EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2021/22

Report

Rabbinization and Diversity: Methods, Models, and Manifestations between 400 and 1000 CE

A virtual international conference

March 14–15 and 23–24, 2022

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Event rationale

This conference builds on and continues the conversations begun almost seven years ago in Paris at the conference “Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Society between 400 and 1000 CE” (June 2015). The terms “diversity” and “rabbinization” continue to be the two primary categories that guide our efforts to conceptualize Jewish history during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. We believe that, alongside ongoing investigation of the various bodies of empirical evidence, it is also important to develop new historical models and methods for examining both the persistent heterogeneity of Jewish social and cultural life in this period and the emergent dominance of rabbinic discourses across Jewish society.

It is our aim to challenge earlier approaches that viewed rabbinization as a linear process in which more and more Jews gradually became more and more “rabbinized” over time. Instead, due consideration should be given to the differences across regions, social strata, and institutional settings in the nature and pace of this process. It is our hope that a refinement of the methods and models that are brought to bear on this problem will bring us closer to a more nuanced historical account of what we might call the “dialectics of rabbinization.”

Evaluating models of diversity is one part of this task. Building on the many historical, archeological, literary, and methodological advances in the study of ancient Judaism over the past decades, we take as a given that the textual and material records attest a certain degree of heterogeneity in Jewish culture and society throughout the first millennium CE. But scholars have not arrived at a consensus about when source materials that differ in form, language, medium, mode of transmission, etc., represent sociologically or ideologically distinct and even competing groups or movements. Nor is there agreement on how we should conceptualize the relationships among the religious and cultural expressions produced within the architectural spaces of Jewish life (e.g., household, workshop, street, market, city, study house, synagogue, and cemetery). Incantation bowl with an Aramaic inscription around a demon. Nippur. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Wikimedia Commons

If the diversity within the textual or material record does indeed point to sites of Jewish cultural production and reception that were differentiated by profession, class, gender, region, and other such factors, were there nonetheless social or institutional networks that connected or mediated among them? We encourage presenters to consider the different levels or types of diversity with which we need to reckon when considering the range of evidence for Jewish culture and society in this period.

A second, but closely related, question is which models and methods are most appropriate for conceptualizing the extension of rabbinic norms, authority, and prestige beyond the rabbis’ immediate familial and communal circles, and what was the impact of this process on the wider Jewish society. What terms are most heuristically productive for describing and analyzing the range of Jewish textual and material sources that circulate(d) at or outside the boundaries of the corpus of rabbinic literature? Should scholars avoid applying such terms as “non-” or “para-” rabbinic to these sources so that they might be studied in their own right? Or are such terms appropriate or useful in light of the definitive impact of rabbinic literature and piety on the production, transmission, and reception of these sources, both by earlier generations and by modern scholars?

Did rabbinization lead to the homogenization of Jewish culture and the standardization of Jewish social and institutional structures? Or perhaps the rabbinic tradition provided generic categories (e.g., mishnah or midrash), social types (e.g., the rabbinic sage), or discursive practices (e.g., halakhic debate) that could be deployed quite differentially as building-blocks within both long-standing and novel Jewish expressive forms. Are the hybrid forms of Jewish literary and religious practice that are particularly characteristic of the period between the fifth and ninth centuries (e.g., Hekhalot literature or certain strands of late midrash) evidence for continuity with “pre- or non- rabbinic” forms of Judaism? Or, alternatively, are they evidence for the “domestication” of Jewish diversity by an increasingly hegemonic rabbinism? Or perhaps some other explanation better accounts for the data.

In addition to addressing particular themes, topics, or bodies of evidence, papers will also apply or even propose models, methods, or approaches that address the theoretical and historiographic problems outlined above.

Detailed Overview of all Talks

Keynote lecturers

Rabbinization, Localization, and the Dynamics of Syncretism

David Frankfurter, Boston University

Developing religious institutions, whether Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism, are ultimately products of local environments despite their every effort to appear trans-regional and eternal. The production of Christian (etc.) religion on the ground will always involve a negotiation between local traditions, habitūs, and immediate landscapes (on the one hand), and new idioms of authority and charisma, including textuality (on the other hand)—a negotiation played out across multiple social sites that I have called syncretism. Syncretism, in this sense, is neither teleological (resulting in a complete “Judaism” or “Christianity”) nor dependent on pure ingredients (as critics have condemned the term). My paper is thus a challenge to the study of rabbinization to consider this model, but I will offer experimental illustrations from the corpus of Babylonian incantation bowls.

‘Babylonian Rabbinic Hegemony’ revisited

Marina Rustow, Princeton University

In this talk I will revisit the question of how and when the Babylonian-Iraqi construction of rabbinic Judaism established firm footing outside Iraq in the tenth and eleventh centuries and whether it matters when considering the larger question of ‘rabbinization’. My hope is to reframe the question: instead of what I described in 2008 as ‘Babylonian rabbinic hegemony’, I’ll discuss Iraqi constructions of Judaism in the plural. I’ll also temper the geographic marker by asking whether, given that those constructions were mobile and portable, they were Iraqi at all. While in a pair of articles in 2010 and 2014 I explained the mobility of Iraqi Judaism(s) through factors such as taxation, migration to cities, imperial collapse and migration westward, those explanations now strike me as a little vague, or even as a sleight of hand masking an absence of hard information about Jewish communities outside Egypt and Syria with seemingly objective but ambient data about everyone else. My reconsiderations here will be more pointillistic than grandly explanatory, but also more geographically far-reaching; my hope is to avoid the analytical impasse of ‘Babylonian rabbinic hegemony’ by considering additional documentary sources from the geniza and elsewhere.

The Two Late Antiquities of the Jews of Asia Minor

Seth Schwartz, Columbia University

Jews in the best-attested regions of Asia—Ionia, Caria and the areas near the great central river valleys of Anatolia—show few signs of “rabbinization” at any point before the middle Byzantine period (c.750–c.1200). I wish to argue that there were two modes of late antiquity, the first beginning surprisingly early in the third century and ending around 410, and the second extending from 410 to 700. The first late antiquity features heightened integrative pressure from the Roman state—even in the throes of its later-third-century crisis—whose landmarks are the Constitutio Antoniniana (212), the great Christian persecutions (249-311), the “Edict of Toleration” (313) and the Edict of Thessalonica (380). This is the period too (I will argue, as a consequence of integrative pressure) of the first profusion of identifiably Asian Jewish material culture whose surprising characteristics include intense localism, reemergence but also enduring weakness of “normative” communal structures and institutions (and, conversely, Jewish identification mediated through non-Jewish institutions like trade and neighborhood associations, devotion to theatrical performance, etc.), and ambivalence about integration in municipal structures and practices (e.g., euergetism) that were weakening but still viable. The second late antiquity shows signs of “standardization”: an iconography is shared trans-locally, Jewish onomastics is transformed and standardized, there are communities, synagogues and officials. Unlike in other areas, e.g., Egypt or Italy, there is as yet no trace of rabbis.

What Made Rabbanites “Rabbinic”?

Sacha Stern, University College London

The study of Rabbinization in the first millennium CE is often predicated on a notion of rabbinic Judaism that is actually far from straightforward. The term “rabbinic” (rabbani) is not attested, as a qualifier of Judaism or anything else, before the ninth century, whilst there is little sense in the Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrashim that their authors saw themselves as expounding a “Judaism” that was “rabbinic.” By the late Geonic period, what identified many Jews as “Rabbanites” was their allegiance to the Mishnah and Talmud (or what we call rabbinic literature), but this allegiance was sometimes illusory. Thus, in the case of the calendar—one of the most public expressions of disagreement between Rabbanites and Qaraites—the Rabbanites used a calculated calendar that had no foundation in the Talmud, whereas the Qaraites observed the new moon crescent and intercalated the year on the basis of aviv, both of which can be traced back directly to tannaitic sources. The alleged continuity of Rabbanite Judaism with the Mishnah and Talmud has underpinned modern scholarly accounts of the Rabbinization of Judaism in the early medieval Near East, but attention needs to be given to the internal ruptures in the transmission and diffusion of early rabbinic traditions, and the apparent absence of an explicitly “rabbinic” identity until its invention in response to Qaraite polemics.

Conference papers

“It does not befit al-Raḥmān to take a son …”: Late-Antique Arabia and the Qurʾanic Polemic against Divine Sonship

Sean Anthony, Ohio State University

The rejection of divine sonship is a major theological motif of the Qurʾan. In one of its earliest polemics against divine sonship, the Qurʾan declares that the heavens and earth nearly split asunder because of those who claim that “the Merciful (al-raḥmān)” has a son; “for it does not befit the Merciful (al-raḥmān) to take a son” (Q. Maryam 19:90-93). Such statements are prevalent throughout the qurʾanic corpus, but I contend that the use of the divine epithet al-raḥmān in this passage in particular – as well as in the so-called “Raḥmān-sūrahs” in general – evokes a memory of a specifically Arabian context: the rise of ‘raḥmanite’ monotheism in the kingdom of Ḥimyar in South Arabia in the centuries prior to the advent of Islam.

How the Qurʾan relates to, or even draws from, the rise in the political fortunes of monotheism in Ḥimyar remains a historical mystery. This paper aims explore a potential connection between the Qurʾan and these earlier developments by investigating three groups of sixth-century texts that one might regard as testimonies to late-antique precursors to the qurʾanic polemics against divine sonship – in particular the sonship of Jesus – in an Arabian context. The first group is the ‘raḥmānite’ inscriptions of the Jewish and Christian rulers of South Arabian kingdom of Ḥimyar from c. 500-570 ad. The second are the Greek and Syriac sources on the Nagrān crisis of the 520s, precipitated by the siege and extermination of the city’s Christian population by the Ḥimyarite prince Joseph Dhū l-Nuwās. And last are select homilies of the miaphysite theologian Jacob of Sarug (d. 521), who corresponded with the inhabitants of Nagran during the crisis and composed several Homilies of Against the Jews which prominently feature, and rebut, Jewish polemics against divine sonship.

Rabbinization and Jewish Aramaic Bible Translation: Perspectives from Rabbinic and Targumic Literatures

AJ Berkovitz, HUC-JIR/New York

Two sites stand prominent among the landscape of ancient Jewish religious life: the study house and the synagogue. This paper contributes to the story of their relationship by surveying the rabbinization of Targum, the oral-performative translation of Scripture. It will begin with an overview of the history and trajectory of Targum. It will then explore the dialectics of rabbinization through a series of short case-studies from both rabbinic and targumic literatures. Attention to rabbinic literature will show how rabbis attempted to place their imprint upon Targum in both form and practice, going so far as to use the word “Targum” to indicate rabbinic` exegesis. Case-studies from targumic literature, itself a heterogeneous genre, will show that although the history of Targum arcs towards rabbinization, the process itself was non-uniform. This paper will highlight diversity by exploring the seemingly competing ways in which Targum acculturates to rabbinic thought and institutions, creates with traditions and formula developed by the rabbis as well as resists rabbinic prescriptions. Given the underdeveloped nature of Targum Studies, this paper will eschew concrete historical solutions for suggestions. It will highlight prospects and problems for future study.

Jonah and the Three Fish in the Synagogue at Huqoq: An Exegetical Motif between Mosaic and Midrash

Ra‘anan Boustan, Princeton University, and Karen Britt, Northwest Missouri State University

The recently discovered Jonah panel from the early fifth-century synagogue in the village of Huqoq (lower eastern Galilee) provides precious evidence for the circulation of traditions of scriptural exegesis across the boundaries that might be thought to divide rabbinic texts from the visual culture of the late antique synagogue. The panel, found in the synagogue’s nave, depicts the episode from the story of Jonah in which the prophet, having fled aboard a ship from his divinely appointed mission of announcing the destruction of the city of Nineveh, is cast into the sea by his shipmates (Jonah 1:1–2:1). The scene is replete with marine and maritime images familiar from a wide range of artistic mediums and even incorporates iconographic elements associated with depictions of classical mythological narrative (especially Odysseus’s encounter with the sirens). But the Jonah panel is perhaps most noteworthy for its presentation of the Israelite prophet being swallowed by a sequence of three successively larger fish, a motif that is not otherwise paralleled in the hundreds of extant visual depictions of the book of Jonah from Late Antiquity. Curiously, the motif of the three fish first appears in Jewish and Islamic textual sources in the early medieval period (after the seventh century), at least three or four centuries after its use in the Huqoq panel. Our paper will consider the distribution of this motif across visual and textual mediums with the aim of reconceptualizing the borderlines among various religious communities, both within and beyond the bounds of Judaism. In our view, the Jonah panel not only challenges teleological accounts of the dissemination of narrative and exegetical traditions from rabbinic text to synagogue art, but also undermines the common scholarly practice of identifying specific motifs as either “rabbinic” and “non-rabbinic” in the first place.

Innovation in Tenth-Century Karaite Interpretation of the Pentateuch: Ya‘qūb al-Qirqisānī’s Kitāb al-Riyād wa-l-Ḥadā’iq

Miriam Goldstein, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Ya‘qūb al-Qirqisānī’s Kitāb al-Riyād wa-l-Ḥadā’iq (Book of Gardens and Parks) is without a doubt one of the most original exegetical works composed in Judeo-Arabic during the medieval period. In this work, composed during the first half of the tenth century CE, al-Qirqisānī takes up a wide variety of angles in analyzing the biblical text, including bold new methods of interpretation. These methods differed greatly from earlier rabbinic tradition, with which he was no doubt familiar. His methods, though, also contrast strongly with those of his fellow Karaites, such as the exegetes of the Jerusalem school. In my paper I will present newly edited and translated sections of al-Qirqisānī’s exegesis on the book of Genesis, and will demonstrate its sui generis nature, breaking with earlier tradition yet unique even in its contemporaneous Karaite milieu.

Where is the Locus of God’s Greatest Glory? Diversity and Dialogue in Late Antique Hebrew Literature (Hekhalot, Midrash, Piyyut)

Yehoshua Granat, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The proposed paper will focus on a cluster of late ancient Hebrew texts that can be read as manifesting an ongoing dialogue between heterogeneous world views and “theological” orientations within contemporaneous Judaism. As a point of departure, we will consider a group of representative Hekhalot hymns which emphatically express the perception of the heavenly divine and angelic sphere as the ultimate focus of religious experience and attention. Against that background, we will examine certain Midrash and Piyyut texts that (arguably) encapsulate rabbinic or “para-rabbinic” responses to the challenge of the Hekhalot circles’ concentration on the heavenly realm and its ecstatic vision as the most sublime sort of devotional practice. First, we will regard the juxtaposition of the preexistent Torah and God’s throne, and the prioritization of the former to the latter in the process of cosmogony according to Genesis Rabbah. Second, we will consider the poignantly paradoxical superiority of God’s worship performed by inevitably imperfect human beings, to His celestial adoration by the multitudes of immaculate angelic beings, as an accentuated topos in the world of early Piyyut. The explication and analysis of the selected pieces will aim to shed light on ‘subterranean’ intellectual ‘negotiations’ between distinct, and in some sense contradictory and competing, religious ideologies of the time, and thus may hopefully make a worthwhile contribution to a fuller understanding of the “dialectics of rabbinization” and of Jewish culture in late antiquity as a multi-vocal shared space.

Dorming Rabbis: An Incrementalist Approach to Babylonian Rabbinization in Late Antiquity

Simcha Gross, University of Pennsylvania

The reassessment of the position of the rabbis constitutes one of the key paradigm shifts in the study of Jews in antiquity in the past half century. As opposed to earlier scholarship, two key revisionist assumptions are now widely accepted: that the rabbinic movement emerged largely following the destruction of the temple, and, as a new movement in the post-destruction period, the rabbis did not enjoy immediate popularity. These assumptions generated the question of rabbinization; if the rabbis were not always dominant, what was the process by which rabbis and rabbinic teaching did indeed attain an elevated position in the eyes of Jews around the world?

To date, the study of Rabbinization in late antiquity has focused intensely and almost exclusively on Palestinian rabbis and the spread of their influence within Palestine and then across the Mediterranean. Lamentably, there has been no comparable study of Babylonian rabbinization during late antiquity, despite the fact that it is Babylonian rabbinic authority and teachings that will become dominant across the known Jewish world in the early medieval period.

This selective focus is not simply a matter of neglect; it is the result of a number of widely shared – and I will argue deeply problematic – assumptions about how the Babylonian rabbis, Babylonian Jewish society, and indeed, the Sasanian Empire, differed from Palestinian society in crucial ways. These arguments precluded any need to seriously address the question of rabbinization in Babylonia. Once these older assumptions are jettisoned, an incrementalist approach to Babylonian rabbinization throughout late antiquity is possible, one that is attuned to social historical arguments about the spread of movements through networks and contacts. I will offer a model of such an approach through the case study of stories about Babylonian rabbinic lodging practices and the landlords with which they were regularly in contact.

Binyamin al-Nihāwandī’s Exegesis in Light of New Evidence

Ofir Haim, Mandel Scholion Research Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Binyamin ben Moshe al-Nihāwandī (fl. early ninth century) was considered one of the forerunners of Karaism by later Jewish authors. Binyamin authored several Hebrew legal works and biblical commentaries, most of which are now lost. His exegetical and halakhic opinions, which reveal his scripturalist leanings, often appear in Karaite works of the tenth century and onward.

In this paper, I present and closely examine several fragments possibly attributed to Binyamin al-Nihawandī, including two hitherto unknown texts dealing with the Book of Daniel and the End of Days. Attention is paid to the terminology and techniques employed in these texts, which may prove helpful in identifying other fragments containing the works of Binyamin. Finally, I attempt to determine the nature of contacts between midrashic literature and Binyamin’s exegetical writings, thus shedding new light on Binyamin’s attitude towards the rabbinic corpus in general and the Rabbanites of his age.

The Rabbinic Movement in Babylonia: Distinctive Features

Geoffrey Herman

Discussion on the nature of the Rabbinic movement in recent decades has focused on the Rabbinic movement in Palestine and the Roman sphere. Many of the assertions relating to how to understand the rabbis, and their place in Jewish society are not relevant or meaningful for Babylonia, and much of the evidence on which such discussion is based, is not available for Babylonia. This paper seeks to quantify what is different about the Rabbis in Babylonia and asks what if any characteristics the rabbinic movement may have shared with contemporary and comparable intellectual elites within the Sasanian milieu.

Rabbinic Messianism and Rabbinic Christology: From the Amidah to Saadya

Martha Himmelfarb, Princeton University

This paper will attempt a better understanding of rabbinic messianism and eschatology and its development from early in the rabbinic era into the Middle Ages. It will focus on the variety of ways rabbinic traditions respond to contemporary non-rabbinic Jewish sources and to Christian messianic narratives and themes over the period in question.

The Transmission of Rabbinic Literature and the History of Rabbinic Judaism

Yitz Landes, Princeton University

Scholars agree that the second half of the first millennium witnessed significant shifts in rabbinic geography and hegemony. Yet, it is the case that many of the central processes behind theses shifts are almost impossible to trace. For much of this period, our evidence for rabbinic leadership is frustratingly slim, and uncovering these processes is hindered also by definitional issues, as it is difficult to even define “Rabbinic Judaism.” In this paper, I will present a method that can shed light on sveral of the shifts that occurred in rabbinic Judaism during this period, one that focuses on the study of the reception and transmission of rabbinic texts and knowledge. This model is based on the conviction that “Rabbinic Judaism” can be described as a practice of Judaism that bears fealty to the canon of rabbinic texts. As such, I propose utilizing the significant amount of work that has been done in the philological study of the rabbinic corpus in order to document the history of the transmission of rabbinic knowledge over the course of late antiquity and the early middle ages. This approach, in turn, allows us to gain greater insight into forms of rabbinic education and into the geographic diffusion of rabbinic knowledge that occurred during this time.

Slaughtering Practices, Rabbinization, and the Western Mediterranean in the Ninth Century

Hayim Lapin, University of Maryland

In their polemical writings, Agobard and Amulo, Bishops of Lyon in the ninth century, provide perhaps the earliest evidence for the presence of Jews, Jewish traditions and texts, and Jewish ritual practice in early medieval Christian Europe. Agobard in particular attests to the peculiarly rabbinic Jewish practice of inspecting the lungs of slaughtered animals to evaluate whether the animals may be eaten. This material has been studied previously from the point of view of early medieval anti-Judaism and for the orientation of Agobard’s Jews to Babylonian or Palestinian halakhah. This paper shifts the focus to the diffusion of rabbinic practice to the western Mediterranean, its demographic dimensions (the movement of new people and/or of new ideas), and its visibility to outside, Christian and Muslim, observers.

Others of Ourselves: Rabbinization in Geonic Times and Seder Eliyahu’s Discourse on Jewishness, Leadership, and Diversity

Lennart Lehmhaus, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Seminar für Judaistik und Religionswissenschaft

Departing from earlier largely “rabbinocentric” Talmudic history (i.e., the rabbis as religious and political leaders), more recent scholarship suggests a slower process of “rabbinization” and continued cultural competition within a diverse Jewry in changing socio-historical contexts. Seder Eliyahu Zuta and Rabba (SEZ/SER) may serve as rich and astonishing sources for these developments. While primarily appearing as ethical discourse, the texts elaborate on Jewish identity/identities and the (social) role of rabbinic scholars, partly educated, and unlearned people. These non-rabbinic or para-rabbinic interlocutors figure in outstanding passages of encounter and dialogue in Seder Eliyahu (SE), which touch upon core issues of religious identity and ideals of Jewish communal responsibilities. While, at first, these passages seem to indicate inner- and inter-religious polemics, a second look reveals their focus on instruction and inclusion despite a greater diversity.

Based on these dialogues and other passages, my paper will focus on SE’s discourse on leadership and community. The text offers (rabbinically biased) accessible and appealing alternatives of religious participation operating below the realm of Talmudic academies or rabbinic circles. Ambitious full-blown rabbinic erudition is augmented or contrasted with the ideal of ethical responsiveness and communal reciprocities. This discourse seems to reflect inner-rabbinic competition, Jewish plurality, (proto-) Karaite Scripturalism, and different Christian and Muslim communities. The rabbinization (and Talmudization) of Geonic Judaism unfolded partly in dialogue with or against the backdrop of lacking coherence in ritual, learning, and other customs – mirrored in Seder Eliyahu’s discussion of different halakha, liturgy, and minhag. Even the so-called “mainstream” of these religions/cultures in early Byzantine/Islamicate milieus were more variegated, and exchanges between Palestine, Babylonia, and North Africa (or Southern Italy) were more complex than previously assumed. Seder Eliyahu navigates this shared discursive space keeping a safe distance to traditional rabbinic learning (institutions), while exhibiting structural similarities with contemporary texts (e.g., PRE and so-called “late midrashim”), new Geonic literary types, and various Arabic-Persian, Muslim, or Syriac Christian forms of discourse. Consequently, one may study SE as a bridging tradition of the formative phase between late antique rabbinic literature and the complex rise of Geonic-Talmudic Judaism in the medieval period.

The Rise and Function of the Holy Rabbi

Avigail Manekin-Bamberger, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The vast corpus of the Babylonian incantation bowls brings to light an unprecedented magical technique: invocations of rabbis and particularly their legal prowess as powerful apotropaics in the combat against demons and disease. This technique provides us with evidence that at least some Babylonian Jews venerated rabbis for their legal powers and expertise in magical incantations. In this talk I will suggest that invoking rabbis in magical contexts is a natural extension of the portrayal of rabbis in the Babylonian Talmud. Additionally, I will suggest how and why this technique became popular among bowl writers in late Sasanian Babylonia. Finally, I will argue that a close reading of these magical texts may provide nuance in our understanding of rabbinization and diversity in the late antique Jewish world.

Jews in North-West Arabia: When, Where and How?

Laïla Nehmé, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Attention to the presence of Jewish individuals or communities in the northwestern part of the Arabian peninsula was drawn a long time ago by various academics. Newby, Lecker, Gil, Hoyland, Robin, Noja, Costa, are names which are familiar to anyone interested in the subject. The author considers herself as an outsider in the debate, being neither a specialist of religious history nor, strictly speaking, a historian of the period, but she will try to tackle the issue from a different, possibly more archaeological and spatial, perspective. She will base her contribution on the available material as well as on the material she has collected during the surveys she undertook in the area under discussion.

Affective Niche as Marking Diversity: Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature and Rabbinic Hegemony

Ronit Nikolsky, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

The debate around the place of Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature (TYL) within rabbinic literature makes it an excellent locus for the study of diversity in the society that gave rise and place to rabbinic culture: questions about how institutionalized this literature is, is it literary or performative, the relationship with the rabbinic institutions, its role in the synagogue, and what is reflected in its midrashic activity and halakhic proems.

Based on a nuanced understanding of the concept of cultural hegemony, I will introduce the affective-niche approach, from the field of the study of emotions. This approach studies the unique emotional engagement of a social group with its cultural canon. I will apply it to the TYL, reframing previous research of TYL within this suggested model. I will present a new study, which looks at the attitude of the TYL literature to the commandments (מצוות) and compare the type of engagement suggested in the TYL to that of “main stream” rabbinic literature, both contemporary as well as earlier.

Why “not an Apple” is not necessarily an Orange: Comparing and Grouping texts

Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, École Pratique des Hautes Études

One of the main questions around diversity and rabbinization centers around priests and priestly texts traditions vis-à-vis rabbis and rabbinic texts and traditions. This paper will focus on the phenomenon of Templization and its relation to Christian competitors.

Textual Archipelagos: Evidentiary Models for Jewish Society in Late Antiquity

Michael D. Swartz, Ohio State University

Students of Judaism in late antiquity are confronted with a challenge: While it is clear that society and culture in Jewish Palestine and Babylonia were more complex than depicted in the rabbinic canon, we lack evidence for the behavior and identity of the vast majority of Jews in those times and places. The goal of this paper is to think through models of dealing with the evidence for literature and material culture outside of that canon, drawing on recent methods for studying social networks and ancient material culture. Case studies from divination texts and early piyyut will provide examples.

Babylonia or All the East? Patriarchal Authority in the Church of the East in Islamic Late Antiquity

Lev Weitz, Catholic University of America

This paper explores themes of comparative relevance to rabbinization and diversity in medieval Jewish communities by examining that other religious organization centered in Babylonia, the Church of the East. In heuristic terms, medieval Christianity differed from Judaism (and Islam) in that its recognized centers of authority—bishoprics, metropolitan bishoprics, and patriarchates—were more institutionally defined, at least in the eyes of those who sought to hold that authority. But this state of affairs in no way relieved East Syrian Christians in Iraq, Iran, and further east from contestation over religious and social norms and who got to define them.

From this vantage point, this paper will look at several developments within the intellectual and institutional life of the East Syrian Church in the early Islamic centuries that parallel or otherwise offer comparative views relevant to the dialectical relationships between the Babylonian rabbinic establishment and other Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean. These developments include: resistance to the primacy of the Church of the East’s Babylonian patriarchate in Iran and east Arabia; textual methods by which East Syrian patriarchs sought to project their authority to distant Christian communities, including letter-writing and law-making; and the introduction of paper to the Middle East and whether this new technology aided the patriarchs in their efforts to administer territories over which they claimed authority.

Public Engagement

The conference was held virtually on zoom provided by Princeton University. Usually around 50 people from all over the world attended the sessions.

Planned Outcomes

We plan to publish a volume based on the presentations and discussions in the same series as the previous conference “Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1000 CE” edited by Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, and published at Cambridge: Open Book Publishers in 2021. We have also reached out to other potential contributors.

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2021/22

Report

Vienna and Thessaloniki. Two cities and their Jewish histories

University of Vienna, Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies

24-26 February 2022

Event Rationale

The international workshop “Vienna and Thessaloniki. Two cities and their Jewish histories”, was designed to bring together a group of scholars, from different European universities, to critically engage with the interconnections and entanglements inherent in the Jewish histories of these two cities. Drawing inspiration from the historiography on Port Jewry and other related scholarship, the proposed program was intended to enhance knowledge on the historical connections between Viennese and Salonican Jewry through an examination of the two cities together, in juxtaposition, as well as on a comparative level. In short, the workshop was motivated by the general need to explore and reflect upon the Jewish histories of these two cities outside dominant scholarly approaches that either investigate the cities separately or as part of a state-centred framework. It was furthermore designed to encourage the examination of certain crucial themes. These themes included the question of space, both Jewish and non-Jewish within Vienna and Thessaloniki, the consequences for their Jewish communities brought about by the First World War and the subsequent dissolution of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, the Shoah and its depiction in wartime photography as well as the Shoah more broadly as a turning point in the lives of these cities and their Jews.

Event Program

The workshop convened an international and interdisciplinary group of ten emerging and established scholars from Austria, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom. It took place at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (DBMGS) of the University of Vienna on 24-26 February 2022. This academic event was organised by Dimitrios Varvaritis (University of Vienna) and Nathalie Soursos (University of Vienna) in close collaboration with the staff and faculty of the DBMGS and with the generous support and financial assistance of the Conference Grant Program of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS) and the Austrian Society for Modern Greek Studies.

Although initially planned to be held in person, due to the ongoing covid-19 situation, the organisers decided in early 2022 to host the workshop in hybrid format. This format enabled a number of speakers to present their papers remotely and furthermore allowed for an expanded audience of listeners chiefly from Greece, Germany, Austria and Israel. At any given moment there were approximately twenty-five people present in the audience in Vienna with another twenty to twenty-five joining the workshop’s audience remotely through the live video-stream. The working language of the workshop was English and to a lesser extent German and Greek.

The selection of papers and speakers was based on personal invitations of the organisers as well as on the submission of abstracts by way of a public Call for Papers. The Call for Papers was published in September 2021 on the webpages of H-Judaic, H Soz Kult and the European Society for Modern Greek Studies. In the process of selection of speakers the organisers prioritised doctoral candidates, recent doctoral graduates, early career scholars and researchers as well as scholars associated with the host department and the wider academic community of the University of Vienna. Priority was also given to those established scholars who had a proven record of pertinent research and publications in the specific fields of Viennese and Salonican Jewish history.

Following the end of the submission process the organisers produced a provisional program that included the Keynote lecture of Professor Rika Benveniste (University of Thessaly) and twelve papers. Due, however, to the subsequent withdrawal of three papers the workshop’s final program (see below) consisted of nine papers. These nine papers were arranged into four panels. They were initially grouped thematically and then chronologically, starting in 18^th century Vienna (Anna Ransmayr) and ending in mid-twentieth century Thessaloniki (Nathalie Soursos). Each speaker had twenty minutes for his/her presentation, while a thirty minute discussion was programmed at the end of each panel. The keynote lecture took place after the third panel, in the afternoon of Friday 25 February 2022.

A webpage dedicated to the workshop was created within the website of the University of Vienna. On this webpage the organisers published, in advance of the start of the workshop, the workshop’s final program as well as the abstracts and papers. A copy of the final conference report will also be published on this website.

The workshop commenced with the welcoming greetings of Christophe Erismann, Head of the DBMGS and was followed by some introductory remarks from Nathalie Soursos and Dimitrios Varvaritis. The first panel, entitled “Jewish communities, topographies and spaces” was chaired by Dimitrios Kousouris (University of Vienna) and included three papers.

Anna Ransmayr (University of Vienna) opened with a paper on the relations between Vienna’s two Greek-Orthodox communities and the community of Turkish-Israelites (or Sephardi Jews) of the city. Offering a longue durée perspective Ransmayr referred in detail to the legal bases of these communities within the Habsburg Empire and retraced numerous common institutional and organizational issues that these communities faced over the course of the 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th centuries. These legal bases provided a secure foundation upon which both groups were able to successfully live and trade in Vienna as tolerated non-Catholics and in time cultivate a kind of “Viennese oriental” identity that combined elements of late 19^th century Viennese culture with their Balkan roots. The end of the Habsburg monarchy was a severe blow to these communities and the paper closed with brief references to the fate of the Sephardi community during National Socialism.

The second paper of this panel was given by Susanne Korbel (University of Graz). It examined, using both a micro-historical approach and digital humanities methods, relations between Jewish and non-Jewish residents in two districts of Vienna in the period 1880-1930. Korbel’s paper provided an in-depth analysis of the everyday life of two residential buildings, one in Döbling and the other in Leopoldstadt. This analysis was based on literary sources, address books, oral history testimonies and registration card indexes. Furthermore, Korbel presented how Jews and non-Jews developed a common and shared notion of community through daily and habitual activities in private and public spaces as well as a strong identification with the wider residential area to which they belonged.

Architectural historian Fani Gargova (University of Vienna) focused on the question of Synagogue architecture in the Balkans. Gargova argued that due to the large amount of relevant scholarship on the Jewish cultural, political and religious life in Vienna and Thessaloniki, it is often assumed that they were also centres in terms of architectural design and history. She then presented various missing links that can help better understand the mechanisms of (dis-)entanglement between the Jewish communities of Vienna and Thessaloniki and the Balkans in the late 19th and early 20th century. In the discussion, Gargova impressed with her expertise on the architecture of Thessaloniki and the aftermath of the fire of 1917.

The second panel entitled “Viennese and Saloncian Jewish memories” consisted of two papers both of which examined the Jewish memories of the Shoah in Vienna and Thessaloniki. Its chair was Nathalie Soursos (University of Vienna).

The panel’s first paper, by Eleni Beze (University of Thessaly), examined five cases of Greek Jewish women who during the Axis occupation of Greece, and subsequent Civil War, participated in the leftist resistance. Through a close reading of these women’s postwar testimonies as well as some impressive photographs, Beze’s paper illuminated the multi-faceted nature of these women’s wartime experiences, stressing not only the importance of gender in the formation of their feminine identity but also the role that other factors such as geography, participation in partisan groups and maternity played in the formation of their leftist identities.

The second paper of this panel, that of doctoral candidate Stefania Zezza (Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata) presented six Viennese and Salonican Jews interviewed by the pionnering Latvian-American psychologist David Boder in 1946. These interviews are among the earliest testimonies on the Holocaust and given this temporal proximity, Zezza’s paper enriched and complemented the findings of Beze. Through a meticulous analysis of these interviews, Zezza argued that while many traumatic experiences were common to both groups. other were more specific and dependent on the language and socio-cultural background of the interviewee.

The third panel was chaired by Professor Maria Stassinopoulou (University of Vienna) and was centred on the theme of Jewish networks. It was entitled “Salonican Jewish networks of Trade and War Relief”.

The first paper, that of doctoral candidate Lida Dodou (University of Vienna), focused on the forgotten history of the Salonican Jews of the Habsburg Monarchy, and in particular the applications for Austrian citizenship made by a number of prominent Salonican Jewish families immediately before and during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913). In this sense Dodou’s paper complements and extends further the themes of commercial mobility, migration and settlement developed in Anna Ransmayr’s intervention. Dodou’s paper was moreover based on a detailed and ongoing examination of the archives of the Austrian Foreign Office and especially the records of the Habsburg consulate of Thessaloniki.

Following a similar thematic thread to that of Dodou was the paper of Paris Papamichos-Chronakis (Royal Holloway, University of London). Chronakis’ paper focused on the politics of contraband trade in Thessaloniki during the First World War. It examined how the British and French military authorities imaginatively adopted a variety of non-economic criteria to define as “contraband” the business activities of prominent Jewish and Dönme merchants. These merchants were often able to successfully resist the restrictive sanctions and Chronakis’ paper argued that the factors that primarily strengthened the position of the sanctioned merchants were the conflicting geostrategic interests of the Entente powers, interests that moreover could be skillfully manipulated by these merchants in their favour.

Both papers provided an actor-network approach and thus brought to the fore the merchants’ and migrants’ agency, actions and experiences. During the discussion that followed the above papers the broad themes of citizenship, national allegiance and their relationship to transnational mobility and shifting notions of state territoriality were explored at length.

The keynote lecture entitled “Salonika, Vienna: Entangled Jewish histories in the 20^th century” was delivered by the eminent historian Rika Benveniste. Benveniste is Professor of European Medieval History at the University of Thessaly in Volos, Greece. She has published extensively on recent Greek Jewish history and especially on the immediate post-Shoah period. Her lecture did not seek to tell the Jewish histories of the cities in the twentieth century but rather “read one history through the other”. Its aim was thus to highlight encounters and discrepancies, common structures and emphasise stories of movement and travel, deportation and migration. It made extensive use of relevant visual material and photographs as well as numerous literary sources.

The lecture began on a personal note. Benveniste recalled travelling, by wagon-lits, to Vienna as a child. This recollection served as a starting point for a reflection on the historical significance of the late 19^th century railway line that connected the two cities. To this end she did not neglect to remind the audience that although this line did advance the economic development of Thessaloniki and furthermore provide the Habsburg Monarchy with an outlet to the Aegean Sea, it also constituted the means by which the Jews of the city reached the death camps of Poland.

Benveniste went on to address the tumultuous and dislocating effects, on Viennese and Salonican Jewry, brought about by the end of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. One of the particularly troubling consequences was the emergence of a new radical antisemitism embodied in the 1931 Campbell riots and the Kristallnacht. This antisemitism did not however disappear. And so in the wake of the Anschluss and the German Occupation of Greece began the desperate attempts of many Jews to flee the Nazi maw. Benveniste retraced some of these trajectories, displacements and deportations. Her lecture continued with the post-Shoah return to life and the endeavours by survivors to rebuild and to mourn. It closed by detailing the contemporary efforts to create permanent and appropriate Shoah memorials in both cities. Benveniste moreover noted the profound reluctance and ambivalence surrounding the erection and continued presence of the memorials in the landscapes of these cities. Her lecture provided, in sum, an important foreground for all the workshop’s papers and especially those of the fourth and final panel.

The fourth panel entitled “The Holocaust in photography” presided by Professor Frank Stern (University of Vienna) began with the paper of Maria Kavala (Aristotle University Thessaloniki) on the collection of photographs, taken by the German soldier Werner Range, of the Black Sabbath in July 1942 in Thessaloniki. This rare photographic material, Kavala argued, presented not only distinct and cynically “tourisitic” view of the German military observer but also contributes to a clearer and more detailed reconstruction of this seminal day in the Shoah of the city.

The second paper of this panel was delivered by Nathalie Soursos (University of Vienna). It explored holocaust-era photography from Salonica and in particular its various uses in Greek-Jewish memoir literature and postwar trials. Soursos emphasised the often non-critical use of these photographs in much of the historiographical and testimonial literature and argued for a re-examination of this visual material that takes into account the broader history behind the photographs and outside the picture frame.

During the vibrant discussion that followed Frank Stern offered extensive and expert commentary on the panel’s papers. He emphasised that in the study of the photographic, and more broadly the visual, material concerning the Shoah in Greece, one needed to draw a distinction between the works of official German war photographers, those of ordinary German soldiers and the photographic traditions and outputs of 1940s Greece. Stern furthermore discussed the materiality of these sources as well as issues concerning their “trade” in various “black” markets and their antisemitic and orientalist depiction of Jews.

The workshop’s closing round table triggered a lively discussion during which the following topics were raised:

• the various meanings of the term Zionism and their relation to the survival of Jews during the Shoah.
• the question of the popular Sephardi musical culture of Israel – its origins in Thessaloniki and through Israel its transmission to the Jewish diaspora
• the need to revisit, reassess and contextualise the testimonies of survivors of the Shoah irrespective of the time that the testimony was taken.
• the challenges of transmitting the content of the above testimonies to the next generation of students.
• the continuing and problematic debates in Vienna and Thessaloniki, surrounding the public acknowledgement, through the creation of relevant monuments and memorial spaces, of the destruction of their Jewish communities in the Shoah.
• the persistence of antisemitism in present-day Vienna and Thessaloniki and by extension, in Austria and Greece.

Summary of Discussions

 This workshop offered a major opportunity for scholars to discuss a new and promising approach by comparing Jewish communities in two key cities in European Jewish history – Vienna and Thessaloniki. From the history of Greek-Orthodox and Sephardi-Jewish relations in the 18^th and 19^th centuries to the dissolution of the imperial Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman states, and in turn to the Shoah, the participants, panel chairs, speakers and listeners shared materials, ideas, sources and knowledge related to the diverse historical experiences of the Jews of these cities. The broad chronological timeframe chosen allowed us to include the imperial history of both cities and find surprisingly many interrelations. One of the many important thematic threads was the concept of Jewish space within the space of a city, that is space not only in the sense of the built environment and neighbourhoods of a city but also in terms of sites of collective Jewish memory. Another key thread was the end of empire and the ensuing consequences of the changes of national borders during the 20th century for the Jewish communities and Jewish individuals. A number of papers demonstrated the important connection between individual Jewish agency and shifting notions of allegiance and citizenship during times of socio-political transition. A further and final theme was centred on the Shoah – its memory and depiction in photography and the visual arts more broadly. The workshop encouraged new insights into these issues and contributed to the study of Jewish history of Vienna and Thessaloniki beyond the traditional state-centred framework.

Outcomes

The EAJS Conference Grant Program enabled the conveners of this Workshop to provide accommodation to three scholars from outside Vienna as well as cover their travel expenses and offer coffee breaks, one lunch and two evening meals to all the workshop’s participants. The workshop also provided a distinctive opportunity for scholars, from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, to meet and discuss on their respective work. It has therefore broadened the academic networks of all the participants. This academic event succeeded in stimulating a lively discussion and exchange between scholars. The discussions across the workshop confirmed the importance of approaching Jewish histories in an interdisciplinary perspective. The workshop successfully promoted Jewish scholarship in the framework of Modern Greek Studies. The event also enabled the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Vienna to build new relationships with scholars who work on Jewish history not only in other departments of the University but in universities in the United Kingdom, Italy and Greece. It also assisted in promoting and associating the Department’s name within the European-wide network of Jewish studies. The publication of the workshop’s papers in a major Jewish Studies journal is being planned. The details of this publication will be finalised in the coming months. The organisers are also considering the possibility of a second workshop in the city of Thessaloniki that will focus on aspects and themes that were not addressed in the Vienna workshop.

Publicity

The event was publicised through the following channels:

• Event page on the H Soz Kult website: https://www.hsozkult.de/searching/id/event-112584?title=vienna-and-thessaloniki-two-cities-and-their-jewish-histories&q=thessaloniki&sort=&fq=&total=210&recno=8&subType=event
• Webpages of H-Judaic: https://networks.h-net.org/node/28655/discussions/8211851/cfp-vienna-and-thessaloniki-two-cities-and-their-jewish-histories
• Website of Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies: https://wienergriechen.univie.ac.at/workshop-vienna-and-thessaloniki/
• Mailing list of abovementioned Department.
• Website of the European Society for Modern Greek Studies: https://www.eens.org/?eens-event=call-for-papersvienna-and-thessaloniki-two-cities-and-their-jewish-histories
• Personal channels of individual participants.

A workshop poster and a brochure were printed and distributed during at the start of the Workshop.

Final Program of Workshop

Thursday, 24 February 2022

 19:00 Meet & Greet and Welcome Dinner

Friday, 25 February 2022

9:00 Welcome

Christophe Erismann (Head of Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies)

9:15-9:30 Introduction

Dimitrios Varvaritis (University of Vienna)

9:30-11:00 Jewish Communities, Topographies and Spaces

Chair: Dimitrios Kousouris

Anna Ransmayr (University of Vienna), Fellow Balkan merchants – the Turkish-Israelite and the two Greek Communities of Vienna from 1718 until World War II

Susanne Korbel (University of Graz), Viennese Jewish Spaces 1880-1930: A Relational Approach

Fani Gargova (University of Vienna), Decentering the Centers: Reassessing the role of Vienna and Thessaloniki in a Balkan context

11:30-12:30 Viennese and Salonican Jewish memories 

Chair: Nathalie Soursos

Eleni Beze (University of Thessaly), Greek Jewish, Leftist and Women: Narrating the experience of the Shoah

Stefania Zezza (Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata): Aftermath: Viennese and Salonikan Jews interviewed by David Boder in 1946

14:00-15:00 Salonican Jewish Networks of Trade and War Relief

Chair: Maria Stassinopoulou

Lida Dodou (University of Vienna), Salonica Jews in the Habsburg Empire, 1867-1918: A forgotten story.

Paris Papamichos Chronakis (Royal Holloway University of London): ‘Trading with the Enemy’ Salonican Jews, Central Europe, and the Politics of Contraband Trade During the First World War

 16:00 Keynote Lecture

Salonika, Vienna: Entangled Jewish Histories in the 20th Century

Rika Benveniste (University of Thessaly)

Saturday 26 February 2022

9:30-10:30 The Holocaust in Photography

Chair: Frank Stern

Maria Kavala (Aristotle University, Thessaloniki), A “black” photo diary. The rare photographic material of the young German soldier Werner Range on Black Saturday in Thessaloniki (Andreas Assael’s collection)

Nathalie Soursos (University of Vienna), Photographs as evidence in Court and Memorial Literature

11:00-12:00 Round Table

Frank Stern (University of Vienna)

Maria Stassinopoulou (University of Vienna)

Dimitrios Varvaritis (University of Vienna

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2021/22

Report

“Theory and Practice of Allegorical Exegesis in Medieval Jewish, Islamic, and Christian Philosophy”

Organisers: David LEMLER (Sorbonne Université), Racheli HALIVA (Hamburg University)

28^th February 2002 / May 31^st-June 1st, 2022 / Paris

This three-day conference aimed at investigating into the place of the allegorical exegesis proposed by Medieval Jewish philosophy in the wider spectrum of the history of allegorical interpretation. A one-day meeting was held in February dedicated mainly to allegorical exegesis in Medieval Christian and Islamic exegesis and a two-day workshop took place in May/June in which texts by Medieval Jewish philosophers, mainly from the 13^th and 14^th century Spanish and Provençal Maimonidean tradition, were discussed.

Due to the health crisis, the conference had to be split into two separate events. A one-day conference was held in Feb. 28, dedicated mainly to papers on allegorical interpretation in Medieval Christianity and Islam, with the exception of one presentation on Maimonides. A two-day workshop took place in May 31-June 1^st, through a series of discussions on texts written by Jewish philosophers, pertaining to their theory and practice of allegorical interpretation. Each speaker was invited to choose a passage or several passages whose reference, reflecting the Biblical interpretation or rabbinic texts, was transmitted in advance to all the participants.

Event Rationale

Allegorical interpretations of Scriptures and aggadot were introduced in rabbinic Judaism in the Middle Ages by rationalist thinkers. This was a major change in the Jewish exegetical tradition. It is often argued that Christianity and rabbinic Judaism departed precisely because of their opposing ways of approaching Scriptures: while the Christian way is to read the Hebrew Bible in allegorical/figurative/spiritual, the rabbinic Judaism focuses on the midrashic interpretation.

By introducing an allegorization of Biblical texts and midrashim, philosophers have emphasized that these interpretations belonged to a new era of Jewish tradition, characterized by a new episteme.

Many questions raise within this context: what is at stake in this shift within the Jewish hermeneutical tradition? Is allegorization only a way to preserve authoritative texts while obliquely “criticizing” them (as Scholem would argue)? Or does this hermeneutical practice reflect a genuine specific way of philosophizing within a religious tradition in which ideas should always seek a support in authoritative texts? What are the sources of this method of interpretation? Did a tradition of allegorical interpretations develop in time among Medieval Jewish philosophers (or at least some trend among them) so that a certain interpretation of a certain text would become their common ground?

It is tempting to see a circulation of the allegorical method of interpretation from the Stoicism to Alexandrian Jews and from them to the Church Fathers, who may have had an influence on the method of ta’wīl in Islam, which was eventually imported by rabbinic Jews. Documenting this chain of transmission requires further research.

Detailed overview of sections and papers

Feb 28^th: Allegorical interpretation in Medieval Christianity, Islam and Judaism

This one-day conference gathered French scholars working mainly on Medieval Christian and Islamic exegesis. In the opening words, David Lemler (Sorbonne Université) recalled the main question that the conference aimed at raising: the specific place of Medieval Jewish philosophical allegorical interpretation in a global history of allegorical interpretation. He also justified the order in which the terms Christianity, Islam and Judaism feature in the title of the conference: the allegorical type of interpretation was somehow imported into the Jewish exegetical tradition through the influence of Islam, which in turn was influenced on this point by the Church Fathers.

The morning session was dedicated to Medieval Christian exegesis, opening with a paper by one of the leading scholars of the field, Gilbert Dahan (EPHE-CNRS), who already authored numerous studies on the subject: including the edited volume Allégorie des poètes, allégorie des philosophes: études sur la poétique et l’herméneutique de l’allégorie de l’Antiquité à la Réforme (Paris: Vrin, 2005). In his paper, Dahan argued for a definition of allegory as the “essence of Christian exegesis.” He recalled that, while allegory has been a recurring subject in his long career of research on Medieval Christian exegesis, he still fails to produce a global definition of this method that would encapsulate its use in the whole Christian exegetical tradition. Notably, “allegory” is sometimes used as a synonym for “spiritual” meaning, that is the three non-literal meanings (figurative/typological, tropological, anagogical) and sometimes it is used to refer specifically to the second layer of meaning. Stéphane Loiseau (Centre Sèvres) proposed a reflection on the use of the categories of “allegory” and “metaphor” in the exegetical oeuvre of Thomas Aquinas. He highlighted Thomas’ original position according to which allegory is somehow part of the literal meaning. He also elaborated on the distinction between allegorical interpretations whose targeted meaning has to do with the “event Jesus Christ” (Jesus’ life and teaching) and those whose targeted meaning has to do with the Church and its history. Annie Noblesse-Rocher (University of Strasbourg) raised the issue of the transformation of the exegetical category of “allegorical meaning” in the context of Reformation through the study of 16^th century exegetes, among whom it competed with new Scriptural meanings promoted by Reformers, such as the literal/historical meaning. She elaborated on the relationship between spiritual meaning in Patristic and Medieval Christian exegesis and the type of “actualizing” exegesis found among 16^th century Reformers who read the Bible as if it was referring to their own communal life (something that is rather close to the monastic type of readings of the Bible).

The afternoon session was dedicated mainly to Islamic exegesis, with the exception of one paper on Maimonides. Meryem Sebti (CNRS) presented Avicenna’s method of philosophical exegesis of specific passages of the Quran, notably the famous Verse of Light (Q 24:35). Ibn Sina offered a reading of these Quranic passages in light of his own modal ontological categories. While Ibn Sina is usually not envisaged as a “religious” thinker and an exegete, Sebti raised the question of the status of such exegetical texts (which she recently edited) in the Avicenian oeuvre – suggesting it is actually more than just a concession to traditional religion. Interestingly, Avicenna’s way of philosophical interpretation echoes that of Maimonides and more generally of Medieval Jewish philosophers. Géraldine Roux (Institut Rachi, Troyes) discussed the influence Maimonides’ exegetical method of Biblical parables as presented in the Introduction of the Guide of the Perplexed on Meister Eckhart’s own exegetical treatises, notably in his Liber Parabolarum Genesis (Book of the Parables of Genesis). Pierre Lory (EPHE) proposed an overview of the allegorical methods used by Sufi exegetes, through the specific example of the Quranic description of Abraham’s Ascension (VI, 75). He showed notably how this passage was read as an allegory for the access to true knowledge through the refutation of false, relative sciences, culminating with the attainment of faith. Finally, Leili Anvar (INALCO) discussed the nature of Jalāl al-dīn Rūmi’s Persian mystical poem, Masnavi. This text refers to itself with words usually reserved to the Quran, it is filled with Quranic references, translations and paraphrases, so that it could somehow be construed a mystical rewriting of the Quran or envisaged as an allegorical commentary of the Sacred Book of Islam.

Throughout the day, some structuring questions and aspects of the issue of allegorical interpretation emerged. First the difficulty to produce a precise definition of allegory, as opposed to metaphor on the one hand and to symbol on the other. The strict difference that scholars of mysticism such as G. Scholem and H. Corbin posited between the allegorical interpretation of philosophers and the symbolic interpretation of mystics seems to have to be nuanced: it is often difficult to argue that only the philosophers and not the mystics brutalize the text by imposing on it notions that obviously do not feature in it. The idea of the philosophers “criticizing” through their exegesis the worldview of the commented text and using it in a totally arbitrary way (in order to access to truth, they could dispense with a revealed text) should also be nuanced. In Medieval Jewish philosophy at least, exegesis is a fully-fledged part of the philosophers’ literary activities. Other striking elements emerged such as the presence at different chronological stages of the idea of four layers of meaning of the Sacred Text in the three monotheistic traditions, that would deserve further specific investigations.

May 31-June 1^st: Workshop on Medieval Jewish texts on philosophical allegorical interpretation

In this second part of the event, each participant proposed upfront a series of texts by specific authors in the corpus of Medieval Jewish philosophy, mainly in the Maimonidean 13^th and 14^th century tradition in Provence and Spain. All the participants received these texts approximately two weeks before the workshop and were able to read them before May 31, which favored precise and informed discussions. Each paper consisted in a 30-minute presentation followed by a 30-minute discussion.

Yehuda Halper (Bar Ilan University) inscribed his discussion of exegetical texts by Jacob Anatoli (Malmad ha-Talmidim) and Moses Ibn Tibbon (Com. on Shir ha-Shirim) within the general framework of his current research on logic in Medieval Jewish philosophy. He argued that, for authors such as Anatoli and M. Ibn Tibbon, the Tanakh consisted in rhetorical, dialectical and poetical discourses. This might explain why in their activity as translators, both thinkers, did not include Aristotle’s treatises relative to these kind of discourses (Rhetoric, Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Poetics…): they could be directly dealt with through Biblical exegesis and not philosophical translation. Rebecca Kneller (Jerusalem College) investigated, with much details, into Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s interpretation of the Merkavah (Divine Chariot), in his commentary on three specific Biblical passages, found mainly in his Ma’amar Yiqqawu ha-Mayim: Gen 28: Jacob’s dream, Is 6, and Ez 1. She showed how these three passages proposed, according to him, three different prophetic ways to translate one and the same reality: the upper part of the cosmos (the supra-lunary world, composed of the spheres and intellects). She also highlighted how Ibn Tibbon expressed disagreements with Maimonides on matters of exegesis (such as the presence or the absence of God in Ezechiel’s vision) and doctrine, while at the same time affirming Maimonides’ position as one possible alternative to his own. Amira Eran (Levinsky College) presented Abraham Ibn Daud’s and his anonymous commentator’s exegesis of Ps 139. She argued for an analogy with al-Ghazālī interpretation of the Verse of Light (Quran 24:35) and a possible influence of the latter on both Jewish authors, even though al-Ghazālī’s reception among Jews in 12^th century Spain remains a debated issue. David Lemler proposed an overview of diverse interpretations of one specific aggadah: Rabbi Bena’ah marking tombs and visiting the Patriarch’s cave, me‘arat ha-makhpelah (TB Baba Batra 58a). In Sefer Pe’ah, Moses Ibn Tibbon proposed a “realistic” interpretation of this highly far-fetched Talmudic tale in order – Lemler argued – to defend the credibility of Ḥazal against Christian critiques. In Livyat Ḥen on the other hand, Levi ben Abraham of Villefranche, offered a radical allegorization of the same story: Abraham and Sarah, representing respectively the Aristotelian categories of form and matter. This hyllemorphic interpretation was criticized during the wave of the Maimondean controversy leading to Rashba’s 1305 ban on the study of philosophy before the age of 25. The phrase “Abraham and Sarah as matter and form” became a slogan to denounce the excesses of the philosophers. Baba Batra’s aggadah was then discussed by Yedayah ha-Penini, in his Apologetical letter, and it was later offered a moderate allegorical interpretation by Shem Tov Ibn Shaprut, in his Pardes Rimonim. This specific case helps recasting the main issues at stake in the debate over allegorization. Among others: what are the limits of an acceptable allegorical interpretation that would not endanger the literal meaning of the Biblical text? Resiane Fontaine (Amsterdam University) presented Judah ha-Cohen’s interpretation of the Book of Proverbs in his early 13^th century philosophical encyclopedia Midrash ha-Ḥokhmah (a treatise she is currently partly editing). In his exegesis, Judah ha-Cohen adopts a polemical stance against Maimonides’ allegorical way, he judges excessive, by considering philosophy as only a subservient science with regard to the true “divine science”, that is “tradition” (qabbalah).

On Wednesday June 1^st, Haim Kreisel (Ben Gurion University) dedicated his presentation to Abraham Ibn Ezra’s cryptic interpretation of the Talmudic saying: “the world exists for six thousand years” (TB Sanhedrin 97a). He explored the diverse interpretations that were given to Ibn Ezra’s words by his main super-commentators in the 13^th and 14^th century. These are more or less radical and generally understand Ibn Ezra’s referring in a veiled way to astrological doctrines. Racheli Haliva (Hamburg University) presented the evolution of Joseph Ibn Kaspi’s position on allegorical interpretation. Ibn Kaspi, often considered a radical Averroistic Maimonidean author, appears as a rather moderate allegorical interpreter insisting on the necessity to preserve the historical meaning of the Biblical narrative, in particular concerning the story of the Patriarchs and the origin of Israel as a people. Yair Lorberbaum (Bar-Ilan University) approached the question of allegory through the unexpected angle of Maimonides’ interpretation of the commandments. One of the main critiques of the opponents to allegorical interpretation in Judaism consisted precisely in their fear that allegory would lead to a negation of the binding force of the law. Lorberbaum elaborated on Maimonides’ own reluctance to apply allegorical interpretation to the commandments according to his words in the Introduction to the Guide of the Perplexed, while offering rather historical-sociological reasons for the Biblical commandments in Guide, book 3. Lorberbaum holds Maimonides’ preference may be explained by the ability of such an explanation to account for the details of the commandments, while allegory is efficient only to explain the principles of the law (even though Maimonides does use allegory to explain some commandments in the Mishneh Torah). Shira Weiss (Yeshiva University) turned to Josef Albo’s interpretation of the story of Job in Sefer ha-‘Iqqarim. She presented his original position in the long tradition of philosophical interpretations of the book opened by Saadia Gaon, followed notably by Maimonides and Gersonides, each of whom interpreted each of the characters of the Biblical dialogue as representing a different position on the question of Providence. In Albo’s perspective, the issue of the book is rather the respective place of determinism and free-will. A discussion on the question whether Albo’s interpretation of Job can be phrased “allegorical” followed. In the final paper of the workshop, Zeev Harvey (Hebrew University) presented a passage of Rabbi Nissim of Girona’s derashot, in his derashah on the pericope Be-reshit, in which he criticizes Maimonides’ assimilation of the Account of the Beginning (Ma‘aseh Be-reshit) with (Aristotelian) physics and the Description of the Chariot (Ma‘aseh Merkavah) with metaphysics. Paradoxically, Harvey holds this critique opens the door to a free scientific investigation, since accordingly the Aristotelian sciences are outside the scope of the Mishnaic prohibition on the teaching of Ma‘aseh Be-reshit and Ma‘aseh Merkavah (Mishnah, Hagigah 2:1).

Summary of the most significant and productive threads in papers and discussions

The format chosen for the workshop: long time slots for each presentation and the reading upfront of all the discussed texts by the participants allowed for fruitful discussions. Consistently with what emerged from the February meeting, the necessity to work on a strict definition of allegory – as a mode of exegesis that postulate two separate layers of meaning, one literal, manifest and superficial, and the other hidden, subtle and profound – as well as to pay attention to the exegetical terminology used by the authors (egg. peshat, mashal, hemshel, melitzah, shir, tsiyyur…) was highlighted.

Statement about planned outcomes and outputs

Papers from the February meeting pertaining to Christianity will be gathered by their authors in an issue of an academic journal. The two-day workshop of May and June, on allegorical interpretation in Medieval Jewish philosophy, will be the basis of a publication in an issue of an academic journal: with both the papers and the discussed texts with an English translation (after reworking and peer-reviewing).

EAJS Conference Grant Programme in European Jewish Studies

2022-23

The EAJS plans to fund the following seven events for the 2022-23 cycle of the Conference Grant Programme. Reports will be uploaded for these after the events.

1. EAJS Congress (XII): “Branching Out: Diversity in/of Jewish Studies”; EAJS & Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany, 16-20 July 2023

2. BIAJS Annual Conference: “Race in Jewish Worlds: Antiquity to the 21st Century”; BIAJS & Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK, 10-12 July 2023

3. EAJS Digital Forum Workshop: “Digital Mapping Approaches to the European Jewish History”; EAJS Digital Forum & Tadeusz Taube Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland, 23-28 October 2022

4. UAJS Annual Conference: “Returning Galician Jews from Oblivion: 100th Anniversary of Jakub Honigsman”; UAJS & Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Lviv, Ukraine, 6-7 December 2022

5. East Central Europe at the Crossroads: Jewish Transnational Networks and Identities; POLIN Museum, Warsaw, Poland, 18-20 June 2023

6. Jewish Communities in the Central Europe in the Toleration and Emancipation Period, 1781–1938; Kurt and Ursula Schubert Center for Jewish Studies, Faculty of Arts, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic, 24-25 May 2023

7. Commemorating the “Night of the Murdered Poets”: History and Afterlife; Jewish Museum Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 14 August 2022 (1 day)

Link for events and reports from previous years:

CGP Reports for 2021/22

CGP Reports for 2019/20 and 2020/21

CGP Reports for earlier than 2019/20

EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2021/22

Report

A Jewish Europe? Virtual and Real-Life Spaces in the 21st Century

Centre for European Research, University of Gothenburg, 3-5 May 2022

Co-convenors: Dr Maja Hultman (University of Gothenburg), Professor Joachim Schlör (University of Southampton)

Event Rationale

As the president of the Conference of European Rabbis recently stated, the European Union invited Jews to be part of the European project, “not as outsiders, but as fully fledged citizens of Europe”. But, given the continuity of antisemitism and the rise in attacks against Jewish institutions, “sadly, the Jews of Europe have had to ask themselves yet again if there is a future on the continent”. Yet again – this ambivalence has a long history indeed, marked by restrictions and tolerance, by antisemitism and fruitful exchange, by genocide and the common desire to learn from the past. Europe has been a home for Jewish communities for more than two millennia, and Jewish individuals have been fundamental to the development of enlightenment thought, science and law, the arts, civic culture and political integration. But what does Europe today mean for Jews, individually and as a community?

• Due to the cultural and spatial approach of the conference, this was achieved by exploring issues of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, digital practices and heritage spaces – sometimes with all three themes in intersection – in 21^st century Europe. Panels were thematised to facilitate focused and thorough discussions on case studies – museum exhibitions, digital events, films, heritage sites, Jewish institutions and public spaces – and theoretical approaches, leading to a unique insight into the spaces and places created and encountered by today’s European Jewry. Using these spaces as a conceptual window, conference participants discussed the role and shape of memory, nostalgia, the Holocaust, minority/minority and minority/majority relations, digital representation, and cultural and religious practices among European Jews.

During the last thirty years, scholars have discussed the development both of an enduring “Jewish space” as well as new “Jewish spaces” (Diana Pinto) and new forms of “virtual Jewishness” (Ruth Ellen Gruber), all referring to different forms of Jewish and non-Jewish cultural co-construction and co-operation. The heritage industry related to the pre-Holocaust Jewish world continues to expand, with the former concentration camp and extermination camp Auschwitz reaching beyond two million annual visitors before the covid-19 pandemic. The former Jewish district of Kazimierz in Krakow has developed into a tourist destination, complete with cultural conferences and events set up by non-Jewish actors. Magdalena Waligórska relatedly emphasizes the role of klezmer music in reviving, replicating and reinventing today’s image of historical Jewish communities.

While non-Jews reinvent the historical presence of Jews through various “Disneylands” (Joachim Schlör), recent demographic studies portray a complex picture of today’s “Jewish Europe” (Daniel Staetsky and Sergio DellaPergola). Statistically, the population dwindles due to antisemitism, migration and intermarriage. Culturally, the sense of Jewishness grows stronger among the younger generations. At the same time, non-Jewish actors are even running and defining Jewish contemporary religious institutions (Hanna Tzubari). How do we interpret these findings? Was Bernard Wasserstein correct in raising an alarm about the future of Jewish life in Europe in his book “The Vanishing Diaspora in” 1997? Is non-Jewish involvement in cultural and religious institutions a threat to “Jewish Europe” or a means for its continued existence?

• These questions permeated discussions throughout the conference. By looking at Jewish/non-Jewish interaction at memorials, museum exhibitions, demonstrations and virtual events, but also digital practices emerging within Jewish communities during the covid-19 pandemic, a contrasting picture emerged. Virtual spaces seem to grow out of, partly, the idea that they allow different ethnic and religious groups to intersect and mingle. At the same time, several papers argued that this meeting never takes place, but only forms part of performative actions. On the other hand, virtual spaces have been used by Jewish communities in the past two years to continue religious practices and communal togetherness. The question of their permanency and continuity was, however, discussed. Will they survive the post-pandemic landscape? Do they serve other uses than mere stand-ins for IRL meetings?

The conference enters this scholarly debate from the perspective of a world changed by the covid-19 pandemic. We recognize the role of digital practices and virtual spaces in upholding, continuing and replacing the collective practices – shabbat meals, synagogue attendance, Pesach celebrations – that took place before March 2020. While the global, postmodern world has enabled virtual spaces in the last fifteen years, the ongoing crisis has now imposed them on the majority of the world’s Jewry. It prompts us researchers to renew questions about the state of “Jewish Europe”, as well as delving deeper into the role and theory of virtual spaces. Through the intersection of Europe, digital practices and real-life spaces, this conference will facilitate an interdisciplinary approach based on, among others, Digital Humanities, spatial theory, heritage studies, religious studies, ethnography and European studies in order to discuss whether the question mark following “A Jewish Europe” in the conference title should indeed be changed into an exclamation mark.

• The interdisciplinary approach of the conference was ensured through careful selection of papers and presenters. Historians, ethnologists, anthropologists and heritage practitioners were invited. Through generous scholarships towards travel, accommodation and food from not only The European Association for Jewish Studies, but also The Wenner-Gren Foundations, Riksbankens jubileumsfond and The Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations, new and innovative research by early-career researchers were encouraged and prioritised. Papers were given about a wide range of countries, such as the U.K., Norway, Poland, Germany, Austria. Lithuania, Hungary, Ukraine and Russia, to provide as large a view on Europe’s diverse Jewish populations. The combined expertise gathered ensured that the conference could approach questions of virtuality from many angles.

Specifically, the conference will share knowledge and deepen our collective understanding about today’s European Jewry through four unique aspects:

1) The current pandemic does not offer a unique viewpoint to the Jewish experience of Europe per se – Jews in Europe have survived different forms of crisis before – but it provides researchers with an exceptional opportunity to engage with questions of Jewish identities, practices and senses of belonging as they fluctuate and/or endure through a time of crisis. While increasing antisemitism and the expansion of “virtual Jewishness” in Europe have thwarted the scholarly progress of a “Jewish Europe” during the last thirty years (Diana Pinto), the digital practices that have emerged among Jewish European communities during the covid-19 pandemic allow researchers to engage with this question with renewed optimism. We believe that it is time yet again, from a cultural point of view, to discuss how Jews belong to the European continent in the 21^st

•  Both invited keynote speakers, Ruth Ellen Gruber and Diana Pinto, reflected on how two years of the pandemic have altered ways of thinking about Jewish practices. Furthermore, recent political changes in Europe, with the increase of right-wing and populist movements, pose questions whether “Jewish spaces” are indeed used as their creators hoped for and imagined. Virtual spaces have provided continuity and support during the recent crisis, but are, on the other hand, as fragile to antisemitic attacks and non-facilitation of intersectional meetings as real-life spaces. In other words, while exploring the possibilities of virtual spaces in continuing Jewish practices – such as holiday celebrations, nostalgic remembrance and subverted memories – they also face challenges and limitations that deserve further exploration

2) The focus on digital practices serves, as briefly noted above, as a unique doorway into understanding Jewish sense and practice of (non-)belonging to today’s Europe. While earlier anthologies and monographs have mainly explored Jewish spaces throughout Europe’s history, adding only a chapter here and there on virtual spaces, the last year has demonstrated the importance and centrality of digital practices in facilitating familial and global networks and meeting points. It is timely and vital to focus on the digital world – and how it aids, changes or hinders Jewish life – not only because of the pandemic, but also as a complement to, and possible revision of, earlier studies on Jewish space, heritage, memory and demography in Europe, specifically in relationship to the non-Jewish majority.

• This was achieved by inviting papers that explored case studies of recent or ongoing digital practices, such as digital memorials, community Youtube and podcast productions, virtual events facilitated through Instagram, and digital exhibitions. These examples showed, as explained above, the possibilities of digital practices in facilitating meetings across ethnic and religious groups, and community memorials. At the same time, presentations argued that digital spaces prove as conflicted and contested as real-life spaces, with various wills, ideals and desires in collision, demanding negotiations on questions of authority, belonging and identity.

3) The relationship between digital practices and virtual spaces is the main theme of the conference. Participants are encouraged in the CfP to use the surge of digital practices, which particularly increased during the pandemic, as an entry point to explore the concepts of “Jewish spaces” and “virtual Jewishness”, minted some thirty years ago by Diana Pinto and Ruth Ellen Gruber. In today’s digital era, can we see a strengthened relationship between real-life practices and virtual spaces? Do we as researchers need to re-conceptualize the concept of virtuality to incorporate the new meanings attached to digital practices? Through the prism of European Jews in the 21^st century, the conference aims to examine the gap between virtual spaces and real-life practices, deepening our understanding of the effects of the digitalization, as well as the pandemic, on the relationship between people and digital practices.

• While papers provided case studies of various types of virtual spaces – digital practices, heritage sites and Jewish institutions – the two keynote speakers provided ample food for thought on how to move the question of “what is a virtual space” forward. Some papers also noted the close codependency between virtual spaces and local communities, or virtual communities and local spaces, arguing, in line with Ruth Ellen Gruber and Diana Pinto, that virtuality cannot be understood from only a real-life or digital perspective. Indeed, in the globalised world we now live in, and especially after the covid-19 pandemic, digital events are intrinsically interlinked with real-life spaces, challenging our scholastic way of approaching ideas of virtual spaces and authenticity.

4) Lastly, the conference will include representatives from “Jewish spaces” in Sweden in order to establish a bridge between the academic world and the institutions we study. Representatives from the Jewish Museum in Stockholm, the cultural meeting place “Judiska salongen” (The Jewish Saloon), Paideia – the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, and the Jewish community in Gothenburg are invited. They present a variety of experience linked to the role of digital practices, virtual spaces and Jewish/non-Jewish relations – that is, “Jewish spaces” – prompting participants at the conference to engage with both the concept of virtuality, as well as the future of “Jewish Europe”, from tangible contemporary examples. Examples of Jewish practices and “Jewish spaces” from Sweden, defined by recent demographic studies as a country with a decreasing Jewish population (Daniel Staetsky and Sergio DellaPergola), is a particularly interesting case study as the conference strives to examine Jewish life in all of Europe.

• Representatives from Jewish spaces and institutions in Sweden were invited as suggested in the rationale. One session was devoted to presentations on their cultural events, memorial practices, institutional programmes and exhibitions, and the representatives were present throughout the whole conference in order to bridge scholarly debates on, and the running of, contemporary Jewish spaces.

 Overview of Panels

Keynote 1: Ruth Ellen Gruber – Life after Life: Shifting Virtualities (and Realities) 20 Years after Virtually Jewish

The conference started with Ruth Ellen Gruber, from Jewish Heritage Europe, giving a personal account of her life journey through European Jewish spaces. Taking us through her personal experience of the revitalisation of Jewish life after the Holocaust, and relating it to the digital practices that emerged during the covid-19 pandemic, she discussed the notion of authenticity in relation to virtuality. What accounts as real? And what is virtual? What happens at the borders of authenticity? And who decides the shapes of authenticity and virtuality? Arguing that digital platforms can be used as agoras, as places of encounters in Jewish spaces that have no tangible, physical connection to the past, Gruber argued for the collapse of the virtual/reality divide. Instead, we should think about how these terms are defined, and by whom.

Panel 1: Jewish contribution to Europe

Chaired by Christina Reimann (University of Stockholm), this panel discussed the role of Jewish lawmakers (Itai Apter, University of Haifa), Jewish participation in cross-cultural memorialisations (Marcela Menachem Zoufalá, Charles University Prague) and former synagogue spaces (Vladimir Levin, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in forming a European identity. The relationship between Jewish post-Holocaust life and the development of European practices and trends was noted, and the potential role Jewish communities might (not) play in shaping today’s Europe was discussed.

Panel 2: Jewish/Non-Jewish Spaces

Chaired by Katarzyna Wojnicka (University of Gothenburg), this panel visited urban streets (Susanne Korbel, University of Graz), cemeteries (Magdalena Abraham-Diefenbach, European University Viadrina) and memorials (Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė, Vilnius University) to investigate how memories of Jewish pre-Holocaust life shapes the public landscape in Europe. Noting the (non-)role Jewish memorials play in the construction of European national identities, these papers contextualised and problematised the (non-)existence of Jewish memory. At the same time, discussions revolved around the construction – rather than reconstruction – of public spaces in relation to Jewish history, that nonetheless are not related to historical realities. Is virtuality the correct concept to describe this phenomenon?

Panel 3: Jewish Europe from Near and Afar

Chaired by Erik Hallberg (University of Gothenburg), this panel travelled to Israel (Jennifer Cowe, University of British Columbia), the US (Libby Langsner, independent researcher) and Poland (Judith Vöcker, University of Leicester) to explore the role of nostalgia in shaping current memories of and heritage experiences of Jewish Europe. Films, digital memorial practices and memorials were discussed, and the importance of physical objects was highlighted, along with a discussion on the unauthentic memories these objects might facilitate.

Panel 4: Virtual Heritage Spaces

Chaired by Joachim Schlör (University of Southampton), this panel focused on heritage spaces in both on-site exhibitions and the digital world: Jewish museums in ShUM (Susanne Urban, University Marburg) and digital memorialisation platforms (Kyra Schulman, University of Chicago, and Kinga Frojimovics and Éva Kovács, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies). The close relationship between urban topographies and virtual representations of history emerged as a common theme, and discussions on ethical considerations in navigating both current urban populations and memories of Jewish pasts proved specifically noteworthy.

Panel 5: Digital Practices in Today’s Europe

Chaired by Klas Grinell (University of Gothenburg), this panel explored digital practices among European-Jewish communities. Case studies from the Norwegian-Jewish community’s digital response to the covid-19 pandemic (Tyson Herberger, University of Southeastern Norway), Jewish-Muslim dialogues in virtual spaces (Dekel Peretz, Heidelberg University) and representations of Jewish individuals on digital platforms (Alla Marchenko, The Polish Academy of Sciences) prompted discussions on the performative aspect of virtual spaces, and in contrast to the previous panel, these papers suggested a clear divergence between virtual and real-life spaces.

Heritage Session: Jewish Spaces in Sweden

Chaired by Maja Hultman (University of Gothenburg), this panel invited representatives from Jewish institutions (Agnieszka Baraszko, Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, and Ivana Koutníková, Paideia folkhögskola), museums (Yael Fried, Jewish Museum in Stockholm), cultural events (Anna Grinzweig Jacobsson and Karin Brygger, Judiska salongen) and communities (Tom Shulevitz, Jewish Community of Gothenburg) in Sweden to present some examples of Swedish-Jewish spaces.

Panel 6: Being Jewish in Today’s Europe

Chaired by Maja Hultman (University of Gothenburg), this last panel visited everyday Jewish life in synagogue spaces (Katalin Tóth, Institute of Ethnology/Research Centre for the Humanities at Eötvös Loránd Research Network) and Poland (Stanislaw Krajewski, University of Warsaw), as well as invisible historical spaces in the U.K. (Phil Alexander, University of Edinburgh). Through these case studies, the on-going inner-communal, societal and urban contestations on how to remember and practice Jewish life after the Holocaust was emphasised. The debate focused on whether Krajewski’s term of de-assimilation fits the European Jewish experience.

Keynote 2: Diana Pinto – Jewish Spaces in a Topsy Turvy Europe

Revisiting the term “Jewish spaces”, which she coined in the optimistic 1990s, Diana Pinto reflected on the increasingly divided and polarised European world, both in terms of Jewish life and the whole continent. Arguing that the idea of virtuality – the augmentation of reality – suits today’s Europe, she argued that Jewish spaces should be used to combat cultural and political fragmentation and launch activism towards a European world defined by pluralism. The isolation of Jewish spaces can end through the encouragement of cross-fertilisations between, for example, minority studies at universities and memory narratives in museums. At the same time, with new horrors entering European territories, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she also asked for how long the Holocaust can remain outside the competition of suffering. And when it does not, what role will Jewish spaces then play?

Significant Themes Discussed

•  The performative nature of digital practices, and how it relates to authentic cross-cultural intersections
• Close relationship between real-life topographies and virtual platforms, and how negotiations on memory in urban life continues and feed digital practices, and vice versa
• Contestations of power, authority and agency in relation to online and real-life Jewish spaces, and how they relate to ideas about authenticity and virtuality
• (Non-)role of Jewish spaces in the battle for a democratic and plural European society

Public and Communal Impact

The keynotes were digitally open for the public. They were also recorded and will be released in the nearby future. Furthermore, the invited representatives from Jewish spaces in Sweden allowed for a necessary bridge between academia and local communities. Lastly, Jewish sites in and nearby Gothenburg were visited, including three guided tours given by local experts. Local Jewish business actors were also employed to cater for some of the conference food.

Planned Outcomes

Conference contributions are planned to be published in both a special issue and an anthology. Publishers have been approached but not yet decided on.

Final Conference Programme

A Jewish Europe? Virtual and Real-Life Spaces in the 21st Century

Tuesday 3 May

09.00 Welcome and introductions

Joachim Schlör, Klas Grinell and Maja Hultman

09.30 Keynote

Chair: Joachim Schlör

• Ruth Ellen Gruber (Jewish Heritage Europe) – Life after Life: Shifting Virtualities (and Realities) 20 Years after Virtually Jewish

10.45 Break and coffee

11.15 Panel 1: Jewish contribution to Europe

Chair: Christina Reimann (University of Stockholm)

• Itai Apter (University of Haifa) – Jewish Legal-Political WWII Era Scholars in the European International Law Space of the Past and Contemporary Virtual Spaces
• Marcela Menachem Zoufalá (Charles University Prague) – Jews as “the Pioneers of the Postmodern Condition”: The Ambivalence, Dilemmas, and Aporias of Central European Jewish Experience 
• Vladimir Levin (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) – European Values, Post-Soviet States, and Jewish Heritage

12.45 Lunch

14.00 Panel 2: Jewish/Non-Jewish Spaces

Chair: Katarzyna Wojnicka (University of Gothenburg)

• Susanne Korbel (University of Graz) – Jewish Spaces in Vienna Today: A Relational, Hybrid Approach
• Magdalena Abraham-Diefenbach (European University Viadrina) – The Legacy of German Jews in Western Poland: Jewish Cemeteries as Places Between “Jewish Space” and “Virtual Jewishness”
• Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė (Vilnius University) – The Process of Learning About the Jews and Their Heritage: Influence of Challenges in Post-Soviet Lithuania to the Contemporary Understanding of the Jewish Culture

15.30 Break and coffee

16.00 Panel 3: Jewish Europe from Near and Afar

Chair: Erik Hallberg (University of Gothenburg)

• Jennifer Cowe (University of British Columbia) – Rootless Nostalgia, Yekke Identity and Intergenerational memory Curation/Creation in Mor Kaplansky’s
• Café Nagler Libby Langsner (independent researcher) – Nostalgia Networks: The Potential of Built Heritage Digitization in European American Jewish Identity Formation and Social Belonging
• Judith Vöcker (University of Leicester) – The Muranów District as a Memorial of the Former Jewish Community of Warsaw

18.00 City walk of Jewish Gothenburg

19.00 Tour and dinner @ Gothenburg’s Synagogue

Wednesday 4 May

09.00 Panel 4: Virtual Heritage Spaces

Chair: Joachim Schlör (University of Southampton)

• Susanne Urban (University Marburg) – Storytelling in Jewish Spaces: Creating a Bond Between Spaces, History and Present
• Kyra Schulman (University of Chicago) – Memory Space: Probing the Limits of Holocaust Memorialization Projects on Digital Versus Physical Topographies
• Kinga Frojimovics and Éva Kovács (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies) – Tracing the Holocaust in the Kaiserstadt

10.30 Break and coffee

11.00 Panel 5: Digital Practices in Today’s Europe

Chair: Klas Grinell (University of Gothenburg)

• Tyson Herberger (University of Southeastern Norway) – Impacts of Norwegian Jewry’s Digital Turn Under Corona
• Dekel Peretz (Heidelberg University) – Searching for Belonging: Jewish-Muslim Dialogue in Virtual Spaces
• Alla Marchenko (The Polish Academy of Sciences) – Virtual Representation of Real Jews and Jewishness in Contemporary Poland

12.30 Lunch @ Museum of World Culture

13.45 Heritage Session: Jewish Spaces in Sweden

Chair: Maja Hultman (University of Gothenburg)

• Yael Fried (Jewish Museum in Stockholm)
• Anna Grinzweig Jacobsson and Karin Brygger (Judiska salongen)
• Agnieszka Baraszko (Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden) and Ivana Koutníková (Paideia folkhögskola)
• Tom Shulevitz (Jewish Community of Gothenburg)

15.15 Break and coffee

15.45 Bus trip Gothenburg-Marstrand

17.00 Guided tour of Marstrand

19.00 Dinner @ Grand Tenan

21.30 Bus trip Marstrand-Gothenburg

Thursday 5 May

09.00 Panel 6: Being Jewish in Today’s Europe

Chair: Maja Hultman (University of Gothenburg)

• Katalin Tóth (Institute of Ethnology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Eötvös Loránd Research Network) – “But We Are Also Here – the Descendants of the Survivors”: Everyday Life of a Synagogue in Budapest for the Past Thirty Years 
• Stanislaw Krajewski (University of Warsaw) – The Concept of De-Assimilation as a Tool to Describe Present-Day European Jews: The Example of Poland 
• Phil Alexander (University of Edinburgh) – “The Most Saving Slum in Glasgow, and the Most Abandoned”: Scotland’s 20th Century Jewish Neighbourhoods as 21st Century Virtual Spaces

10.30 Break and coffee

11.00 Keynote

Chair: Joachim Schlör

• Diana Pinto (independent researcher) – Jewish Spaces in a Topsy Turvy Europe

12.15 Closing remarks

• Joachim Schlör and Maja Hultman

12.45 Lunch @ Andrum

The conference is generously supported by: The Wenner-Gren Foundations, Riksbankens jubileumsfond, The Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations, a donation made in memory of Jack and Gretel Habel (refugees from Nazi Germany), and The European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS).