British Association for Jewish Studies:

Perspectives from a New Generation of Scholars

15 July 2020

On 15 July 2020, the British Association for Jewish Studies is holding an online event that showcases the work of a selection of emerging talents in the field. This is not a replacement for the full BAJS conference (now postponed until July 2021), but rather a standalone event that provides a snapshot of early career research continuing to be developed even amidst the current uncertainties and disruptions.

The event is open to all those working in the field of Jewish Studies. Register for free via this Eventbrite page.

Timetable:

10.00-11.10 – Session 1

Dr Rebekah Welton (University of Exeter) ‘Gluttony and Drunkenness in Ancient Israel’

Dr Yael Fisch (University of Oxford) ‘The Vitality of Tannaitic Temple Architecture: The Case of “Beit Ha’Moqed”’

11.40-12.50 – Session 2

Dr Tali Artman Partock (University of Cambridge) ‘Picking up the Pieces: Men’s Recovery from Captivity and Rape in Rabbinic Literature’

Dr David Torollo (King’s College London) ‘On Wisdom, Wine and Wandering: Texts and Intertexts on the Good Life from Medieval Sepharad’

13.50-15.00 – Session 3

Dr Sarah Irving (Edge Hill University) ‘Donations and their Destinations: Charity and Conflict after the 1927 Palestine Earthquake’

Dr Phil Alexander (University of Glasgow) ‘Berlin Klezmer and Urban Community’

For BAJS members, our Annual General Meeting will follow the event from 15.30-16.45.

Abstracts:

Dr Rebekah Welton (University of Exeter) ‘Gluttony and Drunkenness in Ancient Israel’

Everybody eats but food is not universal. Every culture has its own unique ‘foodways’ – which are the means by which a culture produces and processes food, as well as its normative ways of eating, and associated social practices. The counterpoint to these normative modes of consumption are what we might consider ‘deviant’ forms of eating and drinking, and these too are diverse between cultures of different times and places. While diet and food preparation in ancient Israel and Judah has recently received increased scholarly attention, the analysis of normative and non-normative consumption practices has been less rigorously assessed. Consequently, this lack of interrogation into the socio-religious roles of food and drink in ancient Israel and Judah has led to certain assumptions regarding the attitudes towards food and consumption as reflected in biblical texts. Indeed, it is particularly easy to project one’s own experiences with food, an everyday materiality with which we are intimately familiar, onto other less well-understood contexts. This presentation will explore some of the socio-religious roles of eating and drinking in ancient Israel and Judah as informed by archaeological and ethnographic data, and will particularly focus on those presented as deviant in select Hebrew Bible texts.

Dr Yael Fisch (University of Oxford) ‘The Vitality of Tannaitic Temple Architecture: The Case of “Beit Ha’Moqed”’

This paper is dedicated to Tractate Middot in the Mishnah and will argue for the continuous transformation of temple architecture within Tannaitic literature. Though scholars have long recognized that the architecture of the Jerusalem temple in Mishnah Middot does not fully coincide with Herod’s temple as described by Josephus, nor does it fit with the archaeological reports, Middot’s unprecedented architectural details are often taken by historians of the Second Temple as facts. In this paper, I will revisit the Mishnaic descriptions of “Beit Ha’Moqed,” the priestly sleeping chambers in the Temple, and will offer an explanation to the changes in its architecture and to Mishnah’s choice to narrate the architecture of the temple in the past tense.

Dr Tali Artman Partock (University of Cambridge) ‘Picking up the Pieces: Men’s Recovery from Captivity and Rape in Rabbinic Literature’

The destruction of the Temple, the Bar Kokhva revolt and the ongoing wars on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the 4^th-6^th centuries put Jewish men and women in harm’s way. While some scholars have written about rape, wartime rape, and rape in captivity of women in rabbinic literature, not much has been written about the experience of men (apart from a recent study by Mor), who we tend to think of as aggressors rather than victims. The rape of men under all these circumstances creates a specific, emotional, communal, and legal set of problems. The Biblical verses in Leviticus regarding homosexual intercourse condemn both the active and the passive parties to death, and do not even mention the possibility of a man being raped. However, Lamentations tells us that the rape of boys and men has happened. What then, is the halachic responsibility in case of rape? Is it the same as in the rape of a woman? Tannaitic sources tell us that men who stand to be raped should be prioritized over women when redeeming captives and tell us stories of redeeming of such captives. Why is that so, and do these men ever regain their place in rabbinic society? In this paper, I will focus on the perilous moment in which these men try to make their way back into rabbinic society. The legal issues of what happens to their estates while they are gone and when they come back, what happens to their marriages and social status will be analysed vis a vis Roman law. Issues of emotional damage and ritual standing will be discussed from within rabbinic culture while comparing the fate of men and women.

Dr David Torollo (King’s College London) ‘On Wisdom, Wine and Wandering: Texts and Intertexts on the Good Life from Medieval Sepharad’

While the study of Hebrew poetry of the Andalusi ‘Golden Age’ has flourished, less attention has been given to the birth and development of secular Hebrew prose from the twelfth century in the Christian side of the Iberian Peninsula. It seems to be the case that the phenomenon of translations from Arabic into Hebrew that took place within Jewish intellectual circles in both Iberia and Provence contributed to the increased versatility of Hebrew prose as an artistic medium. This versatility prompted the appearance of secular narrative works, of which the maqāma genre is the best representative. This paper focuses on an image of ‘good life’ according to three narrative works written in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries: Sefer sha‘ashu‘im [The Book of Delights] by Joseph ibn Zab’arah, Sefer taḥkemoni [The Book of Taḥkemoni ] by Yehudah al-Ḥarizi, and Mishle he-‘arav [The Sayings of the Arabs] by a certain Yiṣḥaq ha-Qatan. The goal of the paper is to preliminarily explore the chapters dealing with wisdom, wine and travelling through the lens of musar, i.e. the proper ethical and moral behaviour, and against the intellectual and political developments of the Jewish communities in medieval Sepharad.

Dr Sarah Irving (Edge Hill University) ‘Donations and their Destinations: Charity and Conflict after the 1927 Palestine Earthquake’

Soon after the 1927 earthquake in Palestine, Jerusalem’s Sephardic congregation contacted their co-religionists in London to ask for help rebuilding damaged homes and synagogues. In doing so they relied upon longstanding practices of financial support, but on this occasion controversy emerged when funds raised by the Spanish & Portuguese Jewish congregation in London were merged with the larger relief effort channelled via the Board of Deputies to the Jerusalem relief committee. Not only was the S&P money not allocated to Sephardim in Jerusalem, much of it was used to help Arab victims of the earthquake in Nablus and other areas. This paper contextualises the disagreement within the wider relief effort, reconstructed using sources from the Mandate government, religious organisations, the Palestinian press, and memoirs and autobiographies. It shows how experiences of the earthquake and of the relief effort which followed it united Jews and Arabs in Palestine and their international networks to help those worst affected, but also exposed varying understandings of these networks of solidarity and obligation, and a resulting competition for funds which was articulated in geographical, communal and ethnic terms. In doing so, it challenges stereotypes about communal relations in Mandate Palestine, contributing to a more complex understanding of Arab-Jewish relations in the period.

Dr Phil Alexander (University of Glasgow) ‘Berlin Klezmer and Urban Community’

For more than twenty-five years, Berlin has hosted the busiest and most dynamic klezmer scene outside North America. The resurgence of this Jewish folk music—initially by a majority of non-Jews—in the nerve-centre of its planned annihilation has at times provoked a heady and inevitably unsustainable mix of optimism, polemic, anxiety and vitriol. But over the past decade, something has changed. That a far greater proportion of Jews are involved is only a part of the story. What has transformed at a deeper level is the relationship between this traditional ritual music—now mostly divorced from its original ritual context—and the contemporary city with which it is in continual dialogue. My discussion, therefore, will look at some of the musical and spatial means by which the urban klezmer community has rooted itself within the distinctive material and symbolic conditions of today’s Berlin. I will argue that this transnational and syncretic music—with few historical ties to Berlin—can be understood in relation to the city’s particular post-reunification bricolage aesthetic and subversively creative everyday tactics. By engaging with the material city itself, klezmer in Berlin has found alternative musical practices beyond the overdetermined discourses of ‘revival’—revealing how traditional culture can remain meaningful within a shifting, avowedly modern, urban cosmopolitanism.