EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2022/23
Report
British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies annual conference
‘Race in Jewish Worlds, Antiquity to the Present’
Edge Hill University, UK, 10-12 July 2023
Since the explosion of Black Lives Matter in 2020, societies around the world are paying greater attention to the questions of race and racism, including their role in human history. Over the last decade, a growing number of scholars of the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds have argued that race has held a central place in politics, social relations, and culture. These scholars have challenged the received wisdom that ‘race’ simply popped up as an idea in late modern Europe. Significantly, Jews and Judaism have featured as important parts of this story. For example, Geraldine Heng’s much-discussed work on medieval Europe argues that England was an archetype ‘racial State’ due to its antisemitism. In antiquity, David Horrell has discussed the centrality of Jews and Jewishness in a racialized early Christianity. Regarding modernity, Satnam Virdee has begun to set out a new sociology of race and the European State, which centres antisemitism. There is also a burgeoning field of race studies within Jewish cultures, across time and space. This is particularly noticeable in research on Jewish Orientalisms, as is clear in the work of Ivan Kalmar, and Sephardi and Mizrachi Studies, in the wake of the seminal scholarship of Ella Shohat, in particular.
The aim of the 2023 British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies (BIAJS2023) conference was to build on this work. The event explored how race has affected, and been a part of, Jewish lives and beliefs across Jewish histories and geographies, around the globe. For this reason, the BIAJS23 poster featured the opening text in Bereshit of the Torah’s genealogy of humanity after the flood, until the story of Abraham: וְאֵ֨לֶּה֙ תּֽוֹלְדֹ֣ת בְּנֵי־נֹ֔חַ (10:1) [And these are the generations of the sons of Noah …]. In medieval and early modern Christian readings of race, this text from the Hebrew Bible was crucial. How should we interpret this fact when considering the history of ‘race’ in Jewish worlds? What does it suggest about Jewish agency, the dynamic relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures, and within the rainbow of Jewish diversities around the globe?
In addition to the question of race, BIAJS2023 welcomed papers on all aspects of Jewish Studies, and provided the opportunity for participants to network with peers in Jewish Studies from Ireland, the UK, continental Europe, and the wider world.
As part of the broader task of engaging with race, the conference aimed to consider the relationship between the academy and wider society. Since the summer of 2020, public and civil society institutions have played an important role in developing dialogue and knowledge on race in society. What should be the role of the Jewish Studies scholar in this sort of public space? How can we work to incorporate the findings of academic research in public debate and learning in a way that is accessible and effective?
Finally, the conference had a significant focus on supporting PhD students, and Early Career Researchers. The development of future generations of scholars is crucial, and BIAJS seeks to support this endeavour as a key priority for the association. Just as urgent is the need to support our PhD and ECR community in today’s highly pressured economic climate in Higher Education in Britain and Ireland.
Thanks to funding from the European Association for Jewish Studies, the conference provided ten bursaries of £250 to PhD students in Europe and North America. This funding was complemented by financial support for an additional ten bursaries from the Department of History, Geography and Social Sciences at Edge Hill University. To further this support at the conference, Professor James Renton organised expert panels on how to get that first academic job, and successful research impact. These panels featured Lindsey Davidson (University of Bristol), Julie Kalman (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia), Miri Rubin (Queen Mary University of London), Yulia Egorova (Durham University), Michael Berkowitz (University College London), and Ben Gidley (Birkbeck), who have a wealth of experience in these areas.
The first new university to host the Presidency of the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies, Edge Hill College was founded in 1885 as England’s only non-denominational teacher-training institution for women. Named after the inner-city district of Liverpool where it opened its doors, Edge Hill moved to the countryside in 1934. Edge Hill achieved degree awarding powers in 2008. Amidst the rolling fields of West Lancashire, down the road from the medieval market-town of Ormskirk, Edge Hill sits in a sprawling, award-winning campus, with immaculate gardens, a lake, sports complex, and resplendent shiny new buildings, clustered around the original Art Deco/neo-classical centrepiece.
To meet the two principal objectives of this year’s BIAJS Presidency, Edge Hill hosted keynotes speakers at the forefront of research impact in wider society, and the question of race in Jewish worlds, ranging from antiquity to the 21st century. Frequently, Jewish Studies draws attention to questions that remain unseen, or partially understood, in our wider disciplines, from History to philology. Nonetheless, it is just as true to say that we always have much to learn from colleagues in civil society and the academy beyond our field. As such, our speakers featured prominent scholars and figures from outside of Jewish Studies.
Our keynote on the ancient world, David Horrell, was Professor of New Testament Studies and Director of the Centre for Bible Studies at the University of Exeter. In 2020, Professor Horrell published the thought-provoking monograph, Ethnicity and Inclusion: Religion, Race, and Whiteness in Constructions of Jewish and Christian Identities. Based on this major work, Professor Horrell explored the centrality of ethnicity in early Christian texts and challenged the myth of a universal Christianity as the antithesis to an exclusive Judaism. Engaging with Whiteness Studies, and challenging important elements in New Testament Studies, this address opened a number of central themes for the conference. In particular, Professor Horrell brought into sharp focus the insights to be gleaned from a rigorous contextualisation of Jewish worlds, in which race and ethnicity have played an important role.
Our second keynote, Professor Miri Rubin, was also this year’s PKC Millins Laureate. The annual Millins Lecture at Edge Hill’s International Centre on Racism, directed by BIAJS President, James Renton, is named after the pioneering Principal who ran the College from 1964 until 1979. A linguist and former British intelligence officer in the Second World War, Millins was at the forefront of using Higher Education as a tool to fight racism and support persecuted minorities, in response to the rise of the National Front in England. An internationally renowned medievalist, Professor Rubin is based at Queen Mary University of London, and holds the Presidency of the Jewish Historical Society of England. Professor Rubin delivered a magisterial lecture on the history of race and the Song of Songs in medieval European culture. The lecture drew us into the travelling history of this text in its multi-lingual, social, and cultural contexts. This multiversal analysis threw down the gauntlet to us as we grappled with the complexities of race in Jewish worlds.
Our third keynote took the conference into the pressing matter of how we can contribute to society. We were delighted to host the Head of the world’s only national museum on slavery, the International Slavery Museum, in Liverpool. Currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool, Richard Benjamin is an Edge Hill alumnus, who trained in the UK’s only BA programme in Community and Race Relations. Under Professor Benjamin’s stewardship, the International Slavery Museum plays a vital role in bringing cutting-edge scholarship and activism to the wider community. Professor Benjamin brought us into the rich dialogue of practice between the museum space, public knowledge, and scholarship.
With the global rise of Black Lives Matter in 2020, racism is receiving some of the public attention it deserves. How does this interest in racisms and ethnicity feed into coverage of antisemitism and Jewish life in general? Taking us to the heart of this underlying question, our final keynote speaker, Mark Burman, spoke to us about his three decades of telling Jewish stories on BBC Radio. A pioneering Radio Producer, Burman took us through the fascinating process of how he has sought to rescue forgotten Jewish voices in history, from his training as an oral historian at the Jewish Museum to his most recent BBC series, ‘The Warsaw Ghetto: History as Survival.’ Narrated by the eminent and world-famous actor, Anton Lesser, this stunning production should be the touchstone for how Jewish history can be mediated through mass media; Burman gave us the inside story of its making.
In addition to our keynote speakers, the conference welcomed around 80 speakers from Canada, Ireland, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, the UK, and the United States. The first session included panels on antiquity, antisemitism, modern Jewish literatures, ant-racism, and British Jewish history since 1945. The papers ranged from Lindsey Davidson (Bristol) speaking about antisemitism in scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible to Barry Trachtenberg (Wake Forest) grappling with how to teach the graphic novel Maus in an age of “racial panic and reckoning”.
The second session featured a panel on ‘Creative Jewish Feminist Theology’, which delved into contemporary poetry, as well as the discussion by Natalie Polzer (Louisville) of “God as agunah?” in her analysis of divine repulsion in Jeremiah. This session also boasted a big panel discussion on contemporary debates in Mizrahi/MENA/Arab Jewish Studies, as well as contemporary antisemitism, diaspora, and British Jewish history.
In the third session, the ancient and medieval worlds panel ranged from Geert de Korte (Apeldoorn) on Ambrose of Milan and his reading of ‘the Jew’ to the question of whether the Babylonian Talmud used an “ancient Tosefta”, presented by Hillel Gershuni (Haifa). The panels ‘Jews and Photography’, ‘Borders and Colour Lines’, and ‘Sephardi Music and Liturgy’ grappled with the inter-connected themes of identity, race, and agency. In addition, a panel on #JewishStudiesMatters considered the challenges of bringing the fruits of Jewish Studies scholarship to wider society. Reflecting the transnational and trans-continental make-up of this year’s BIAJS conference, the discussion on this overarching challenge included Jennifer Creese (Leicester), Mie Astrup Jensen (Hebrew University), Jennifer A. Thompson (California State, Northridge), Karen Skinazi (Bristol), and Gavin Schaffer (Birmingham).
The following session built on the preceding debates about race within and without Jewish worlds by moving on to the subjects of migration, dictatorship, and Ashkenazi/Sephardi “Fault-Lines”. These panels demonstrated the significance of Jewish Studies for the wider academy in, among other things, the sharp relief given to the centrality of race. Migration Studies, for example, continues to neglect race. In the Jewish histories presented at BIAJS23 by Mara Cohen Ioannides (Missouri State), Natalie Wynn (Trinity College Dublin), and Sue Vice (Sheffield) it is clear that this neglect is misplaced. Similarly, within modern and contemporary Jewish cultures race historically played, and continues to play, a critical role, as seen in our panel on Ashkenazi/Sephardi “Fault-Lines”, with papers by Miriam Yosef (Duisberg-Essen), Yair Wallach (SOAS), Miranda Crowdus (Concordia), and Isaac Amon (Jewish Heritage Alliance).
In the following session, the discussion moved into international law and politics, positioning Jews within colonial and postcolonial fields of knowledge and experience, as demonstrated by the presentations by Laura Almagor (Utrecht), Jaclyn Granick (Cardiff), and Rotem Giladi (Roehampton). A panel on identity in Israeli politics took us back to themes that were raised in the discussion on being Ashkenazi and Sephardi, with race and ethnicity featuring prominently.
Our final session tackled the historical and contemporary lived experience of Jews as one of entanglement with other communities. The emphasis was on the webbed complexity of individual and communal lives, rather than looking at race in the abstract as a concept on the printed page or in the words of an ideologue or intellectual. The research project led by Yulia Egorova and Ben Gidley on contemporary relations between Jews and Muslims in Europe gave us a powerful and concrete way of looking at these questions. Similarly, the individual research of Julie Kalman (Monash), Zoe Abrahams (Jewish Museum), and Talha Kaan Űnlü (Amasya) provided us with the gripping stories of individual figures, along with the legal framework of the Ottoman empire, through which to think through the framework of lived experience and entanglement.
Building on these rich intellectual discussions, BIAJS23 provided important space for networking and celebration over food and drink. Our Millins Laureate, Miri Rubin, wore another hat at this year’s conference, as President of the Jewish Historical Society of England. Hosted by Professor Rubin, the Society sponsored a special reception to celebrate its 130th anniversary, which took place on beautiful roof garden at Edge Hill. It was a great honour that we could collaborate with the Society to mark this milestone. Catered by the East End-trained owner of Ormskirk’s bagel emporium, the reception featured Salt Beef and other heimishe treats, our annual book prize (won by Jan Rybak, with an honourable mention for Jaclyn Granick’s monograph), and a moving memorial to the late James Aitken, delivered by his former student, Lindsey Davidson. Thanks to the Society’s sponsorship, the classical guitarist, Fernando Gonzalez, flew in from Belgium to perform at the event.
Another highlight was the conference buffet-party, with Italian pop music, oodles of kosher wine, and vegan tapas fusion (including a special take on Lancashire hot-pot, of course!).
A large number of people made the conference such a success, whom we would like to thank by way of conclusion: the Edge Hill conference and catering teams, particularly Suzanne Cohen and David Grimes; the administrative team in the Department of History, Geography and Social Sciences, led by Lisa Burke; Professors Cherith Moses and Alyson Brown at Edge Hill; the BIAJS committee, especially our outgoing Secretary, David Tollerton; the tireless efforts of James Renton’s students, Elena Ghiggino and Chloe Kemp; and, throughout his Presidency, the ceaseless endeavour of the Editor of MONITORacism magazine, Monica Gonzalez Correa, and Clemente Renton Gonzalez.