonly accepted view, they did not convey a clear-cut anti-cosmic dualism, as their cosmology was evidently monistic (only one God). Thus, he concluded, they rather represented a moderate dualism (akin to Platonic conceptions) in which the earthly/ human and the heavenly/ divine were in opposition. The following discussion raised the question as to what extant these texts reflected their authors’ wish to be the “other,” alienated from the common people who do not seek knowledge.

The second session (chaired by Mateusz Wilk, University of Warsaw) was devoted to Conceptions of “the Other” and the Exile in Medieval Thought and Traditional Literature. It opened with a paper The Karaites as others in Judah Halevi’s Book of the Kuzari, presented by Marzena Zawanowska (University of Warsaw & Jewish Historical Institute). It focused on one of the most influential books of Jewish religious thought ever written, namely Judah Halevi’s Book of the Kuzari. On the basis of a letter preserved in the Cairo Genizah, it had generally been assumed to have originally been composed as a polemical response to a Karaite convert. However, Zawanowska argued that the Karaites had neither been perceived nor described by Halevi as heretics. She pointed out that in fact, his depiction of this alternative to Rabbanite Judaism – its adherents and origins – appeared so appealing to the Karaites that it made some of them believe that the author had been a (crypto-) Karaite himself, while his reconstructions of the movement’s history became appropriated as the founding myth of Karaism. The paper attempted to answer the questions of what was the attitude of Halevi towards the Karaites, and what, in his view, was their main fault. It also addressed a more fundamental issue of what was his purpose in writing the Kuzari. In an attempt to answer them, she showed that although Halevi was evidently ambivalent towards the Karaites, he was also ambivalent towards the Rabbanites. Her conclusion was that the Book of the Kuzari conveyed a sustained critique of all the Jews, whether Rabbanite or Karaite, aimed not only at their improvement, but also at reconciliation between the adherents of these two major branches of Judaism. The ensuing discussion focused on the question of how different Halevi was in comparison with his contemporaries (especially in terms of his conceptualization of divine revelation), hence to what extent he was the “other” within his own society.

The second talk in this session, Exile and estrangement in the thought of Baḥya ibn Paqūda and Judah Halevi, was given by Ehud Krinis (independent researcher), who employed the interpretation of the prolonged existence of Jews in exile (Heb. galut) as a prime example of Baḥya’s and Halevi’s radically diverse understanding of the meaning of Jewish experience. He argued that Baḥya suggested a re-formulation of exile not as a historical experience, but as a personal-existential one, whose dimensions of loneliness and alienation were formulated with the help of the Arabo-Muslim terms of “estrangement” (Ar. ghurba) and “stranger” (Ar. gharīb). In Baḥya’s thought the individual’s acknowledgement of his status before God as the one meaningful axis of his existence, entails his inner acknowledgment of himself as a stranger (Ar. gharīb), one who is estranged and alienated, in his inner concealed level, from matters of his earthly existence in general, and from matters concerning his social existence and national affiliation in particular. In contradistinction, Judah Halevi, who perceived Judaism as developing along the axis between the God of Israel and the people of Israel, sought to emphasize the national dimension of exile (Heb. galut) as a situation which drastically weakens the ties bonding the people of Israel with the God of Israel. For Halevi, acknowledging and experiencing exile as an acute and profound crisis are crucial to the arousal of a real and concrete desire and plea for national redemption. According to him, an authentic yearning for God’s redemption of Israel from exile requires not just adhering to the traditional rabbinical customs of lamenting and praying, but also active steps of traveling and dwelling in holy land. It is in this context that Halevi integrated his own original interpretation of the concept of the “stranger” (Ar. gharīb), which he took upon himself to realize. The stranger is the one who, after departing from his family and community, assigned himself to walking across the holy land, grasping directly the bitter reality of the land’s occupation by foreigners and impostors. This is much in the way the nation’s patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, did in the aftermath of God’s convent with them. Thus, Krinis convincingly demonstrated that by applying the concept of the “stranger” (Ar. gharīb) to their interpretations of the situation of exile (Heb. galut), both Baḥya and Halevi had found themselves in conflict with their own cultural and social environment, retreating from their Jewish-Andalusian society. While in the case of Baḥya this retreat was inner and implicit, in Halevi’s case it was explicit and provocative. The following discussion focused on different influences on Baḥya and Halevi (of al-shuʿūbiyya, the possibility of which Krinis rejected, and of the shiʿīte concept of ṣafwa, which he confirmed referring to his PhD dissertation).

The third paper of this section presented by Łukasz Piątak (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań), was entitled “Banished from its World.” The Image of Fallen Soul in al-Suhrawardī’s al-Wāridāt wa-al-Taqdisāt (The Divine Inspirations and Sanctifications). It explored the influences of Gnostic and Neoplatonic paradigms of treating what is divine in human (be it soul, spirit, pneuma, light, etc.) as essentially alien to the mundane world on Muslim religious thought, and more specifically on the twelfth-century mystic author, al-Suhrawardī’s (1154–1191). It argued that some traits of this worldview could be found in, or interpreted from, the famous hadīth of the prophet Muḥammad: “This world is the prison for a believer and paradise for a non-believer” (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, 5390) and that it had been typically interpreted in this way by Sufi mystics and Muslim Neoplatonic philosophers. Piątak demonstrated that in the thought of al-Suhrawardī the soul (Ar. nafs/ an-nūr al-isfahbaḏī) was an intermediate being, which had its origin in the realm of spiritual light. However, being attached to the body during its life on earth meant a forced descent to the dark world of matter. In this state a soul was engaged in a number of relations that caused its ethical deterioration and might have an impact on its eschatological fate. The paper showed that in his well-known allegorical narrative entitled Qiṣṣat al-ġurba al-ġarbiyya (The tale of western exile), al-Suhrawardī presented temporary stay of the human in this world as “an exile in the West,” while in al-Waridāt wa al-Taqdisāt, he developed an image of a soul as a stranger lost in the land of danger, desperate to free itself from oppression. Thus, Piątak concluded that the medieval author invoked his soul to remind it of its noble descent and called for its purification and implores the Active Intellect to facilitate the soul’s return to its homeland through the process of illumination. The paper was mainly based on Piątak’s critical edition of the hitherto unpublished Arabic text of al-Waridāt wa al-Taqdisāt. The ensuing discussion raised the question of al-Suhrawardī’s estrangement as a mystic. One of the participants asked why he was killed, whether it was because of his controversial and heterodox views. The answer was that one should not disregard the tense political situation in the region of the time (e.g., Crusades, but also Sunni/Abbasid and Ismāʿīli/Fatimid rivalry for power). Referring to previous scholarship (Ziai, Marcotte), Piątak pointed out that al-Suhrawardī was probably seen by his adversaries as possible crypto-Ismāʿīli (e.g, his ideal of the king-philosopher rather than orthodox Qurayshī caliph). In addition, the chroniclers mention him as a master sorcerer, a person perceived by his disciples as a prophet (Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a, Ibn Khallikān). Indeed, Piątak argued, that two of al-Suhrawardī’s texts might have been seen as having pretense to the status of revelated books, namely Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq (The Philosophy of Illumination) and al-Waridāt wa al-Taqdisāt.

The third session (chaired by Marzena Zawanowska, University of Warsaw & Jewish Historical Institute) was devoted to Converts and Community Boundaries in the World of the Genizah. It opened with the paper Conversion of women to Judaism in the Cairo Genizah documents, presented by Amir Ashur (The Research Authority of Orot Israel College). It discussed numerous cases of conversion of women, all dated to the 11th–13th centuries. It argued that the heroines of these conversions were independent women – each one of them being a foreigner not only as a non-Jew asking to be accepted into the Jewish community, but also as a woman, that is, of lower social status, not equal to men (thus “double strangers”). In-depth analyses of various documents from the Cairo Genizah inspired Ashur to raise interesting questions: how these women perceived themselves as “foreigners” or “others” and how they were perceived by the community, as well as whether there was any difference in the attitude of the community toward male converts or foreigners, as opposed to the attitude toward women. In an attempt to answer these and other questions, Ashur discussed different aspects of “otherness” – gender, religion and ethnic community. The following discussion evolved around the status (and rights) of women as internal “others,” and touched upon the question of their literacy and access to education. One of the participants gave an example of a woman who served as a Bible teacher for boys. There was also a question about the conversion of slaves and their status as “new-comers” in the society.

The next speaker in this session was to be Zvi Stampfer (The Research Authority of Orot Israel College), who was to give a talk on Trust or Suspicion: The Status of the Non-Jews as Reflected in Judaeo-Arabic Works, but, unfortunately, had to cancel his participation.

The last paper in this session, Strangers by the Law: A Sharia Perspective on Others According to Mālikī Fatwās from Medieval Maghreb, was delivered by Filip Jakubowski (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań). It begun with an observation that being a stranger could be considered from different angles – religious, ethnic, tribal, social as well as others, and argued that the famous “us and them” dichotomy was also visible in Islamic jurisprudence (especially in fatwās, reflecting different perspectives). Considering Islamic legal rulings a unique source of knowledge on everyday life, Jakubowski analyzed Mālikī fatwās from the medieval Maghreb preserved in a collection known as Al-Miʻyār l-muʻrib wa al-jāmiʻ al-muġrib ʻan fatāwī ahl Ifriqiyya wa al-Andalus wa al-Maghrib. This multivolume work was compiled by al-Wansharīsī (d. 1508) and transmitted by al-Mahdī al-Wazzānī (d. 1923) in his Al-Miʻyār al-jadīd. Jakubowski pointed out that among many fatwās dating from 3rd/9th to 9th/15th c., there were cases of marginalisation of both individuals and entire groups. Not only were there entire groups labeled as heretics, as well as traces of some controversies with Jews or Christians could be discerned, but also, what is most peculiar, a clear distinction between local Muslims and others was made. Those considered strangers seemed to be Andalusīs, members of certain Berber tribes, or Muslims from other parts of the Islamic world. Although the Sharia theoretically treats all Muslims equally (this approach is based on Q 49:13), the questions posted to muftīs testify to the existence in practice of clear distinctions between “us” and “them,” especially if the customs of those who were recognized by the community as others were different from the local ones. Jakubowski demonstrated that the theoretical equality of Muslims (kafā’a) depended on: lineage (the descendants of the Quraish tribe were considered better), duration of adherence to Islam (recent converts were considered worse), freedom, piety, occupation (scholars were considered better; there were even produced tables of unsuitable professions) and wealth. Finally, he observed that the same distinction was also visible in the choice of the words describing the “others.” The ensuing discussion focused on different conceptualizations of otherness within Muslim society (e.g., the title of sharīf is given to those who descend from Fatima, but ironically women in some cases do not inherit it).

The fourth session (chaired by Yoram Erder, Tel Aviv University) was devoted to Strangers and Estrangement Real and Imagined. It opened with Camilla Adang’s (Tel Aviv University) paper on Ibn Ḥazm’s Self-portrayal as a Stranger in His Own Land. The controversial religious scholar and literary figure Ibn Ḥazm of Cordoba (d. 1064 CE) stood out in the intellectual landscape of al-Andalus for a number of reasons: (1) the rare breadth and depth of his scholarship, which resulted in a vast number of major works and short epistles on theology, morals, substantive law, legal theory, logic, history, political theory, interreligious polemics, belles lettres and more; (2) the suspicion that he had not acquired his knowledge through the accepted channels of oral instruction but rather from books; (3) his insistence that religious law and doctrine should be based exclusively on the Qurʾān and reliable Ḥadīth, taken in their external sense (Ar. ẓāhir) and, closely related to all the above (4) his relentless conflict with representatives of the dominant Mālikī religious establishment in al-Andalus, whose authority he challenged and whose piety and learning he questioned. All of this, together with his critique of some of the party kings, who had created small states on the ruins of the former Umayyad caliphate, led to his ostracism and withdrawal from public life and to the burning of his books. Even before events took this dramatic turn, however, Ibn Ḥazm seems to have been well aware of his unusual position, as we can infer from a number of texts that reflect his sense of alienation and otherness. The paper focused on a close analysis of these source texts. The final discussion evolved around the question of how common was it to feel linguistic estrangement in al-Andalus (the spoken Arabic dialect differed from the classical one), and thus to what extent it was a cultural topos. It also touched upon the question of the concepts and relationship between the oral and written traditions in Islam. In addition, one of the participants asked about Ibn Ḥazm’s competences and training (who were his teachers, whether he was a true Ḥadīth scholar; Adang confirmed that he was).

The second paper in this session was presented by Mateusz Wilk (University of Warsaw), who talked on Otherness and Politics in Zīrid Granada. It discussed the political and cultural activity of two Jewish leaders (viziers?) active in Zīrid Granada – Samuel ha-Nagid (Abū Ibrāhīm b. al-Naġrīla, d. 447/1055) and his son, Joseph (Abū Ḥusayn b. al-Naġrīla, d. 459/1066) – as well as the situation that led to the upheaval of Muslim inhabitants of Granada against the Jews in 1066. It used the case of Zīrid Granada as an example of a Classical Muslim state paradigm, where non-Muslim officials were often employed, but this practice frequently caused social upheavals, conflicts and riots. Wilk explored the nature of interactions between Jewish leaders and Muslim inhabitants of Granada, demonstrating how the “otherness” of Jewish high-ranking state officials influenced the politics of Granada in mid-5th/11th century, paying special attention to some methodological difficulties posed by the sources. He also scrutinized in detail one of these sources, namely the famous anti-Jewish poem written by the jurist Abū Isḥāq of Elvira, showing that the way he presented Jews in this text might have reflected collective fears characterizing the political unrest of the taifa period. At the end of his presentation, he addressed a question of whether the poem might indeed have triggered the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in 459/1066 as maintained by some scholars. The ensuing discussion focused on the role played by the poem in the aforementioned riots of 459/1066. One of the participants argued that the poem did not incite violence (it would be hard to imagine for a poem written in classical Arabic to exert influence over uneducated masses), but rather it was the other way around – it reflected views that brought it about. Another participant observed that although it was against Muslim law to have a Jew in power, no one had a problem with it, as long as the Muslim ruler was strong and his politics were successful. The problem started when the Muslim power weakened and had to cope with its own defeats by looking for a scapegoat. Finally, someone made a comment that nowhere in Muslim sources ha-Nagid was called a vizier.

The last paper in this session, Do Calendar Differences Cause a Social Rift?, was given by Nadia Vidro (University College London). She opened her talk with an introductory comment to the effect that calendars and time reckoning had occupied a central position in medieval society, as an organizing principle of society and social life. The calendar structured all aspects of social and economic life, defined the rhythms of religious liturgy and worship, and provided a focus for communal and religious identities. For this reason, scholars have often assumed that disagreements over the calendar led to social rifts and sometimes even schisms. In her paper, Vidro aimed to undermine this view, by offering a more nuanced picture of the impact that calendar differences between medieval Karaites and Rabbanites had exerted on Jewish social cohesion and daily life. She explained that in the Middle Ages, Rabbanites determined their calendar by calculation using fixed arithmetical schemes, while Karaites relied on the observation of natural phenomena, such as the new moon and the state of barley crops. It has thus long been recognized that the calendar differences played a critical role in Karaite-Rabbanite relations. In early research on the subject it was assumed that the use of different calendars would have broken up society and led to a Karaite-Rabbanite social and religious schism. More recently, the assumption that Karaite and Rabbanite communities must have led separate lives because of their different calendars has been challenged, for example, by marriage contracts between Karaites and Rabbanites which included special provisions for their different festival dates. In her paper, Vidro considered the implications of medieval Jews running their lives with different time frames and calendars and convincingly argued that calendar differences did not entail social segregation and schism. The ensuing discussion revolved around the question of whether there was a real schism between Karaites and Rabbanites in the Middle Ages and if it did affect the everyday life interactions of the adherents of both these branches of Judaism. One of the participant observed that one should not draw general conclusions on this matter from the Genizah documents relating to specific instances (thus not to take pars pro toto). It was also pointed out that the Rabbanite authors’ theoretical statements in this respect are not a reliable source either (e.g., Ibn Daud’s information on the yearly excommunication of the Karaites was probably his own invention). Another participant asked if calendrical works by Abraham bar Hiyya and Abraham ibn Ezra might have been composed in response to the Karaite “threat.” The answer was negative; they were composed in 12th century Spain where the Karaite presence did not pose a real threat, and therefore most likely reflected genuine scientific interests of their authors.

The fifth session (chaired by Camilla Adang, Tel Aviv University) was devoted to the question of The Status of Strangers and Converts in Religious and Secular Legislation. It opened with Krystyna Stebnicka’s (University of Warsaw) paper on Jews as Strangers in Late Antiquity Jerusalem/Aelia Capitolina. It began with a historical introduction on Emperor Hadrian and his refounding of Jerusalem as the Roman colony called Aelia Capitolina. Jews were banned from this totally pagan city populated with military veterans, as well as from its environs. The ban remained in force for the next couple of centuries (in the 4th c. Constantine permitted Jews to visit the Temple site only once a year to commemorate the destruction of the Temple). Stebnicka presented and analyzed in detail all known evidence (objects with Jewish symbols) for Jewish pilgrimages to the Christian Holy City from the 4th to the 6th c. CE. She argued that the early fourth-century itinerary of the anonymous Bordeaux Pilgrim, including the first description of the Temple Mount after the one by Josephus Flavius, as well as Jerome’s commentary on Zephaniah and the so-called pilgrim vessels decorated with Jewish menorot, left no doubt about regular Jewish visits to Jerusalem and Jewish presence on the ruined Temple Mount during the time when Emperor Hadrian’s ban was theoretically still in force. The ensuing discussion focused on the question of why the Jews were allowed to enter Jerusalem, what made Constantine issue a permission for Jews to access the Temple site once a year. The conclusion was that their visits were tolerated for religious propaganda purposes as a means of showing the superiority of Christianity (the miserable situation of the Jews was considered as convincing proof that God favored Christians). As to the preserved material evidences of their presence, it may safely be assumed that they represented a sort of souvenirs produced for the pilgrimages.

The second paper in this session, The Proselytes (gerim) in the Hebrew Bible According to the Early Karaites, was presented by Yoram Erder (Tel Aviv University). It opened with a remark that as on many other issues, there were numerous contradictions in the Hebrew Bible regarding the proselyte status in Israel. The answers given by the Talmudic sages to these contradictions in the Oral Law were irrelevant to the Karaites, who sought solutions through their own interpretation of the Hebrew Bible alone. Analyzing the Hebrew concept of ger (“proselyte”), Erder demonstrated that the Karaites maintained that the Bible made a distinction between two types of proselytes: Ger ṣedeq (in Judaeo-Arabic: ger dīnī) who accepted the yoke of religion, and ger shaʽar – a proselyte who partially assimilated to the Jewish people. The Karaites found it hard to identify the type of proselyte to which a particular scriptural verse was referring to. Erder explored in depth the definitions of proselyte in Karaite law, and the duties and rights of the various types of proselytes, considering the following issues: Are the rights of a proselyte in the Land of Israel the same as those of a proselyte in the Diaspora? Did the laws of the dhimma in Islam influence the Karaites’ legislation concerning the proselytes? He also pondered the extent to which the Karaite discourse influenced the Rabbanite commentators of the Hebrew Bible in the Gaonic period and after. The ensuing discussion focused on the medieval Karaites’ internal debates over the concept of “proselyte,” as well as how their internal disagreements were reflected in their writings (theory) on the one hand, and influenced their legal rulings (practice) on the other.

The last paper in this session, Maimonides and Andalusian Legal Thought, by Marc Herman (Yale University), was read by Camilla Adang. It opened with the observation that Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) had penned perhaps the most comprehensive medieval account of rabbinic tradition, but that his ideas were at odds with his medieval predecessors and frequently, as his interpreters noted, the Talmudic tradition itself. It situated several anomalous features of Maimonides’ legal thought in the context of Andalusian Mālikī and early Almohad jurisprudence, thereby embedding Maimonides’ timeless vision of Jewish law in a particular moment of Islamic legal history. Herman demonstrated that integrating ideas from non-Rabbanite Jews and, more decisively, Muslims thus enabled Maimonides to reevaluate rabbinic literature and to present rabbinic authority in a novel way. Ultimately, he argued that reading Jewish and Islamic legal traditions in concert contributed to a long-needed reevaluation of the constitutive elements of Jewish law in the Islamic world. Given the absence of the author of the paper, there was no possibility to take questions from the audience.

The sixth session (chaired by María Angeles Gallego, Spanish National Research Council) was devoted to Reflections on “the Other” and “the Other’s” Scripture in Exegetical Literature. The first paper, The Pedagogy of Failure: Christian Arabic Commentaries on Exile Psalms, by Miriam Lindgren Hjälm (Stockholm School of Theology & Sankt Ignatios Theological Academy), was read by Marzena Zawanowska. It opened with the observation that reception history is increasingly becoming an integral part of biblical studies. Accordingly, the reception of the popular Psalm 137 [LXX 136, “By the Rivers of Babylon…”] has recently been the subject of several studies that show how the interpretation of this Psalm was adapted so as to be made meaningful for new audiences as it traveled through the centuries. We are told in these studies that the interpretation divided Jews and Christians because of their respective approaches to the Bible. Yet the story told is the story of the West. As a complement, the present paper focused chiefly on the Eastern Christian reception. It argued that Eastern Christian commentaries and homilies on this Psalm showed that Eastern Christianity resorted to a broad spectrum of approaches in their efforts to make sense of the Jewish exile and that Christian reception was far more complex and rich than what recent studies on the reception of this Psalm have accounted for. By bringing examples from Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Arabic texts, Hjälm demonstrated that the question of interpretation divided not primarily Jews and Christians, but Christians internally in Patristic times and for centuries to come. Given the absence of the author of the paper, there was no possibility to take questions from the audience.

The second paper in this session, The Vision of the “Other” in Menahem ha-Meiri’s Commentary on Psalms, was presented by Mariano Gómez Aranda (Spanish National Research Council). It opened with an introductory information on Menahem ha-Meiri (1249–1315), a Provençal halakhist and exegete. He wrote several commentaries on the Bible, of which only two have been preserved up to our times (viz. on Psalms and Proverbs). In his commentary on Psalms, ha-Meiri observes that some Psalms were written as prophecies of “our long exile” or “our exile in Edom,” making a clear reference to the situation of the Jews among Christians in Medieval times. Thus in his exegesis, the ambiguous “other” of the biblical text is transformed into the Christian “other.” The paper analyzed how this Provençal exegete perceived the Christian “other” by applying the biblical text of Psalms to the circumstances of his own time (“actualization”). By doing so, it contributed to our understanding of how the contacts of Christians and Jews in Medieval Provence were perceived by a Jewish exegete in the light of the biblical text. Finally, Gómez Aranda analyzed and compared Meiri’s vision of the Christians as expressed in his exegetical comments (in his Bible commentaries) with his positive attitude towards them in his halakhic works (Talmud commentaries). The following discussion touched upon the resemblance between ha-Meiri’s approach and those of the earlier Karaite exegetes from the East (especially Daniel al-Qumisi) in terms of his “actualizing” comments. One of the participants asked whether ha-Meiri made a clear theoretical distinction between the literal-contextual and allegorical interpretations, and if he elaborated on his hermeneutics (e.g., in introductions to his commentaries). The answer was negative. Moreover, Gómez Aranda stated that it was rather improbable for ha-Meiri to be acquainted with Karaite writings. Another debated issue was the apparent incongruity in ha-Meiri’s approach to Christianity – his positive assessment of this religion as non-idolatrous and promoting positive values in his Talmud commentaries, and his negative assessment of it in his Bible commentaries. The conclusion was that both types of works were written for different audiences with different purposes in mind and that ha-Meiri considered Christianity good in theory, but bad in practice.

The seventh session (chaired by Israel Muñoz Gallarte, University of Córdoba) was devoted to The Others, Their Languages and Deities. It opened with a paper entitled The “Unsacred” Language of the Others: Jewish Views on Other Languages in the Andalusi Context, delivered by María Angeles Gallego (Spanish National Research Council). It opened with the introductory observation that the role that the Hebrew language played in the history of the Jewish people as their sacred language has been widely studied. The study of Jewish attitudes towards other languages is arguably less developed, especially for the pre-modern period. The paper addressed the issue in the specific context of al-Andalus. The Jews of al-Andalus played a crucial role in the study and revival of the Hebrew language for literary purposes in the so-called Golden Age period. Interestingly, however, their investigative work in the Hebrew language took place at a time of profound Jewish embedment in the Arab-Muslim milieu, often idealized as the Golden Age of “convivencia.” Gallego demonstrated that references to languages other than Hebrew, the sacred language of Judaism, were scarce and usually occurred in grammatical works in the context of comparative analyses between Hebrew and Arabic. The view that Andalusi Jews had of other languages was also reflected in the initial polemics between those scholars who were in favor of writing in (Judeo)-Arabic on the one hand, and those in favor of using Hebrew for their scientific works on the other. Furthermore, attitudes towards languages other than Hebrew, and more specifically Arabic, are implicit in the linguistic registers used for their writings and their acknowledgement of the literature of other groups, notably Arab Muslims. Thanks to the in-depth analysis of these different factors, Gallego offered a comprehensive view of Jewish attitudes to languages other than Hebrew in al-Andalus. While doing so, she showed how they evolved through time (early period, 8th–11th c.; from 11th c. onwards) pointing to the link between religious and linguistic identification. The ensuing discussion revolved around the Jews’ of al-Andalus “nationalism” versus their pride in their Oriental ancestors (such as Saadia Gaon). One of the participants suggested that in al-Andalus it was generally considered prestigious to study in the East. Another participant responded to this comment by observing that initially the Jews of al-Andalus indeed recognized the intellectual superiority of Eastern Jewry and its cultural centers, and only with time developed a sense of self-pride. Yet, he argued, the Jewish-Muslim encounter in medieval Spain would not have been as fruitful as it was, if not for the earlier interactions of both cultures in the East. Gallego pointed out that although the Andalusi Jews evidently acknowledged and were proud of their cultural heritage, during the Golden Age they predominantly saw themselves as an independent intellectual elite, superior to other contemporary traditions. Comments from the audience reinforced some of Gallego’s arguments. Furthermore, one of the participants pointed out that in the quotation of Moshe ibn Ezra regarding his conversation with a Muslim scholar about the use of other languages for translating the sacred texts, we should assume that the conversation took place within a shared house (pointing to the closeness of Muslims and Jews) rather than merely in the same land. One of the participants referred to the linguistic evolution of al-Andalus and asked why from the 11th c. onwards Latin ceased to be used as a literary language in the Iberian Peninsula, especially given the spread of Christianity. The answer was that Christians had largely adopted Arabic. Another participant was interested to know if the Jews of al-Andalus might have known Greek. The answer was that it was hardly probable.

The second paper in this session, The Self as the Other in the Jewish Literature of the Egyptian Diaspora in the Hellenistic Period: The Case of the Letter of Aristeas, was delivered by Agata Grzybowska (University of Warsaw). It opened with the introductory comment that the pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas was one of the two works of Jewish literature of the Hellenistic Period (the other being the Sybilline Oracles), in which a non-Jewish figure was introduced as the narrator and the central figure of the text. In this work, the story of how the Greek Bible translation known as the Septuagint came about is told from the perspective of a Greek court official under the rule of Ptolemy II Philadelphos in a letter – or a diegesis [narrative] – written to his friend Philocrates. The author of the Letter, who, according to the scholarly consensus, was a Hellenized Jewish intellectual most probably based in Alexandria, adopted the Hellenic perspective to the point of approaching his own culture as a Hellene would approach the culture of the “other.” The narrative features several digressions, including a travelogue, in which Aristeas relates his impressions of Jerusalem, an apology of the Law, in which peculiarities of the laws of kashrut are explained to him by the High Priest Eleazar, and a symposion, where King Ptolemy II Philadelphos interviews the Judean translators on their culture’s views on kingship. The paper analyzed the construct of the non-Jewish narrator, who explored his own tradition as the cultural legacy of the “other.” In the first part of her talk, Grzybowska connected this work with the Greek educational practice of progymnasmata (exercises in rhetoric), as well as early Hellenistic attempts at historical fiction. In the second part, she briefly discussed the benefits and ideological implications of this kind of approach. Finally, she concluded pondering the questions of what and how did the text tell us about the author’s own approach to the “other.” Grzybowska posited that although it was seemingly aimed at conveying a favorable image of the Jews to the Greeks, it in fact conveyed a favorable view of the Greeks to the Jews. The following discussion disputed this claim providing various arguments for and against this claim.

The last paper in this session, The Treatment of Idols (asnām) in the Hebrew Bible According to Andalusi Hebrew Lexicography, was presented by José Martínez Delgado (University of Granada). It opened with the observation that although according to the Bible the God of Israel is evidently one, He is not the only one, as Scripture contains numerous allusions to neighboring local deities and gods (called “idols”). In the following, it showed how these deities and gods were treated in the Andalusi lexicographical tradition, especially in Ibn Janah’s dictionary. The paper offered a detailed lexicographic analysis of their names demonstrating that medieval authors had ridiculed them through providing mocking etymology of their names (e.g., as originally zoomorphic terms). Martínez Delgado argued that this interpretative tradition was deeply Arabized. He also demonstrated that when a reference to an idol or idols appeared in the Bible in connection with the forefathers, it was neutralized in lexicographic texts by means of interpretative translation (e.g., Rachel’s home deities, tĕrafīm, were explained to mean astrolabe). The ensuing discussion touched upon the possible sources of inspiration of Andalusi lexicographers. It was pointed out that strikingly similar explanations were earlier provided by the Karaite exegetes active in the East (e.g., the explanation of tĕrafīm as astrolabe).

The eighth session (chaired by Filip Jakubowski, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań) was devoted to Power, Powerlessness and Expulsion. It opened with Fred Astren’s (San Francisco State University) paper, A Doubly-Articulated Anomaly in the Muslim Past: The Expulsion of Jews and Christians from the Hijaz under the Caliph ʿUmar, read by Marzena Zawanowska. It discussed the expulsion of Jews (and Christians) from the Hijaz that is recorded to have taken place under the caliph Umar (634–644). Since Muḥammad made a pact with the Jews of Khaybar and others in the Hijaz, this expulsion seemingly violates rightly-guided prophetic precedent. Many reports found in ninth and tenth-century Muslim tradition and historical writing sought to harmonize this anomaly, in part to define the Hijaz as a Muslim holy land, and as part of a wider discourse on Muslim space. In this regard, questions about a Hijaz purged of non-Muslims parallels scholarly discussions on the character of Muslim cities. Even as later Muslim scholars imagined the seventh-century Hijaz, they also imagined the seventh-century Muslim garrison cities as pristine exemplars to be applied to contemporaneous Muslim urban space, in which the presence of non-Muslims was either circumscribed or entirely forbidden. Re-writing both the history of the Hijaz and the garrison cities in Muslim tradition together was used to frame the place of Jews (and Christians) in Muslim society. Given the absence of the author of the paper, there was no possibility to take questions from the audience.

The second paper in this session, The Exile of Cain. A Passage in the Syriac and Arabic Apocryphal Sources, delivered by Lourdes Bonhome Pulido (University of Córdoba), focused on one particularly problematic passage from the Book of Genesis (Gen. 4:10–16). It narrates how Cain, after having killed his brother Abel, was sent to inhabit the Land of Nod. The paper offered an overview of the reception of this passage in the Apocryphal Cave of Treasures, written in Syriac. A detailed analysis of the source text aimed at enhancing our understanding of where was located – according to the Syriac author – the place of Cain’s exile, as well as of how early Christian commentators conceived of the controversial character of Cain. The ensuing discussion touched upon the question of whether the music which, according to the Bible, was created by Cain’s descendants should be considered blameworthy or not. Someone also asked about the possible relationship between this Syriac text and the apocryphal Book of Jubilees. The answer was that this issue has so far not been researched well enough.

The last paper in this session, entitled Stranger in Power: The Image of Shmuel ha-Nagid as a Jewish Dignitary at a Muslim Court in Contemporary Literature from al-Andalus, was presented by Barbara Gryczan (University of Warsaw). It scrutinized selected aspects of Shmuel ha-Nagid’s political activity through the prism of his poetic oeuvre. Ha-Nagid (993–1056) – known also as Ismāʻīl Ibn al-Naġrīla – was a Jewish intellectual who rose to power and prominence in the city-state of Granada in the first half of the 11th century. His life story provides a rare example of the spectacular success and career advancement of a Jew, thus a stranger, at a Muslim court. Gryczan explored the ways in which ha-Nagid’s unusual biography (with its various stages: Cordoba 993–1013; Malaga 1013–1020; Granada 1020–1056) was reflected in his poetry. Analyzing in detail his poems in which ha-Nagid recorded the events of his life, kept poetical track of what was happening around him, or commented on it and replied to criticism, Gryczan argued that his lyrical oeuvre represented a single example in the history of Jewish literature of a versified autobiography. In this unusual autobiography recounted by a poetic voice, he presents himself as a Jewish leader of the chosen people appointed to this role by God, despite that in reality he was serving as a hight official at a Muslim court and leading wars for Berber Kings. Special attention was paid to the poet’s reflections on his own status as “the other,” at first as a refugee from Cordoba and next as a stranger in power in the city-state of Granada. The following discussion focused on the question of the reliability of ha-Nagid’s texts as well as other sources of the period and on his purposeful auto-creation as a stranger in the exile. In addition, it considered possible ways of tracking the waves of emigration from Cordoba after the fall off the Umayyad dynasty and ha-Nagid’s probable visit to Lucena. It also touched upon the issue of the reception of Ibn al-Naġrīla’s figure in Arabic sources (Ibn Hazm and ‘Abd Allāh).

The ninth session (chaired by José Martínez Delgado, University of Granada) was devoted to Historical and Exegetical Narratives on Strangers. It opened with a paper entitled A Christian Out of Home: The Greek Sources of the Abgar’s Legend Revisited, delivered by Israel Muñoz Gallarte (University of Córdoba). It analyzed one of the most intriguing texts in the history of Christianity, related to the supposed exchange of letters between King Abgar V Ukama of Edessa and Jesus. The original source texts, probably composed in the early 4th c. CE in Syriac, have been translated and preserved in various languages (Armenian, Coptic, Latin as well as Greek, and afterwards also in Arabic). Although they have already deserved scholarly attention, the information regarding the Greek sources remains scarce and misleading. The paper revisited the main threads of the legend, closely analyzing Greek sources from literary, historical and philosophical perspectives. It scrutinized the circumstances in which they were written (after the conversion of Constantine to Christianity in 312 CE) and the purpose of their composition. Muñoz Gallarte suggested that they might have reflected Eusebius’ interpretation of the history of Christianity on the one hand presenting Jesus as a good pastor and letter writer, and over-emphasizing the culpability of Jews on the other. In addition, at the time of the spread of Christianity towards the East, the image conveyed by these letters of a pagan king who converts to Christianity and is rewarded might have served as an instructive model to be emulated by other kings. In the end Muñoz Gallarte demonstrated that the letters analyzed were evidently in popular use (as amulets). The ensuing discussion revolved around the question of whether these letters might have been originally composed in response to Manicheism and whether Eusebius translated them directly from Syriac.

The second paper in this session, An Idumean among Nabataeans and Romans: On the Source-text of a Passage in Maḥūb al-Manbijī’s Kitāb al-‛Unwān, was offered by Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala (University of Córdoba). It focused on a short text contained in Maḥbūb al-Manbijī’s Chronicle (dated to the 10th c. CE). Among other things, this work recounts the major events of the life of Antipater. The paper provided a detailed analysis of the relevant passage with a view of shedding new light on the possible sources employed by Maḥbūb al-Manbijī in his recount of Antipater’s narrative. To this purpose, it scrutinized two other accounts of the same story provided by earlier Jewish and Christian historians: the Hellenized Jew Flavius Josephus’ War of the Jews (1st c. CE), and the Christian historian and exegete Eusebius of Caesarea’s Historia ecclesiastica (3rd–4th c. CE). In addition, a quotation brought by Michael the Syrian (12th c. CE.) was also analyzed in this context. Finally, Monferrer-Sala offered some conclusions about the possible Vorlage of the story cited by Maḥbūb al-Manbijī, stating that it was impossible to know for certain whether he had drawn directly on Josephus, or not. The ensuing discussion revolved around the questions of whether in his recount of Antipater’s story Maḥbūb al-Manbijī might have used the Book of Yosippon as his source (given the popularity of this text as attested by the Genizah documents), and whether he provided some more detailed information on Antipater’s title (designation).

The last paper in this session, prepared by Dotan Arad (Bar-Ilan University), Muslim Rule in Jewish Eyes: Different Views and Approaches from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period, was presented by Marzena Zawanowska. It dealt with the relations between Jews and Muslims in the Islamic world. In previous research, legal aspects of these relations (in terms of discriminatory laws against Jews and their enforcement) have chiefly been discussed, but not the conceptual ones. Addressing this lacuna in research, Arad investigated texts written in the Middle East in the late medieval and early modern period by Jewish thinkers, Kabbalists, preachers, as well as laymen, exploring different ways in which these authors addressed the following questions: What did they think of the Muslim authorities? Did they consider their governors to be righteous and fair rulers? Would they have preferred to live under Christian rulers? He discussed inter alia a Talmudic dictum which rates the non-Jews as rulers depending on under whose rule it is more comfortable for a Jew to live (BT Shabbat 11a). Arad showed that there existed different variants of this saying. While manuscripts copied in Christian countries put the Ishmaelite on top of the list, those written in Islamic countries put the “Goy” (i.e., the Christian) on its top. The Jews living in in the realm of Islam imagined Jewish life in Christendom as relatively more tranquil and safe than their own. Analogously, Jewish travelers from Europe (mainly Italy) described with enthusiasm the safety of roads in the Mamluk state as well as deep involvement of Jews in the local economy. Interestingly, their travelogues preserve also voices of local Jews which reflect a more negative view of the Muslims (including mockery of Islamic praxis). In addition, a negative attitude towards Muslim neighbors and Islam appears in a letter (dated to the 15th c.) sent to the Community’s leaders of Cairo. The Cairene Jews are described in it as those “who live in their enemies’ wilderness; who dwell in a land that is not theirs.” The author’s viewpoint is clear: The Jews are strangers who are subjected to the Muslim rulers like the Jewish slaves in Egypt at the time of the exodus were, while their neighbors are their enemies. In light of the above, Arad suggested that despite the paucity of sources we may conclude that Jews in the Muslim lands in the late Middle Ages and early modern period did not share the optimistic view of their own situation expressed by their brethren from Christian lands, and depicted their Muslim rulers in a dark light. The difference in descriptions written by the representatives of the two Jewish Diasporas reflects well the idiom: “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” Given the absence of the author of the paper, there was no possibility to take questions from the audience.

Summary of the most significant and productive threads

Among the most significant and productive threads in papers and discussions were the following:

  • the importance of the ideas of otherness, estrangement and exile in late antique and medieval sources, no matter their literary genre; the impression is that in one way or another everyone felt a stranger or wished to depict himself as such;
  • it was relatively common to be/ feel the “other” within one’s own society (e.g., women, converts, slaves, but also free-thinkers, mystics, etc.);
  • the double meaning of the concept of emigration which may refer to an actual physical displacement (often conceived of as negative), but also spiritual and/or intellectual alienation (often conceived of as positive, e.g., in gnostic tradition, but also in Baḥya ibn Paqūda’s and Judah Halevi’s thought);
  • the use of the concept of exile to construct one’s own religious identify vis-à-vis another religious tradition/s; accordingly, emigration may sometimes be made into an important part of a group’s self-identity (or cultural topos, as in the case of early Muslim society of the Muhājirūn);
  • alienation may sometimes be self-imposed and conceived of as a sort of a privileged status (e.g., Gnostics, but also Baḥya ibn Paqūda);
  • linguistic estrangement and alienation may sometimes make one feel at home in an alien culture and thus create cultural boundaries between representatives of the same religion;
  • the concepts of stranger and estrangement is much dependent on the nature of inspected sources (e.g., the Genizah materials testify to no social segregation and schism between the Rabbanites and Karaites, while other sources prove the contrary);
  • the inner dynamics of parallel developments within different religious traditions (e.g., Gnostic authors of Nag Hammadi texts, mystical thinkers such as al-Suhrawardī), as well as cross-cultural transfer of ideas, concepts and motifs;
  • diverging and converging interpretations of the concept of exile, as well as exegetical methods and techniques applied by Jewish, Christian and Muslim authors; the enduring efforts on the part of both Jewish and Christian commentators to make sense of the Jewish exile, as well as the extent to which the question of interpretation divided not only Jews and Christians, but also Christians internally;
  • synchronic processes of cross-cultural development of given concepts or phenomena, and their diachronic evolution;
  • the extent to which some interpretations were informed by the Sitz im Leben of a given Jewish, Christian or Muslim author (e.g., ha-Meiri’s approach to Christiany versus the approach of the Jews who lived in the Muslim realm);
  • the unusual fertility of the discussed concepts of the “other”/ stranger, otherness/ estrangement and exile that inspired many varied interpretative responses;
  • the extent to which interdisciplinary approaches contribute to and enhance fruitful inspiring discussions.

Planned Outcomes and Outputs

The conference helped to shed new light on conflicting tendencies of inclusion and exclusion discernible in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as dialectic tensions between freedom and coercion in one’s choice of belonging to a given religious community or geographic location (homeland). It traced and thus helped elucidate the roots of modern approaches to “the others” – no matter foreigners or minority groups – and “otherness” within a given society. The subject is of special interest and significance in Europe now, given all the discussions related to the refugees.

The additional outcome of the event is the enhancement of international, multidisciplinary academic cooperation that transgresses the boundaries of distinct scholarly disciplines, in order to examine the cross-cultural transfers of concepts and ideas among different monotheistic traditions. The underlying assumption is that none of these traditions operated in isolation from others, and that they all had a far-reaching, cross-fertilizing effect on one another.

The planned output of the event includes the publication of a conference report in a well-established journal (indexed by Scopus, and included in the ERIH or Master Journal List, such as Collectanea Christiana Orientalia or Studia Judaica). An additional output considered by the organizers is publication of a collective volume of articles based on selected papers presented at the conference (edited by Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, Miriam Lindgren Hjälm and Marzena Zawanowska) to be submitted to a renowned publishing house (such as Mohr Siebeck, Brill, etc.).

Filed Under: Conference Grant Programme Reports

Biographies and Politics: The Involvement of Jews and Activists of Jewish Origin in Leftist Movements in 19th and 20th Century Poland

23 April 2020 by EAJS Administrator

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2019/20

REPORT

Biographies and Politics: The Involvement of Jews and Activists of Jewish Origin in Leftist Movements in 19th and 20th Century Poland

Event abstract

The conference “Biographies and Politics” approached the involvement of Jews and people of Jewish origin in leftist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from a biographical perspective. Using this method, we aimed to analyze how personal motivations, social and political conditions as well as issues such as gender, generational change and family dynamics influenced the individual and collective paths of Jews into various Jewish (Bundism, Labor Zionism) and general leftist political and social movements. Employing a biographical approach and a long-term perspective, we moved the scholarly debate on Jewish involvement in leftist movements beyond the stereotypes and superficial generalizations which still bedevil discussions of this issue. The conference took place in the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. It was co-organized by Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies, Halle (Germany), the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford, and University College London (both UK).

Event rationale

The involvement of the Jews of Poland in leftist political movements in nineteenth and twentieth-century Poland is a complex and challenging topic. Bundism and Labor Zionism openly combined Jewishness with leftist ideology. The situation is more complicated in the case of people of Jewish origin in non-Jewish organizations, who, at least to some degree, did not consider themselves to be Jewish but were regarded as Jews by others. In addition, in the imperial era of the long nineteenth century, we cannot speak exclusively of “Polish Jews” or “Poland” since other affiliations were also possible.

Nevertheless, the presence of Jews or people of Jewish descent in leftist movements, especially the prominent position some “Jews” held in the revolutionary movement and in state socialism, has been an issue of public debate to this day. On the one hand, the stereotype of communist Jews as “Jewish perpetrators” was often and is still used to stir up anticommunist or nationalist sentiments. On the other, especially in western historiography the dominant narrative on the role of “Jewish” participants in leftist movements is that of a struggle for political and social equality, whose results were often disappointing. This narrative focusses on the failure of Jewish revolutionaries and portrays Jewish communists as victims of Stalinism and the Communist regimes in East and East Central Europe.

Our conference will go beyond such schematic conceptions. Instead we approach the involvement of Jews and people of Jewish origin in leftist movements from a long-term perspective starting in the nineteenth century and with a clear focus on individual motivations, ideological choices and personal biographies. To explore the different paths which led Jewish individuals to become active in leftist parties and organizations, we seek to approach the topic from a biographical perspective. Analyzing the formation of Jewish political identities on the basis of biographical sources, especially documents like diaries, personal letters, memoirs and oral testimonies, makes it possible to avoid fruitless debates on the number – real or imagined – of Jews in the higher ranks of communist parties or their supposed influence.

During our conference we seek instead to gain source-based insights on questions such as:

  • Was Jewishness an important factor in choosing a specific political path?
  • Which other factors led Jews and people of Jewish origin to affiliate with a particular political group?
  • How did their leftist involvement influence their attitude towards imperial settings, occupying powers, internationalist movements, as well as Poland and Polish identity?
  • How did such individuals assess their leftist engagement later in their lives?

The answers to these questions will shed new light on the character of Polish Jews’ involvement with the left and will lead to a better understanding of their actual motives—why some Central and Eastern European Jews chose to engage in leftist political movements.

The conference will be held at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which provides a well-equipped venue and a professional institutional backing. The whole conference will be open to the public and simultaneously translated (English/Polish). The conference sessions are, however, directed, in the first place, to an academic audience. Two public evening events address a broader public and will be more widely promoted. Karen Auerbach’s keynote lecture will convey the key theme of the conference analyzing the biographies of several Jewish families who lived in an apartment building in postwar Warsaw. Its local flavor should, in addition, attract many Varsovians. The second event will be the screening of the film Tonia and her Children, which tells the life story, from the perspective of her children, of a prewar Jewish communist, who was arrested during the Stalinist period. The professional PR and the extensive network of the POLIN Museum will secure a high outreach into the academic and non-academic public.

To improve the methodological skills of Polish and international graduate students engaged in biographical projects and to promote Jewish Studies the conference will be preceded by a one-day methodological workshop. This will be jointly conducted by Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Stephan Stach (POLIN Museum). In it up to twelve graduate students will be given instruction into how to analyse different biographical sources and will discuss with the organizers and other senior scholars’ important aspects of biographical analysis. They will also be invited to attend the conference. The participants will be selected after a publicly announced call for applications. This call will be published after the closure of the CfP for the conference so as not to discourage advanced doctoral students from submitting a proposal for the main conference.

The conference, the workshop and the accompanying programme attracted great interest. We received a huge number of responses to the CfP of the conference as well as to the Early Career Scholars Workshop. The contributions to the conference covered a wide range of issues raised by CfP and discussed them from various disciplinary viewpoints. The biographical approach to the topic of left-wing political commitment of Jews proved to be suitable for examining even difficult aspects from new perspectives.

The Conference and its Accompanying Programme

Workshop for Early Career Scholars. 30 November 2019

The conference was preceded by a workshop on biographical research for early career scholars, organized and directed by Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Stephan Stach (POLIN Museum). Eleven participants from Poland, Germany, Croatia, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, the United States and Israel discussed their biographical research projects and methodological texts. The discussion was given additional impulses by a presentation of Piotr Osęka (University of Warsaw) about challenges and opportunities of using communist security service files as a source for biographical research. After the day full of lively and engaged discussions all participants were invited to also observe the conference. Two of them also presented a paper at the conference.

First Day of the Conference

The conference was opened by Anthony Polonsky, who welcomed participants and guests on behalf of the conference organisers. He also gave a concise outline of the basic ideas and considerations, that lead to the organisation of this conference. In particular he emphasised the epistemic advantages of approaching a complex and disputed topic like Jewish engagement in left-wing politics though specific biographies. After his words the participants split up to continue in two parallel panels.

In the first panel explored the interconnection of Jewishness and leftwing political activism. Jacob Stürmann investigated, how the exiled Russian-Jewish Social-Democrat Pavel Axelrod became an important point of reference for interwar Jewish Socialists. Alexandra Kemmerer traced the impact of Rosa Luxemburg’s personal Jewish experience on her political thinking and Katarzyna Chmielewska approaches the question through an analyze of narrative structures in Polish-Jewish communist family memoirs. François Guesnet, who chaired the panel, opened the discussion. With a short reference to Karl Marx’s concept of communism as liberation from Jewishness towards human liberation, he added another perspective on the panels central question.

In the second panel titled “Internationalist Politics, Transnational Biographies, Local Activism” addressed the question of leftist engagement in Polish Jewish émigré communities. Zoé Grumberg analyzed political and social trajectories of Polish-Jewish Communists in France during from the 1920s to the 1960s. Among other she points on the exceptionally high engagement of this group in the French Résistance but also to their strong Jewish identity, which, however, did not contradicting their internationalist conviction. Ebony Nilsson examined the paths of an anticommunist Polish-born Jewish labor activist that immigrated along with of several thousand other Jewish DP’s to Australia. Based on his own family history Daniel Walkowitz explored how Jewish immigrants from Lodz and Bialystok engaged in the Yiddishist, socialist General Jewish Labor Bund formed a specific milieu in Patterson, New Jersey. Among other topic brought forward during the lively discussion, David Slucki raised the question, how family histories focusing on rank-and-file activist and institutional sources concentrated on party leaders could be better integrated into a more comprehensive narrative.

Cultural and social activism was in the center of discussion in the third panel, exploring leftist activism beyond party boundaries. Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska analyzed the biography of the gynecologist Herman Rubin. He was one of the proponents of birth control and conception and his Yiddish and Polish publications influenced the discussion of birth control in socialist circles and leftist literary journals. Andrea Feldman examined the role of the progressive Jewish academic and social activist Vera Ehrlich Stein in interwar Zagreb and her involvement in leftist politics. The “unwritten autobiography” of the Soviet Jewish actor and cultural activist Solomon Mikhoels was the topic of Vassily Schedrin’s talk. On the example of Mikhoels’ contribution to the Soviet movie “The Return of Nathan Becker” of 1932, he demonstrated, how combined elements of religious messianism of Judaism and the messianic ideology of the Bolshevik revolution.

The fourth panel titled “Antifascism facing the Holocaust” began with Stefan Gąsiorowski’s presentation on the poet and early Holocaust historian Michał Borwicz. Gąsiorowski explored the in how far his personal and political connections to the Polish socialist movement contributed to his rescue form Lviv’s Janowska camp. Michał Trębacz in turn investigated the role of socialist ideology in Szmuel Zygelbojm’s writing and thinking in face of the Holocaust. As he points out, despite his suicide protest against the World’s indifference towards the fate of the Jews under Nazi occupation, Zygelbojm remained faithful that it will be up to labor movement to create peaceful postwar order. While Zygelbojm is one of the more prominent leaders of wartime Jewish socialist movement, Maria Ferenc introduced the so far mostly unknown Shmuel Breslaw, as the “Unacknowledged Intellectual Leader of Hashomer Hatzair in the Warsaw Ghetto”. As Ferenc underlines, Breslaw was one of the staunchest advocates for armed resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, however murdered before the outbreak of the Ghetto Uprising.

Ula Chowaniec chaired the fifth panel “Exclusion and Inclusion in Leftist Jewish Biographies” and opened the floor with a mild critique of the quite general character of the panel title. The three papers tied together here explored the impact of additional overlapping experiences of inclusion and exclusion on Jewish biographies: In the case of Jewish Social Democrat Zygmunt Glücksman, a leader of German Socialists in interwar Poland, this was the double minority identity as German and Jew. Wojciech Goslar presented the biography of Maurycy Jaeger, who oscillated between socialism, anarchism, Polish and Jewish national identities in both late nineteenth century Galicia and his exile in London. Anna Ładowska case study on Dina Blond a leading representative of Bundist women’s movement, persuasively pointed out how the inclusion of gender equality into the Bundist program had to struggle with practiced gender inequal in the organization.

The sixth panel was dedicated to leftist Jewish visions for the future after the Holocaust. Magdalena Semczyszyn examines the different views of two leftist Zionist partisan leaders presented on a meeting in Lublin in 1944. While Aba Kowner was convinced that surviving Jews needed emigrate as soon as possible after the war. Icchak Cukierman on the contrary argued for a better planned and controlled emigration in several waves. Anna Nedlin in turn presented the founders of the Kibbuz Lohamei haGetta’ot (The Ghetto Fighters Kibbuz) – one of whom was the afore mentioned Icchak Cukierman. Eryk Krasucki’s paper was placed on this panel for organizational rather than thematic reasons (cancellations by several participants). In it he evaluated the references of various communist functionaries to their Jewish origins. He shows that family relationships often remained the only remaining link to Jewish life.

The first day ended with Karen Auerbach’s keynote lecture “Jewish Biographies, Leftist Politics, and the History of Emotions”. Auerbach reevaluated analyses of why some Jews have been drawn to Communism and other leftist political movements, under the guiding question, how reconstructions of individual biographies can illuminate commonalities and variations in mindsets as well as frameworks of belonging at times of changing ideas, what binds individuals to broader political, social and cultural communities. To this end, she drew primarily on the material for her study of the families of Jewish communists who lived in a Warsaw apartment building on Ujazdowski Street after the war.

Second day of the conference

The second day started with a panel on religious labor movements. Ada Gebel introduced the orthodox labor union “Poalei Agudat”, founded in 1922 and linked to the leading orthodox Jewish party in interwar Poland. Gebel focused on two pioneering thinkers of the union, Yehuda Leib Orlean and Isaak Breuer, and their concepts to conciliate socialism with orthodox religious thinking. Gershon Bacons, paper that was read by panel chair Yvonne Kleimann, as Bacon was not able to be present, also concerned Polaei Agudat and examined the movement as an orthodox answer to the social needs of Jewish artisans and workers. Yitzchak Schwartz investigated Am Olam, a radical, Utopian agricultural movement founded in Odessa in 1881, building several colonies throughout the Eastern Europe. Schwartz called for the increased consideration of such groups into an inclusive the history of left political movements. A call which was generally welcomed during the following discussion, which circled around the question, where exactly to place it in this history.

Panel eight examined three generations of Marxist historians of Jewish working class: Mojżesz Kaufman, Rafał Mahler and Feliks Tych. Kaufman was the subject of Piotr Laskowski paper analyzing several Polish and Yiddish manuscripts of Kaufman’s articles on the Jew engagement in the Polish Socialist Party during the 1930’s. Laskowski interprets these works among others also as an implicit criticism of the politics of the Pilsudski regime. Tom Navon presented on Mahler’s efforts to create and apply a Marxist methodology to study Jewish History. Tomasz Siewierski presented on Tych, who as child surviver of the Holocaust, became an outstanding historian of Worker’s movement in communist Poland before he turned to Jewish history, after 1989.

A panel chaired by Dariusz Stola gathered talks circling around the question if there is a particular Jewish responsibility for communist crimes. Stanisław Krajewski approached the delicate issue through his own family history: his grandfather and his great-grandfather were both pre-World War II communist leaders and victims of Stalinist purges. Katarzyna Rembacka presented the reckoning of a Jewish pre-war communist with communism in post-war Poland based on autobiographic writings. Katarzyna Kwiatkowska-Moskalewicz and Marcin Moskalewicz examined the pre-war and war-time biographies of Helena Wolińska and Włodzimierz Brus, both communist activists associated with Stalinist crimes in postwar Poland. The following at times heated discussion considered, among other things, the role the identification with Polish culture of most of the persons, whose biographies were debated.

Less controversial but no less exciting was the panel “Emancipatory Empowerment and Leftist Politics” that took place simultaneously. Emma Zohar analyzed autobiographical writings of two communist women activist regarding emotions expressed in relation to their political activity in interwar Poland. Jan Rybak, too, based his talk on the autobiographical writings of an activist of Zionist-Socialist Poale Zion from Galicia, describing her experience of emancipation through revolutionary politics. Magdalena Grabowska in turn examined the biography of the postwar Polish communist women’s activist Edwarda Orłowska, raising the question if such activism can be described as feminism.

The last panel focused on generational aspects in biographical research of Jewish leftist activism. Jaff Schatz evaluated the biographical paths that led young Jew into the Communist party of interwar Poland. He pointed at general social mechanisms that led to the political formation of this group. Łukasz Bertram evaluated three periods of activity in his biographical analysis of Jewish communists beginning with their entry into the movement, proceeding through interwar clandestine activity until the postwar period. He raises the question whether a and in how far dispositions shaped in the processes of their political socialization can be considered as a specific habitus of Jewish communists.

The end of the conference was heralded by round table on Jewish Leftwing Activism and Family History, whose participant approached this issue form different perspectives. Ewa Herbst portrayed the biography of her great-uncle, the Polish-Jewish socialist Herman Diamand, in a very committed and engaging way, drawing among others on family correspondence. Leopold Sobel spoke about three generations of Leftist engagement in his Jewish family beginning with the union career of his father in interwar Poland, through his own engagement in the formation of the New Israeli Left in post-1967 Israel up to his sons current political work as a British Labour MP. David Slucki discussed the story of his grandfather Jakub, a Bundist activist first in Poland and later in in Australia, based on his recently published book “Sing This at My Funral”.

Yvonne Kleinmann, co-organizer of the conference representing the Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies, took over the task of making a short final comment. Referring to the longish and complicated title conference, she pointed at the complication the organizers faced defining Jewishness in the period under consideration. In the course of the conference and this problem repeatedly appeared in different contexts. The most fruitful of these approaches had been those that consider of Jewishness as pluralistic and bound to its historical context. Summing up, Kleinman was especially satisfied with the fact that many new currents in historical research such as history of emotions of gender studies had been used to examine Jew leftist engagement.

The final cord of the conference was a public screening of of the film Tonia and her Children, which tells the life story, from the perspective of her children, of a prewar Jewish communist, who was arrested during the Stalinist period.

Outcomes: The conference made a significant contribution to the networking of European, American and Israeli researchers of different generations working in this field. Furthermore, it deepened the existing personal and institutional academic contacts between the organizing institutions. A video recording of the individual conference panels, the keynote lecture and the round table including the discussions is available online at: https://www.polin.pl/pl/aktualnosci/2019/12/24/biografie-i-polityka-nagrania-wideo

Output: A selection of the contributions will be published either in the form of an anthology or as a thematic issue of a scholarly journal.

Event Programme: https://www.polin.pl/pl/system/files/attachments/program-v3_0.pdf

Publicity

The conference sparked an enormous public interest. It was attended by 180 visitors. The countrywide radio station Tok.fm dedicated an issue of its 45-minute programme “Historia Polski” to the conference.  Krzysztof Persak, representing the POLIN Museum, and Stanislaw Krajewski, representing the conference, discussed the conference topic with the moderator Maciej Zakrocki. The broadcast is available online via the following links:

http://www.tokfm.pl/Tokfm/7,103089,25552291,zydokomuna-jako-uzasadnienie-antysemityzmu-dlaczego-zydzi.html

https://audycje.tokfm.pl/podcast/83612,Zaangazowanie-Zydow-w-komunizm-nie-oznacza-ze-to-byl-system-zydowski

An academic report for the web portal HSozKult.de is currently under preparation.

Filed Under: Conference Grant Programme Reports

Dynamic Jewish-Muslim Interactions (“DJMI”) in Maghribi Material and Performative Cultures

23 April 2020 by EAJS Administrator

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2019/20

REPORT

Dynamic Jewish-Muslim Interactions (“DJMI”) in Maghribi Material and Performative Cultures

17-18 September 2019, Camargo Foundation (http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28764)

Co-conveners: Dr Karima Dirèche (Université Aix-Marseille); Dr Sami Everett (University of Cambridge); Dr Rebekah Vince (University of Durham)

Hosted by the Camargo Foundation, Cassis (France), this conference strengthened a recently established network of early career and more senior scholars alongside artists and musicians, all of whom explore Maghribi Jewish-Muslim interactions and performing cultures in North Africa and France. Following on from our conference held in December 2018 at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge (UK), this second conference was a collaborative event between Aix-Marseille University (France) and the University of Cambridge (UK).

This event provided the framework for scholars to examine the multiple ways production and performance illustrate dynamic Jewish-Muslim interactions from the turn of the century to the present day, and to discern the benefits and drawbacks of emphasising universalism or particularity. The time period encompasses France’s attempts to emancipate and assimilate Maghribi Jews under colonial rule; decolonization which saw many of these Jews leave for France or Israel, as well as other countries; the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict; and rising antisemitism and Islamophobia across the Western world.

Our meeting in Cassis brought together a Euro-Mediterranean and transatlantic group of specialists (both researchers and practitioners), working across a wide range of genres, including music, theatre, film, religious architecture, and language. It provided the context for discussion around cultural encounters, influences, and cooperation between Maghribi Jews and Muslims to explore interaction, collaboration, and dialogue on both sides of the Mediterranean, with a focus on representation. Papers included interdisciplinary research and lively discussions on Judeo-Arabic (piyyut, matrouz, and the debate around the pertinence of the label ‘Judeo-Arabic’); Maghribi heritage; museum curation in Algeria, France, Israel, and Morocco; and the trajectory of objects and repertoires across time and space. There was also a strong focus on both amnesia and communication i.e. what we forget when we idealise artistic creativity and collaborative performance across community boundaries. We also discussed the ongoing difficulties that arise, on both sides of the Mediterranean, when discussing (intergenerational) transmission and re-appropriation in relation to the legacy of Jewish culture from North Africa. The conference will produce an edited volume that will be published by autumn 2020. When further funding is secured, we envisage an online pedagogical resource, drawing from our online archive of cultural artefacts and recordings to which we added more material at this event, as well as an interactive exhibit for a forthcoming exhibition at the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (MNHI) in conjunction with Cambridge Digital Humanities. We are extremely grateful to the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS), CRASSH, and the Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Cambridge collaboration scheme for their support and funding. We would also like to thank the Camargo Foundation for hosting us.

Conference rationale with a reflection on how the goals of the event have been achieved

Building on the success of our conference concerning the Dynamics of Maghribi Jewish-Muslim Interactions across the Performing Arts in December 2018, the aim of this event was to reunite and reinforce our research network while adding a creative element to the collaborative project, including the development of an interactive exhibit.

The purpose of the event was threefold:

  1. to interrogate the artistic and cultural outputs influenced by or resulting from Jewish-Muslim interactions in North Africa from the turn of the century to the present day;
  2. to discern how to integrate these performative artworks into university syllabi on courses that include a significant cultural and Jewish studies component; and
  3. to establish the material and presentation of a mobile, screen-based exhibition.

Increasingly, scholars are forging links across postcolonial studies, Jewish studies, decolonized trauma theory, and transcultural memory studies (Cheyette, 2018), while recognising connections between Orientalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, (anti-)colonialism, and Zionism (Penslar, 2017). The purpose of this event was to interrogate these linkages within the multilingual context of North Africa, by drawing attention to Maghrebi Jewish-Muslim artistic depictions and creative cooperation in academia and the arts, in view of an interactive exhibition.

=> The discussions during the event centred on both chapter drafts for the edited volume and further material, with a focus on Maghribi heritage-making across religious boundaries, the legacy of North African religious architecture, and multilingualism.

The aim was to interrogate the threads that emerged from our previous event, fundamental to the establishment of the volume, the pedagogical resource, and the exhibition. These are:

  • The role of humour in depicting Muslim-Jewish interactions, and satire as catharsis
  • Absence/presence of Jews in the Maghrib as manifested in performance art
  • The specifics of influence and aesthetics in performance relating to Jewish-Muslim interactions
  • Memory and amnesia of Jewish life in Maghribi performative artwork
  • Challenging stereotypes and assumptions through performative collaboration

=> the inclusion of Hadj Miliani, Jonas Sibony, and Neta El Kayam – experts in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, and music – enabled us to examine in detail the impact on performance of multilingualism, for example localized variants of Arabic in Maghrib/Mashriq as well as Judeo-Arabic; the shifts emerging in new generations of Israelis and French-speakers; and issues of translation/mediation.

We specifically addressed questions that emerged at the previous conference, notably:

  • How to look at the specificities of cultural interactions within a temporal and geographical context without being blind-sided by presentist concerns, and cultural inclinations
  • The need to develop a grammar to talk about the Maghrib in relation to Israel/Palestine without diminishing the importance of local interactions both historically and in the present

=> The heritage and curation focus of the event gave us a multidimensional perspective on the issues around heritage-making (patrimoinilisation) across the Mediterranean, as considered past exhibitions on Algerian heritage (Hadj Miliani, Naomi Davidson), Moroccan culture in Israel (Amit Hai Cohen), and Maghribi heritage in France (Mathias Dreyfus, Naima Yahi).

The inclusion of artists (Iris Miské) and musicians (Amit Hai Cohen and Neta El Kayam) gave us an alternative perspective on academia and highlighted the need to communicate with stakeholders beyond the confines of intellectual debate, integrating creative approaches to the subject material.

Finally, we discussed in-depth the design of an exhibition and the incorporation of our archive of cultural artefacts and video recordings of participants offering expert analysis collated at the two conference, taking into consideration narrative, interpretative material, funding, and public engagement.

=> The pedagogical toolkit and exhibit will be hosted at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, where the previous conference was held, in collaboration with Cambridge Digital Humanities Groups (CDH).

Overview and Threads

Session 1: Multilingualism, Aesthetics & Translation 

Chaired by Karima Dirèche (Aix-Marseille), this session explored transmission and communication of Maghribi cultures in multiple forms. Naima Yahi discussed heritage-making and the experience of curating an exhibition in Toulouse on Maghribi diaspora, including Jews and Muslims (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwyaQrfJno4&feature=share). Through standpoint theory, we subsequently discussed the notion of museum ‘restitution’ with Miléna Kartowski-Aïach’s personal experience at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme. Jonas Sibony analysed an ethnographic video of a Judeo-Arabic piyyut (Ehad mi yodea), leading to an exploration of oral archives still in existence among North African Jewish religious populations. These presentations prompted discussion of the dissemination of heritage – personal, public, national, origin, and label – in multiple contexts: liturgical, transborder, Maghribi. In this session, we focused on Algeria and Morocco in particular, notably through exploring an Algerian Jewish museum project 1968-72 and Simon Lévy’s Casablanca ‘only Jewish Museum in the Middle East 

Workshop A: Artistic Creation on the Line Between Jerusalem and Morocco

Amit Hai Cohen and Neta El Kayam took us on a creative journey of their musical and artistic practice ‘on the line from Jerusalem to Casablanca’ and on to Tahanut. The workshop began with a famous poem by Benarroch recited in Spanish (Sami Everett) and Arabic (Moneim Rahman), and then performed by Amit and Neta. Neta then explained the extent to which she and Amit have invested themselves in learning and perfecting Arabic (over a period of ten years) in order to be able to replicate the chaâbi repertoire and finally create their own music beyond the guardians of this genre: Samy Maghribi, Maurice El Medioni, Line Monty, Zohra Alfasia etc.

Set list:

— “Ya lhmama” — docu music 11mins (2015), projection

— ARENAS project — influence of the transit camps “Grand Arenas” (performance)

— “Abiadi” — tribute to singer Zohra Alfasia (performance)

— “Tizgui” — video projection and personal documentation

— Presentation of the exhibition “Ziara” currently at the Jerusalem bianniale

— Performance of Moroccan music within synagogues in Jerusalem

Traditional repertoire: https://www.facebook.com/karima.direche/videos/2276152435844663/

Contemporary repertoire: https://www.facebook.com/naima.yahi/videos/10218248078887527/

Session 2: Memory, Amnesia, & Stereotype 

Chaired by Rebekah Vince (Durham), the discussion in this session revolved around remembering and forgetting in musical, theatrical, and linguistic depictions of Jewish-Muslim interactions in the twentieth century, with a focus on Tunisia, Algeria, and France. Presentations were given by Morgan Corriou (Paris VIII) on Albert Samama and his forgotten documentary films; Chris Silver (McGill, Canada) on the forgotten feminism of Habiba Messika; and Hadj Miliani (CRASC, Oran, Algeria) on the importance of remembering Algerian Jewish artists and performers without leaning towards lachrymose history. Miliani stated, ‘the history of early twentieth century performance between Jews and Muslims is one of brawls, cooperation and fierce competition’. Finally, Mourad Yelles (Emeritus, INALCO) spoke about the Judeo-Arabic genre of Matrouz (local Arabic/Hebrew mirror poetry) in diasporic contexts. A long discussion about the idea and notion of the ‘intermediary’ ensued, and a productive tension emerged between the technological forward thinking of these ‘intermediaries’ (Yafil, Samama, etc.), and why Jewishness and intermediary-ness should be so often elided.

Session 3: Mixed Grammars; Talking about North Africa in France

Chaired by Sami Everett, this session looked at the ways in which North Africa and Arabs, Jews, and Muslims in France (often from or descendants of North Africa) are discussed, represented, and depicted transnationally in the contemporary era. This provided the context for a discussion around the tenor and content of an exhibition about Jewish-Muslim Maghribi cross-connections in relation to Maghribi trajectories of migration to France. The session moved chronologically from Arthur Asseraf ’s work on 1930s Algerian radio broadcasting to Naomi Davidson’s current project on post-independence Algerian Jewish-Muslim correspondence, notably around material heritage such as synagogues, cemeteries, and liturgy in the late 1960s and 1970s. More polemical discussions brought us to up-to-date concerning the current intellectual debate in the US around the use of Judeo-Arabic (Jonathan Glasser) and an in-depth analysis of the terms used to describe French Jews and Muslims in the French national written press (Le Monde, Le Figaro) (Adi Bharat). Several interesting notions were shared concerning Jewish-Muslim exchange, all of which pointed to ‘contact that drives friction’ (Arthur Asseraf). Other topics of discussion included ‘listening with suspicion’ to ‘Oriental’ music; the reconversion of places of religious worship and devotion (the case of the great mosque, formerly synagogue, of Oran); the Butnitski-Shohat debate about Judeo-Arabic and its secularist assumptions (Jonathan Glasser); and the construction o

Workshop B: Creating an Interactive Exhibition

The final workshop focussed on academic creativity, digital humanities, and the incorporation of these elements into a museum exhibition. The workshop was in two parts. First, Iris Miské introduced us to her artistic work at the intersection of plural cultures and human rights activism (feminism, gender, LGBTQ including Medieval Lesbians; migrant rights, especially of Saharoui Cubanos; and now dynamic Maghribi Jewish-Muslim artistic collaborations). She explained how she and Sami Everett have been translating archival research on the 1920s Algiers theatre and music scene into a digital format, and showed the DJMI network the storyboard that they have been working on together for a future animation. Second, Mathias Dreyfus discussed in-depth and elicited questions on his future exhibition.

Conversation emerged around storytelling through objects, and the ability to narrate conflict without taking sides, as well as future directions:

  • Convergence of the project with several contemporary initiatives for the promotion of Jewish North African heritage and Muslim contact in Paris: Association Dalâla (for the promotion of North African Jewish Culture)
  • Consolidate the digital humanities angle of the project after the edited volume by creating short animated films as lead-ins to several chapters
  • Remaining papers to be pitched as a special issue to a leading journal (Journal of Modern Jewish Studies have expressed an interest; The Journal of North African Studies is another option)

Tasks ahead:

  • Third and fourth conferences are being planned i. to accompany the book launch of Everett & Vince’s volume Everett, Samuel Sami, and Rebekah Vince (eds.), Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures in North Africa and France (Liverpool University Press, Francophone Postcolonial Studies series, 2020) in October or November 2020 and ii. to continue the emergent synergies between art/music, digital humanities and Jewish-Muslim interactional scholarship in Morocco (March/April 2021). The first will be the opportunity to develop and discuss a project bid (ERC).
  • Funding applications for the third conference: EAJS, ANR, AHRC, Hanadiv
  • The final manuscript for the volume to be submitted at the end of October 2019 and reviewed before the end of the year, in preparation for 2020 publication
  • Sami Everett will continue to work on the conference/project video-clips, which tie the participants to the cultural artefacts

Planned outcomes and outputs

Outcomes: As the ‘tasks ahead’ section indicates, we will be convening two further conferences with a core of continuing participants to take forwards collective plans for the use of the materials and videos already collated. Conference three will focus on the pedagogical use of the materials collated.

Outputs: The growing cultural artefacts archive, hosted at CRASSH, includes a wide range of material, from YouTube videos to song clips, from personal and ethnographic photographs to street art, and from film extracts to fieldwork notes and musical clippings from the field. It is our intention that these cultural artefacts, accompanied by video presentations recorded at the two conferences, will form the basis of a future digital output. This will consist of an online pedagogical toolkit with teaching notes and case studies, for implementation in modules that the participants currently teach in the first instance, and subsequent adaptation for secondary school level, following the model of the Yiddish Book Centre Educational Programs.

Final conference Programme

Dynamic Jewish-Muslim Interactions (“DJMI”) in Maghribi Material and Performative Cultures; 17 September 2019 – 18 December 2019

Day One, Tuesday 17 September
09.30 – 10.00 Registration
10.00 – 10.30 Welcome and opening words
10.30 – 12.00 Session One: Multilingualism, Aesthetics & Translation 

Chair: Karima Dirèche (Aix-Marseille)

Naima Yahi (CNRS): ‘Cultural Histories, Diasporic Tongues’

Jonas Sibony (INALCO): ‘How are Jewish-Muslim Interactions Played Out in Language?’

Miléna Kartowski-Aïach (Aix-Marseille): ‘Objects Speak to Us: Naming, Repairing and Restitution’

12.00 – 13.00 Lunch
13.00 – 16.00 Workshop A: Artistic Creation on the Line Between Jerusalem and Morocco

With artists Neta El Kayam and Amit Hai Cohen

16.00 – 16.30 Break
16.30 – 18.00 Session Two: Memory, Amnesia, & Stereotype 

Chair: Rebekah Vince (Durham)

Morgan Corriou (Paris 8): ‘Forgotten Films and Movie Memory-Making’

Chris Silver (McGill): ‘Does Music Remember While History Forgets?’

Hadj Miliani: ‘Mirroring, Memories, and Multiplicities’

Mourad Yelles (INALCO): ‘Folklore, Tradition, and Memories of Mixing’

Day Two, Wednesday 18 September 2019
09.00 – 9.30 Coffee & Pastries
09.30 – 11.00 Session Three: Mixed Grammars; Talking about North Africa in France

Chair: Sami Everett (Cambridge)

Naomi Davidson (University of Chicago in Paris): ‘Mediterranean Conflicts and Convergences’

Jonathan Glasser (William & Mary): ‘The Judeo-Arabic debate’

Arthur Asseraf (Cambridge): ‘Listening with suspicion’

Adi Bharat (Manchester): ‘Jews and Muslims in contemporary French Newspapers’

11.00 – 14.00 Workshop B: Creating an Interactive Exhibition (including lunch)

With graphic designer Iris Miské and historian and museum curator and historian Mathias Dreyfus

14.00 – 14.30 Group Discussion: Timelines and Deadlines
14.30 End of conference

Sponsors:

  • Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
  • CRASSH
  • European Association for Jewish Studies

Full list of attendees:

  • Karima Dirèche (Aix-Marseille)
  • Naima Yahi (CNRS)
  • Jonas Sibony (INALCO)
  • Miléna Kartowski-Aïach (Aix-Marseille)
  • Amit Hai Cohen (Musician, Jerusalem)
  • Neta El Kayam (Musician, Jerusalem)
  • Rebekah Vince (Durham)
  • Morgan Corriou (Paris 8)
  • Chris Silver (McGill)
  • Hadj Miliani (CRASC)
  • Mourad Yelles (INALCO)
  • Sami Everett (Cambridge)
  • Naomi Davidson (University of Chicago in Paris)
  • Jonathan Glasser (William & Mary)
  • Arthur Asseraf (Cambridge)
  • Adi Bharat (Manchester)
  • Iris Miské (Graphic artist, Toulouse)
  • Mathias Dreyfus (Curator MNHI, Paris)
  • Sarah Benichou (Journalist, Paris)
  • Abdelmoniem Rahma (Fellow, Camargo Foundation, CF)
  • Floy Krouchi (Fellow, CF)
  • Sara Farid (Fellow, CF) — thanks Camargo Foundation, 2019 © Sara Farid for all photos

Filed Under: Conference Grant Programme Reports

Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfer in the Early Modern World

26 November 2019 by EAJS Administrator

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2018/19

REPORT

“Kabbalah and Knowledge Transfer in the Early Modern World” (Berlin, 9-10 July 2019)

Authors: Agata Paluch and Patrick B. Koch

Rationale of the event

Kabbalistic traditions in the early modern period have been mostly examined by previous generations of scholars along the historical lines of investigation defined by Gershom Scholem and his students. Only in the last generation, following Moshe Idel, have scholars become interested in new methodological approaches to study early modern kabbalah as a set of religious and cultural practices as opposed to focusing solely on its theoretical or theological framework. Yosef Avivi, through his meticulous bibliographical survey, has paved the way to the study of the great abundance of sources available for investigation of the kabbalah of Isaac Luria, the most influential kabbalistic tradition of the early modern world. In the last few years the study of kabbalah in the early modern period, including the complex histories of Lurianic tradition and its dispersion beyond its birthplace in Palestinian Safed, have become a rapidly growing field.

This conference’s objective was to recognise and evaluate the part that kabbalistic literatures, in a variety of their written formats, played in the transfer of knowledge in the early modern world, a subject that has only recently began to attract scholarly attention. The practical and scientific dimension of early modern kabbalistic literature exerted a significant influence on both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual culture and was widely disseminated in early modern Europe. As it seems, in the seventeenth century and up to the eighteenth century, this feature of kabbalistic literature gripped numerous reading audiences, who aimed to gain and systematise knowledge of the metaphysical world, and to harness its power to effect changes in the physical world. The conference also aimed at engaging in the discussion on the role of magical rituals related to early scientific and artisanal practices which played a significant role in introducing the speculative doctrines of kabbalah into both European and non-European Jewish culture. Similarly, ethical conduct literature, in a variety of its genres and material formats, proves to be a rich source for the study of knowledge transfer strategies.  The conference gathered participants to contribute a series of case studies that will help critically reassess the role and consequences of printed texts in the spread of esoteric ideas and practices, and re-evaluate the character and significance of thriving manuscript culture, in its variegated material forms, for the early modern transmission of knowledge.

The aim of our conference was to showcase the recent surge in scholarly interest in early modern kabbalah by bringing together the most prominent scholars in the field side-by side with post-doctoral and doctoral researchers who  will contribute to developing the field in the future. We also sought to overcome the fragmentation of research on kabbalistic traditions between Europe, Israel, and the United States. As the field is still relatively in the making, most of the papers in the sessions were devoted to the presentation and analysis of primary sources, many of which have not yet been published. The conference thus focused on contextualised readings of primary texts presented by each of the participants with the aim to highlight variant patterns of the diffusion of kabbalistic traditions, especially those formulated in Safed, in new cultural and historical circumstances, and their role in the formation and transformation of contemporary knowledge systems. Finally, by concentrating on the broadly defined kabbalistic lore, often included in the magical and moralistic literary genres, the conference provided a forum for the comprehensive assessment of the circulation of esoteric knowledge and praxis in the early modern period.

Lectures

FU Berlin, Institut für Judaistik

Tuesday, 9 July, 14:30–16:30:                 

Panel I: Forms of Kabbalistic Knowledge Transfer in Early Modernity

1. H. (Yossi) Chajes (Haifa University): “Ratzo ve-shov: Reflections on the Circulation of Visual Kabbalah in the Early Modern Period”

J.H. Chajes introduced the genre of visual Kabbalah – ilanot (hebr. Trees), the diagrammatic parchment rotuli which he described as “the maps of God”, from their earliest appearances in medieval Hebrew manuscripts to their later appropriation by Christian cabalists in the early modern period. Chajes highlighted the significance of knowledge transfer between Jews and Christians as well as Jews in various diasporas to the emergence and efflorescence of the ilanot. The main examples shown were the Great Ilan by Meir Poppers, based on Jacob Zemah’s design that followed a conservative visual language of concentric circles in schemata, lacking seals or diagrams that had featured earlier in Christian versions of ilanot, suggesting perhaps an active resistance to the influence of visual Kabbalah proposed by e.g. Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim in his De occulta philosophia. In the second part of his presentation, Chajes focused on the 18th-century Kabbalist from the region of Kurdistan, who creatively reformatted the visual form of ilanot, producing both large-size rotula and small codices, aimed perhaps at different audiences. Interestingly, the Kurdish Ilan, although preserving elements known from Ashkenazi printed sources, such as diagrams from Moshe Graaf’s Vayakhel Mosheh, contained also typically local elements. The diagram,  itself designated as tofes in quite a rare manner, was according to Chajes prepared for performative rather than pedagogical purposes.

2. Gerold Necker (Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg): “The matrix of understanding: Moshe Zacuto’s Em la-Binah”

The broad genre of instructional literature for esoteric thought included reference books, glossaries, dictionaries, manuals and guides to kabbalistic concepts, either arranged according to topics (like the sequence of the sefirot) or in alphabetical order. It emerged already at the formative stage of kabbalistic literature in medieval times. Once the (re-)formulations of Isaac Luria’s (1534-1572) kabbalah were put into circulation, Moses Zacuto (ca. 1610-1697) shaped the development in this field to no small degree. In his paper, Gerold Necker presented the ordering principles of Zacuto’s contribution to Lurianic works of reference, which he exemplified by a case study of Zacuto’s Em la-Binah, printed first in Isaac ben Judah Zaba’s collection Sha’arei Binah (Saloniki 1813). On the one hand, Necker traced the origin of Zacuto’s composition Em la-Binah back to the very beginning in one of Zacuto’s manuscript notebooks (BL Add 26927), and, on the other hand, discussed the question of its part in the process of the distribution of Lurianic kabbalah. In doing so, Necker attempted to understand Zacuto’s practical approach to the kabbalistic material he used to order it, and methods that led to the creation of Em la-Binah. These methods were according to Necker used to build a comprehensive text-book of kabbalah wherein knowledge is organised by concepts and subject matter and significantly, not in alphabetical order – the latter would rather be a feature of the genre of reference-books.

3. Andrea Gondos (Tel Aviv University): “Modes of Kabbalistic Knowledge Transmission in Early Modernity: Reductive versus Expansive Approaches”

Andrea Gondos analysed the literary strategies deployed in the management of kabbalistic knowledge in Jewish mystical anthologies with a focus on works published in the early modern period. In particular, she discussed two major anthological approaches – the expansive and the reductive models – that kabbalists used to re-present older textual material and ideas. Expansive model targeted an elite readership, who were already proficient in kabbalistic texts, language, and symbolism while the reductive approach served to render kabbalistic idea and works more accessible and facilitate their comprehension by readers who had little or no knowledge of this lore. Gondos used Moses Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim to illustrate the expansive strategy, and Yissakhar Baer’s Meqor Hokhmah served to expose the modes of the reductive model.

Kabbalistic anthologies begin to appear already in the Middle Ages and assemble earlier authoritative teachings. Two basic approaches can be distinguished with regard to an author’s anthological objective: the expansive-syncretistic and the reductionist-simplifying. Moses Cordovero pursued the first strategy and devised systematic methods for coping with the multiplicity of sources. In his defining work, the Pardes Rimonim (1592), he created order by devoting an entire chapter to the encyclopaedic treatment of kabblistic terms and symbols arranged in alphabetical order to promote easy consultation (Gate 23). The second strategy, reductive in focus, was frequently adopted by secondary elites, who saw the Zohar as an already difficult and complex text not only from the linguistic but also from the theosophical perspective, and therefore sought strategies to simplify, digest, and reorganise its content – these strategies involved also material elements such as simple fonts and layout in print. Yissakhar Baer’s Meqor Hokhmah (1609) fits into this model. According to Gondos, his aim was to zoom in and extract a zoharic unit that offers a concise, uncomplicated, often pedagogically and ethically motivated reading of Scripture.

17:00-18:00

Keynote lecture: Giulio Busi (Freie Universität Berlin) “How the Art of Printing transformed Kabbalah: From Italian Courts to Polish Shtetlach”

In the keynote lecture on the first evening of the conference, Giulio Busi offered a survey on the relationship of Italy and Poland in the 16th century, and the question if how print changed Kabbalah. Busi argued that the perennial crisis of Jews living in Italy in the middle of the sixteenth century can be regarded as a stimulus for creativity. Thus, negative events such as the confiscation of the Talmud and the establishment of the Venetian ghetto may have caused the printing of Kabbalistic literature. Contrary to the accepted scholarly opinion, Busi highlighted that the editorial projects in Cremona, Ferrara, and Mantua were interrelated. Along these lines, he suggested to understand the printing of the Cremona and Mantua Zohar not as a competition but a coordinated project. Accordingly, he claimed that the Mantua print constitutes a continuation of the Cremona project, as the latter was blocked due the inquisition under Spanish rule.

Based on a preliminary inventory of Kabbalistic books printed during the second half of the sixteenth century, Busi showed how the period between 1556 and 1567 marks the core period of Kabbalah books in Italy. After that time-span, book printing decreases in Italy, but at the same time, increases in Eastern Europe, particularly Cracow. The diffusion of books printed in Italy thus also had a lasting impact on the rest of the European market, leading individuals to move to Italy to learn the art of book printing and to establish new printing presses in their hometowns.

In the second part of his lecture, Busi focused on the choices of texts printed and their literary character. With reference to Moshe Idel, he showed how the ‘renaissance’ of Kabbalah unfolded around Zoharic materials. The project of printing the Zohar can therefore justly be seen as the attempt of creating a corpus with narrative as a literary focus, as a reaction to the anthological projects of the Christian world.  Referring to Elisabeth L. Eisenstein, the mechanisms were different—typography vs. manuscript—but the mission remained the same. Thus, the medieval Zohar project, that is the compilation of a corpus of Midrashic materials in manuscript, was perpetuated in the 16th century in printing. According to Busi, it is this very recurrence that allows us to speak of two ‘Kabbalistic renaissances’, the first taking place in thirteenth-century Castile, and the second one in sixteenth-century Italy.

Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien

Wednesday, 10 July, 9:30–11:00:                       

Panel II: Manuscript Matrix and Kabbalistic Knowledge Transfer

1. Magdaléna Jánošíková (Queen Mary, University of London) “Imprisoned Agencies: Knowledge Transfer between Travelling and Sitting Down”

In the spirit of associating ‘renaissance’ with cultural flourishing, historians recount the history of the late-Renaissance Jewry of east-central Europe as a heyday of cultural exchange with Italy. The mystical miscellany (NY, Jewish Theological Seminary, Ms 2324), written in 1550s, represents an early material evidence of the textual exchange between these two regions divided by the Alps. Its scribe Eliezer Eilburg, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Braunschweig, claimed to have gather the texts for his ‘Notebook of the Collector’ in Italy and then edited them in east-central Europe: he found some of his texts ‘in the hands of the Greek Jews,’ admired others in a monastery where they arrived via ‘the Spanish Jewish emigrants.’ His writing conveys excitement about new knowledge that originated in Jewish intellectual circles unknown to him prior to his visit of Italy.

Janosikova approached Eilburg’s miscellany as a case study of cultural agency, which enabled intellectual bourgeoning of the late sixteenth-century Jewish culture north of the Alps. Yet such approach, she noted, does not take into consideration high toll Eilburg paid. Eilburg’s new knowledge neither bought him a permanent residence in any major Polish community where he was returning, nor secured a stable income. Janosikova analysed the circumstances, which informed Eilburg’s writing, especially his prolonged imprisonment. She focused on Eilburg’s use of Abraham Abulafia’s Imre Shefer, which he incorporated into his first-person narrative. The use and appropriation of Kabbalistic meditative techniques  of Abulafia may have provided Eilburg with a sense of agency and helped him to achieve the   ideal of the balance of emotions. In this sense, as noted by Talya Fishman in Q&A, Abulafia’s writings provided Eilburg a channel to act in accordance with the contemporary medical guidelines – Kabbalah thus did not necessarily denote an esoteric type of knowledge but constituted the science and thus praxis of the day.

2. Hanna Gentili (The Warburg Institute): “Kabbalah and/or Philosophy: Sources and Methodology in the Work of Yohanan Alemanno”

Yohanan Alemanno (c. 1435-c. 1504) worked as a private teacher for the most illustrious Jewish and Christian circles and was particularly active in Florence, where he worked for the Da Pisa family and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Alemanno’s interests included philosophy, pedagogy, medicine, Kabbalah and biblical exegesis. His works, which are preserved almost entirely in manuscript form, are invaluable sources to trace the textual transmission of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century philosophical and Kabbalistic sources in fifteenth-century Italy. Hanna Gentili’s paper concerned Alemanno’s autograph notebook, Bodleian Library Ms Reggio 23, a commonplace book where he copied a wide variety of existing Hebrew sources, ranging from logic and philosophy of language to ethics and psychology. Ms Reggio 23 fully embodies the variety of Alemanno’s interests as it displays his knowledge of the Graeco-Arabic-Hebrew philosophical tradition as well as sources such as Sefer Yetsirah, Abraham Abulafia and the Zohar. Gentili showed how philosophical and Kabbalistic sources were often presented side by side in the manuscript page and merged in Alemanno’s later works. She analysed the disposition of the material in the manuscript, often precisely identified by the scribe himself, in order to discuss the textual practices adopted by Alemanno in the study, interpretation and teaching of both philosophical and Kabbalistic sources. Throughout the paper, the content of Ms Reggio 23 was contextualised in the wider framework of Alemanno’s work to show that it developed over a long period of time, including explicit cross-referencing. Gentili showcased Alemanno’s manuscript as a study programme of kabbalah, designed by the compiler for his own needs and purposes, and underpinned at large by Aristotelian sources.

11:30-13:00:

Panel III: Kabbalistic Knowledge between Jewish & Christian contexts

1. Flavia Buzzetta (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Laboratoire d’études sur les monothéismes), “Transmission and Transformation of Kabbalistic Knowledge in Italy at the End of the Fifteenth Century”

This presentation examined the transmission, adaptation, and transformation of Jewish thought in relation to Christian Kabbalistic works through a detailed study of the Kabbalistic library of Pierleone da Spoleto (1455-1492). Pierleone Leoni was a physician and a philosopher who participated in the rediscovery of the prisca theologia (a providential manifestation of a universal divine message and expression of a single truth) which embraces ancient, Mosaic, and Christian mysteries. Pierleone’s library, renowned among his contemporaries and remembered in the chronicles of his time, attests to the multiplicity of his interests. He devoted a section of his collection to Kabbalah, which in his opinion was able to cast light on the most secret aspects of the divine. Buzzetta focused on Sicilian translations of Kabbalistic texts that are located in Parisian libraries, and especially on the Ms. Arsenal 8526 that belonged to the library of the order of the Minime. This manuscript contains a vernacular Kabbalistic summa mainly composed of two treatises: the Tratati Belli (ff. 1r-138r), a translation of Abulafia’s Imre Shefer, and the Glosa de Schepher Yecira (ff. 140v-293r), a translation of Yoseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi’s Commentary on the Sefer Yetsirah. Written at the end of the fifteenth century in a Kabbalistic scriptorium, this code represents one of the first historical encounters between Jewish translators and Christian humanists, which involved both transformative communication and creative reception. Pierleoni, according to Buzzetta, had clearly prophetical interests and was also a reader of Ramon Lull’s ars combinatoria, since he read his Jewish Kabbalistic sources through the Lullian categories. As such, his translation of Kabbalistic texts can in fact be seen as adaptations and transformations of Kabbalistic knowledge, a type of “intellectual hybrids.”

2. Saverio Campanini (Università di Bologna): “Transmission and Reception of Isaac Ibn Sahula’s Kabbalistic Commentary on two Psalms”

Isaac Ibn Sahula is especially well-known as the author of the poem Meshal ha-Qadmoni. It is also known that Ibn Sahula was among the early Kabbalists and the first quotation of the Midrash ha-Ne’elam, from the earliest layer of Zoharic literature is found in his highly learned poem. Moreover, he was among the friends of Moshe de Leon and has occupied a relevant place in the 20th-century philological reconstruction of the development of Kabbalah in Castile. By the account of Saverio Campanini, it is all the more surprising that Sahula’s Kabbalistic Commentary on two Psalms has been neglected so far, especially since it was anthologised and some fragments have been translated into Latin in the glosses of the polyglot Psalter published by the bishop Agostino Giustiniani in 1516.

The original text and its reception in Latin formed the object of Campanini’s paper in which he showed not only that Ibn Sahula’s Kabbalistic commentary is preserved in a manuscript at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (JTS 1609), but also that precisely that manuscript is the one which used to belong to Agostino Giustiniani’s library. The main features of Ibn Sahula’s commentary were presented together with their reception within the ideological framework of a Christian Kabbalist in the early Renaissance. Campanini presented a long history of (mis-)reading and (mis-)recognising of the attribution of the Kabbalistic commentary that continues in contemporary scholarship. By diligent reading of the manuscript sources, and especially highlighting the application of the tools of palaeography, Campanini emphasised the use of Hebrew manuscripts alongside Christian (printed) sources in reconstructing the history of textual transmission as well as Kabbalistic historiography.

14:00-16:00

Panel III: Transformations of Kabbalah in East-Central Europe

1. Maoz Kahana (Tel Aviv University): “Mortal Temples: Early Modern Usages of a Kabbalistic Image in the Nomian Sphere”

Maoz Kahana took the motif of the temple as the departing point for his discussion. He began with presenting Joseph Karo’s programme of the universal unification of Jewish law, setting it against the background of similar contemporary programmes, such as that of John Dee’s project of the universal language of nature. Kahana thereafter presented Sabbatai Tsevi’s ideas of bodily practices which conceptualised Tsevi’s body as the actual divine Temple on earth. This idea was placed by Kahana in the context of the early modern utopian or even revolutionary projects of earthly temples, such as the architectural design of El Escorial or the ideal model of the universe by Isaac Newton. In his talk, Kahana discussed the halakhic impact of the organisation of Jewish knowledge, comparing the ideal of the “temple of law” of Joseph Karo with the temple of performative body of the messiah as presented in some texts about Sabbatai Tsevi by his major supporter, Nathan of Gaza. Interestingly, the projects of both Karo and Tsevi, one legal and the other cosmological, were underpinned to a great degree by the Kabbalistic language and rhetoric, inasmuch as the language of kabbalah enabled their “rationalisation”, legitimation, universalisation, and thus popularisation. Kahana highlighted the move inwards in the texts of Nathan of Gaza, that is, a concerted effort to emphasise the performative self of the kabbalaist alongside the performative body of the messiah, which might constitute a major change in the Kabbalistic language of the early modernity in comparison to the earlier period.

2. Avinoam Stillman (Beer Sheva): “Paratexts and the Printing of Kabbalah in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth”

Over the course of the 18th century, numerous and varied kabbalistic texts were printed in the Hebrew presses of Eastern European towns like Zolkiew and Korets. This wave of kabbalistic printing – which peaked in the last quarter of the century – was the largest since the 16th century printings of kabbalah in Italy and Poland. The paratexts of many of these books – title-pages, approbations, introductions, editorial apologies, and colophons – reveal their embeddedness in both local and global contexts. Stillman highlighted for instance a tendency to authenticate and legitimise the texts in their approbations by asserting their link to the authority of Isaac Luria, even if that linkage was only “fabricated.” On the one hand, these sources shed light on the local conditions under which kabbalistic manuscripts were obtained and edited for print. The first printings of the Lurianic kabbalistic writings of Hayyim Vital particularly demonstrate the important role of rabbinic elites, with their social authority, their educational institutions, and their libraries, in the production of kabbalistic books.

According to Stillman, the paratexts also point to continuities between the intellectual elites and the networks of individuals associated historiographically with the emergent movements of Hasidism and the Haskalah. On the other hand, reprints of kabbalistic books testify to the circulation of kabbalistic knowledge between Eastern Europe and centres of Hebrew printing such as Amsterdam and Constantinople. Frequently printed works like Share Orah of Joseph Gikatilla reflect the emergence of kabbalistic book-markets; these were linked to the spread of certain kabbalistic rituals, such as recitation of the Zohar or the kabbalat shabbat liturgy, across the early modern Jewish world. According to Stillman, the paratexts of kabbalistic prints paint a dynamic picture of the socio-cultural position of kabbalah between in 18th century Eastern Europe and make it possible to reassess the Kabbalistic curriculum of the time.

3. Elke Morlok (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt): “The Magic Triangle: Printing Lurianic Kabbalah in Koretz with Satanow, Krüger and Czartoryski”

This lecture discussed the first printing of Lurianic material in Koretz in 1782. The unique cooperation between the maskil Isaac Satanow (1732-1804), the salesman Anton Krüger (c. 1705-1779) and the magnate of Koretz and Pantler of Lithuania Joseph Klemenz Czartoryski (1740-1810) led to the first publication of Lurianic books, whose circumstances and contexts will be examined. Morlok presented the specific motivations and interests of the three partners, the contexts in which these writings were put to print and their producers’ expectations.

Special attention was given to the fascinating figure of Satanow, who originated from Podolia, but migrated to Berlin, where he became one of the most influential personalities of Haskala literature and its printing. He was the director of the Oriental Printing Press and author of numerous books on grammar, ethics, Hebrew language, education, science, theology and philosophy. Morlok focused on his parameters for the Jewish society at the threshold of modernity and the extent to which kabbalistic material played a role in that process, with an eye to Satanow’s engagement with the questions of the modern world in his various writings on tradition, theology and science. Morlok highlighted the philological expertise of Satanow and his potential connections with Sawants’ scribes, the copyists of Lurianic manuscripts, as well as a pedagogical agenda that underpinned Satanow’s printing enterprise. For Satanow, Lurianic Kabbalah might have been a medium to bridge the gap between the East and the West, or the “oriental” (esoteric) and “western” knowledge. The questions raised by Morlok regarding Joseph Czartoryski, the magnate of Korzec, such as his personal connections to esotericists’ circles and his interest in freemasonry that may have motivated his endorsement of the print of Lurianic Kabbalah, still await in-depth archival study but suggest an interesting avenue for further research.

16:00

IV: Concluding remarks

The papers engendered an engaging debate both during the panels and the concluding discussion. The conference covered a long period between late 15th and late 18th century. The participants reflected on the question of careful periodisation with regard to Jewish early modernity and a need to emphasise cultural and social changes particular to the 16th, 17th, and 18th century respectively. Andrea Gondos highlighted not only the problems of periodisation but also those stemming from geographical complication, suggesting careful comparative study on Kabbalistic knowledge in various geo-cultural zones. Indeed, the conference papers covered the transfer of knowledge that took place in the main centres of the early modern “Western world”: Italy, Central and Eastern Europe, Iberian Peninsula, the Middle East, as well as North Africa.

Talya Fishman noted that the conference shifted the hitherto dominant scholarly notion of early modern Kabbalah as a counter-narrative to Haskalah—the latter customarily considered as the main Jewish cultural and intellectual factor of the period. Instead, the conference papers successfully proved that Kabbalah played an essential role in transmitting, authenticating, and legitimising knowledge in early modernity, both among Jewish and non-Jewish society. Among various Jewish audiences, as stated by Maoz Kahana, Kabbalah became one of the dominant languages through which individuals and groups could express and authorise their views and beliefs on subjects from law to natural knowledge. This authoritative language was often shared with members of non-Jewish circles interested in various forms of prisca theologia in 15th-16th century, or esotericism in the 17th and 18th century. The conference participants discussed the use of the Kabbalistic language in expressing the dynamics of emotions as well as concepts of self, reflecting on a general predilection of the epoch to accounting for one’s individual, inner experiences in writing found also in Kabbalistic texts.

Magdalena Janosikova raised the vital question of the forms and methods of the transmission of Kabbalistic knowledge and the need for comparative studies in the area of material genres employed to this end by Jews in the early modern period. The majority of conference papers focused on the role of print vs. manuscripts in the popularisation of Kabbalah in early modernity, while several papers strongly highlighted a crucial role of manuscripts in conveying and transmitting knowledge well until the end of the 18th century.  A careful reconsideration of the production of manuscripts, those for individual or private use and those produced in scriptoria, may help answering vital questions of exclusivity of Kabbalistic knowledge on the one hand and its popularisation on the other. As demonstrated by papers of Elke Morlok and Avinoam Stillman, a focused research on political, social and cultural underpinnings of printing kabbalah may bring more answers on the rationale of circulation of Kabbalistic knowledge both in manuscript and printed form.

Outcomes and outputs

  1. The conference helped establish a network of both junior and senior scholars (in equal numbers) who work on the topics related to kabbalah and knowledge in the early modern period.
  2. The event promoted the cluster of Jewish studies in the Berlin-Hamburg area. Moreover, it featured a good number of scholars from various centres of Jewish studies in Europe and facilitated their discussions with academics based in Israel.
  3. The organisers have planned the publication of conference proceedings as a special issue of the journal Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts. The publisher has been approached and initial arrangements were made to issue the volume at the beginning of 2021. To date, the majority of conference speakers (ten of eleven) have committed to submitting their revised papers for publication. The volume will be preceded by a comprehensive introduction authored by the conference conveners.

Publicity

  • EAJS website
  • GAJS
  • Soz-Kult website
  • FU Institut für Judaistik website
  • University of Hamburg website
  • Facebook page of Judaistik at FU Berlin and Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien
  • Newsletter of Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien
  • academia.edu
  • “Knowledge in Circulation” blog: https://esknowcirc.hypotheses.org/179
  • Posters and flyers around FU Berlin, University of Hamburg, send also to all major Jewish Studies departments in Germany

Link to the programme: https://www.academia.edu/39235862/EAJS_Conference_Kabbalah_and_Knowledge_Transfer_in_the_Early_Modern_World_Program

*

Signed by:

Agata Paluch

Patrick B. Koch

Filed Under: Conference Grant Programme Reports

Dynamic Maghribi Jewish-Muslim Interaction across the Performing Arts (1920-2020)

22 January 2019 by EAJS Administrator

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2018/19

REPORT

Dynamic Maghribi Jewish-Muslim Interaction across the Performing Arts (1920-2020)

5-7 December 2018, Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Cambridge (http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/27895)

Co-conveners: Dr Sami Everett (University of Cambridge), Dr Arthur Asseraf (University of Cambridge), Dr Rebekah Vince (University of Warwick)

This conference explored Jewish-Muslim dynamic interactions in performance art across North Africa (the Maghrib) and France since 1920. We brought together a research network of early career and more senior scholars researching and producing artistic representations across the genres of music, theatre, film, comedy, and art, to discuss how these relate to Maghribi Jewish-Muslim interaction, collaboration, and dialogue on both sides of the Mediterranean. Papers included interdisciplinary research on early twentieth century Jewish-Muslim theatre troupes and orchestras across the Maghrib, Israeli Moroccan nostalgia, and how North African Jews and Muslims have influenced the French stand-up comedy scene. Emphasis was placed on artistic cooperation, creative representation, intergenerational transmission, and dynamic interaction between Jews and Muslims on both sides of the Mediterranean. By discussing these themes, the conference challenged polarised narratives surrounding Jewish-Muslim relations in the Maghrib and France which tend to focus either on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia or on nostalgia and utopianism. While acknowledging the historical and contemporary tensions between Jews and Muslims, the material that we explored focused on transcultural creative production, taking a historical view of dynamic interaction between Jews and Muslims both sides of the Mediterranean. The event examined (co-)production and (inter-)acting, as well as influence from elsewhere, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged, in Jewish and Muslim performance cultures across the Maghrib and France. We are grateful to the European Association for Jewish Studies, the Centre for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities and the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR), and the Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) – Cambridge collaboration scheme for their support and funding.

Event Rationale

The aim of the event was to investigate how Maghribi Jewish-Muslim artistic and cultural production represents or is under-girded by creative coexistence and dynamic interaction between Jews and Muslims in both the Maghrib and France.

=>This was achieved by discussing a series of pre-circulated work-in-progress papers and cultural artefacts (film and music extracts, images, and text including, for example, fieldwork notes or archival photos), which formed the basis for in-depth and knowledgeable conversation around the theme of dynamic Maghribi Jewish-Muslim interactions on both sides of the Mediterranean.

The time period covered the promise of French emancipation to its indigenous subjects; nation-building in the Maghrib; decolonization and end of empire; the Cold War and its end; the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the rise of the right in France. Together the network scholars explored the ways in which this relationship plays out within production and performance, paying particular attention to shifting conceptions over time about sameness and difference.

=> During the conference this was achieved by addressing in particular the Nahda (Arab renaissance) of the 1920/30s and the significant structural change in the context of the Maghrib surrounding questions of what a North African nation-state might look like that occurred during that period. During that time and space, artists were creating narratives of pluralism. We went on to look at the 1960s and the period of decolonisation in which we found at times a postcolonial absence of Jewish cultural life in the Maghrib, particularly in Algeria. In cinema and in cartoons for examples there was no physical Jewish presence even though many Jews remained. We also discussed the question of rupture and whether or not this was immediate upon independence and a subterranean Judeo-Muslim cultural vestige/continuity which was not fully revived until the 1990s when there was a re-emergence within a religious framing, partly due to the convergence of Islam and politics in North Africa i.e. the increased necessity to show openness towards religious pluralism. This led to a discussion on revivalism abstracted from a lived experience in North Africa (exiles and third-generation re-appropriation), intergenerational post-nostalgia and return to North Africa among a generation who never lived there, resulting in cultural production continuing to the present day.

The event seeks to interrogate the degree of perception-change produced by such performance through addressing the question: What potential do such narratives, their spaces of production and performance, and the relations that generate and maintain them, hold for societal change?

Over the last two decades, scholarship of relations between North African Jews and Muslims, both during and after the colonial period, has side-lined cultural connections. Scholars have offered analyses of structural political connections and differences in relation to rights and racism (see Attias, Katz, Stein), but performance culture such as music has only figured in the background or has been approached from within the anthropology subfield of ethnomusicology (Langlois, Swedenburg). However, recently, some scholars and filmmakers have begun to highlight the centrality of performance culture as underpinning lived connections between Maghrebi Jews and Muslims (Glasser, Hachkar, Safinez). Building on and broadening out this scholarship, the proposed event considered the dialogical impact of performance spaces chronologically and artistically. The performative artworks that the event investigated have challenged and continue to challenge Jewish and Muslim stereotypes, in spite of the ongoing tensions across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, which are negotiated by the artists in creative and provocative ways.

=> The detailed and meaningful discussions during the conference acknowledged and interrogated moments of colonial and religious rupture as well as continuity, the significance of subterranean cultural work of mediation and transmission surrounding memories of Jewish life in the Maghrib. As a group we also explored the potential of performative artwork to challenge stereotypes by exaggerating these to the point of ridicule and from that self-derision offering cathartic dialogic alternatives.

As scholars of Jewish-Muslim interaction in North Africa, we proposed to build on European connections, in particular between Cambridge and Paris by means of a cross-disciplinary approach. The majority UK-France focused network that we sought to establish combines creative and analytical insights by identifying the limits and potential of representation and collaboration in breaking cultural taboos, exercising freedom of speech, and promoting cross-cultural exchange.

=> Through this conference, we established a network of scholars from emerging ERCs to more senior figures from not only France and the UK, but also from the US and Canada, Algeria and Morocco including participants from the social sciences, history, literature, anthropology, music, and modern languages. The strength of this network has the potential for significant written output and establishing a large-scale inter-disciplinary and international project.

Overview and Threads

Keynote 1: Valérie Zenatti (independent author), ‘La mémoire trouée [Perforated Memory]’

The conference began with an autobiographical keynote by Valérie Zenatti. She was introduced to the public by Dr Sami Everett including in her capacity as author, screenwriter, and translator of the late Aharon Appelfeld (from Hebrew into French). The event was open to the public as well as to conference participants and academics from the University of Cambridge.

Born to Algerian and Tunisian Jewish parents, Valérie Zenatti grew up in France where her encounter with the Holocaust was mediated through the American television series Holocaust (1975) and later through the writings of Ukrainian-Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld, whose translator she was to become. Her affiliative relationship with Aharon Appelfeld is recounted in her (auto)biographical novella Mensonges [Lies] (2011) which preceded her prize-winning novel Jacob, Jacob (2015), an exploration of Jewish life in Algeria during the Second World War and decolonisation. Both these texts, alongside Une bouteille à la mer de Gaza [A Bottle in the Gaza Sea] (2005) and its film adaptation (watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL8p6FKCPzQ), featured in her conversational keynote, which addressed issues of memory and forgetting, filiation and affiliation, erasure and reconstitution. Questions and ensuing discussion revolved around the (im)possibility of return, the absence of Muslims in some accounts of Jewish life in the Maghrib, and dialogic approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Session 1: Popular Music

Chaired by Ruth Davis, University of Cambridge, this session explored Jewish-Muslim dynamic interaction in Maghribi popular music, from concert halls in the interwar Maghrib (Chris Silver, McGill University) to narratives of peaceful religious coexistence in Moroccan patriotic rap (Cristina Moreno Almeida, King’s College London). Listen to Casa Mdinti here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNJhJOKqM8Y&feature=youtu.be. These presentations prompted discussion around the construction of the nation and engaging in politics with a capital or lower-case “p”.

Session 2: Staging and Performance

Chaired by Arthur Asseraf, University of Cambridge, this session included a presentation by Mourad Yelles, INALCO, on theatre as meeting point between Algerian Jews and Muslims with a particular focus on the Jewish actress Marie Soussan. Listen to Marcha Djazairia here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ju1EmrbywU&feature=youtu.be. This led to a discussion on similar values among Jewish and Muslim families, and a shift in focus from a socio-cultural analysis to a political and aesthetic one. The session also included a presentation by Adi Bharat, University of Manchester, on how the conflictual model of Jewish-Muslim relations in France is challenged through stand-up comedy, taking the comedy duo Younes and Bambi (‘l’Arabe et le Juif’ [the Arab and the Jew]). This raised questions about exaggeration to the point of ridicule and reinforced the general consensus at the conference that interactions is a more useful concept than relations when speaking about Jewish-Muslim performance art in terms of influence and collaboration.

Session 3: Cinematic Representation

Chaired by Rebekah Vince, University of Warwick, the discussion in this session revolved around cinematic, musical, and linguistic depictions of Jewish-Muslim relations in both Morocco and Israel. Presentations were given by Miléna Kartowski-Aïach, Idemec/Université d’Aix Marseille, on forbidden memory and political song in Kamal Hachkar’s mediatory films, and by Chana Morgenstern, University of Cambridge, on decolonising Hebrew through Arabic in the film adaptation of Almog Behar’s prize-winning short story “I’m one of the Jews”. This led to a debate on whether or not Palestine/Israel can ever be excluded when speaking about Maghribi Jews in the contemporary moment, even in analysing Jewish-Muslim interactions in North Africa before the foundation of the State of Israel.

Keynote 2: Jonathan Glasser, Associate Professor of Anthropology, William & Mary, ‘Maghrebi-Jewish Musical Intimacy’

This keynote began with an analysis of how music seems to challenge discourses of antagonism that emphasize Muslim-Jewish conflict and posit Jews as pariahs in North African society. Yet a closer look revealed that Muslim-Jewish interactions via music and surrounding debates were nevertheless marked by tropes of rivalry, marginality, and ambivalence. Jonathan Glasser focused on the case of Algeria to account for the centripetal forces of these tropes and to provide a rich alternative for understanding Muslim-Jewish dynamic interactions in the Maghrib and its diaspora. He also posited the possibility of a particular Jewish aesthetics of Andalusi music born of the hermeticism of community living prior to the twentieth century. A certain accent, musical structure and even ways of playing might underpin this but these ‘Jewish’ musical modes have been adopted and even appropriated by Muslim music players(chioukh) also.

Session 4: Comedy and Satire

Chaired by Warda Hadjab, EHESS, this session looked at absent depictions of Jewish heritage and Muslim-Jewish relations in Algerian caricatures and graphic novels from 1967 through the 1980s (Elizabeth Perego, Shepherd University), and creative co-existence in the work of street artist “Combo” (Nadia Kiwan, University of Aberdeen). See http://www.combo-streetart.com/. These presentations were a springboard into discussion about whether we are dealing with total rupture or lingering traces when addressing the immediate post-independence period: Chris Silver suggested we might talk about ruptured continuity. We also addressed the question of gender (“Is street art male?”) and the extent to which displaying religious symbols in public space acts as a provocation in secular France. Continuing with concepts of satire and comedy, we considered how malaise is dealt with via the medium of humour, how assumptions are deconstructions, and how anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are challenged through performative artwork.

In the concluding comments, the question was again raised, this time by Arthur Asseraf, University of Cambridge, as to the breakdown, rupture, and absence of the immediate post-independence moment. Often when looking for interactions, our attention is drawn to the interwar period or more recent examples but not so much to the period of the independences or following that. Chris Silver suggested that there was a possibly nostalgic need to fill this absence. The Christian question was also raised: Christians are often depicted as the dominant power yet, in the Arab world at least, Christians have a distinctive (minority) identity. Seth Anziska, UCL, noticed how the conference was working against the lachrymose view of history and this led to a discussion on whether or not we were engaging in “grieving cosmopolitanism” and the potential (creative or otherwise) of this concept, which need not be a negative one. Sami Everett was of the opinion that while this may also be the case Maghribi Jews of latter generations had every right to re-engage with a cultural legacy and heritage which was often simply not passed down to them. Jonathan Glasser suggested that co-resistance was a useful way of looking at performative collaboration and co-creative artwork. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, University of Cambridge, brought up the myth of “the last Jew” and the phenomenon of contemporary Muslims self-identifying with a suppressed past, notably in relation to Judeo-Berber identity within the Arabo-Muslim context of the Maghrib. Miléna Kartowski-Aïach spoke of the subterranean work and the role of mediators in the transmission of cultural memory, which is beginning to bear fruit in changing perceptions and opening a space for interfaith dialogue.

Threads included:

  • Multilingualism (localised variants of Arabic in Maghrib/Mashriq and Judeo-Arabic, question of accent, French, Hebrew, Yiddish), translation
  • The role of humour in depicting Muslim-Jewish interactions and satire as catharsis
  • Absence/presence of Jews in the Maghrib as manifested in performance art
  • Influence, aesthetics, and performance relating to Jewish-Muslim interactions
  • Memory and amnesia of Jewish life in the Maghrib as depicted in (or left out of) performative artwork
  • Challenging stereotypes and assumptions through performative collaboration

Questions that emerged included:

  • How to look at the specificities of cultural interactions within temporal and geographical context
  • How to talk about the Maghrib in relation to Israel/Palestine without diminishing the importance of local interactions historically and in the present day

Planned outcomes and outputs

Participants submitted 3,000-word work-in-progress papers prior to the event, where these were discussed. These work-in-progress papers will form the basis of 6,000-word chapters to be collected in a volume commissioned by Liverpool University Press for publication in their Francophone Postcolonial Studies series in 2020, co-edited by Sami Everett and Rebekah Vince with an afterword by Valérie Zenatti.

Given the level of interest in the workshop and the desire to participate we are considering a journal special issue as a second written output.

Actual final conference Programme

Dynamic Maghribi Jewish-Muslim Interaction across the Performing Arts (1920-2020)

5 December 2018 – 7 December 2018

The Beves Room, King’s College, University of Cambridge

Day 1 – Wednesday 5 December
18.45 – 19.45 Keynote

Valérie Zenatti
‘La mémoire trouée’

 

(This event is open to all and will be taking place in the Winstanley Lecture Hall, Trinity College)

Day 2 – Thursday 6 December
9.15 – 9.45 Registration
9.45 – 10.00 Welcome and Opening
10.00 – 11.15 Session 1: Popular Music

Chair: Ruth Davis (University of Cambridge)

 

Chris Silver (McGill University)

‘“In a complete fusion of all of the native social classes”: Popular Music and the Production of the Nation in the Interwar Maghrib’

 

Cristina Moreno Almeida (King’s College London)

‘“Are we all brothers?” Breaking down narratives of peaceful religious co-existence in Moroccan patriotic rap’

11.15 – 11.30 Break
11.30 – 12.45 Session 2: Staging and Performance (bi-lingual session: English/French)

Chair: Arthur Asseraf (University of Cambridge)

 

Hadj Miliani (CRASC) and Mourad Yelles (INALCO)

‘Theatre as Meeting Point Between Algerian Jews and Muslims’

 

Adi Bharat (University of Manchester)

‘Shalom alikoum! Challenging the conflictual model of Jewish-Muslim relations in France through stand-up comedy’

12.45 – 14.30 Lunch
14.30 – 16.00 Session 3: Cinematic Representation (bi-lingual session: English/French)

Chair: Rebekah Vince (University of Warwick)

 

Miléna Kartowski-Aïach (Idemec / Université d’Aix Marseille)

‘Rediscovering the Lost Voice: Forbidden Memory and Political Song as a Bridge Between Morocco and Israel’

 

Jamal Bahmad (University of Exeter)

‘In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Aliyah and Transnational Memory in Moroccan Cinema’

 

Chana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge)

‘Decolonising Hebrew Through Arabic: Almog Behar and the Spectre of Languages in Israel/Palestine’

16.00 – 16.45 Break
16.45 – 18.00 Keynote

Jonathan Glasser (College of William & Mary)

‘Maghribi Muslim-Jewish Musical Intimacy’

 

(This event is open to all and will be taking place in the Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road)

Day 3 – Friday 7 December
9.45 – 10.00 Arrival and Coffee
10.00 – 11.15 Session 4: Comedy and Satire

Chair: Warda Hadjab (EHESS)

 

Elizabeth Perego (Shepherd University)

‘Drawing Blanks: Absent Depictions of Jewish Heritage and Muslim-Jewish Relations in Algerian Caricatures and Bandes Dessinées, 1967 through the 1980s’

 

Nadia Kiwan (University of Aberdeen)

‘Kidnapping Culture: Transcultural Complexity and Creative Co-existence in the Work of Street Artist “Combo”’

11.15 – 11.45 Final Discussion

Supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS), the Institute of Modern Languages Research, Université PSL, and the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of History.

Filed Under: Conference Grant Programme Reports

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