EAJS Virtual 2025: Translating Maimonides
Call for Papers
Deadline for Abstracts: 18 September 2025
Event Date: Late Autumn (exact date TBC)
translatingmaimonides@gmail.com
Illustration of a plaque at Rambam Medical Campus that will feature in the ‘Maimonides the Healer’ animation première at the EAJS Virtual event
Maimonides has been and continues to be a figure of incredible significance, not only for scholars in and beyond Jewish studies (including historians, researchers of the Mediterranean, linguists, medical ethicists, and many others), but equally for Jewish, Muslim, secular philosophical and any number of other communities. Indeed, between 2000 and 2007 alone, more than 243 articles were entered in the Index of Articles of Jewish Studies (Jewish National and University Library at Jerusalem) with Maimonides’ as a keyword (Bouretz 2008; Stroumsa 2011). Since then, scholarly interest in Maimonides seems only to have grown.
Acknowledging the ongoing importance and interpretation of Maimonides, his life and his world, this virtual conference is inspired by and centres on Maimonides as a symbol of translation par excellence. It calls up his multiple trajectories, enriched by Mediterranean mobilities, transcultural encounters with Jewish, Islamic, and Hellenic philosophies, and ongoing interreligious, intertextual, and interpersonal dialogues. It also responds to the many afterlives of both his work and Maimonides himself as an historical figure, to explore processes, politics, and relations of (non)translation in and across the Mediterranean. We invite papers on the theme of ‘Translating Maimonides’ including, but not limited to, translation of:
- Language
- Challenges and opportunities of translation
- Community interpretations of translation (what can or cannot be translated, practices of translation and translation innovation)
- Beyond translation: what does translation bring to Jewish dynamics in periods outside the Medieval
- Maimonides’ correspondence with his translators
- Knowledge
- Translation across medical, astronomical, mathematical, philosophical, religious, and legal frames
- Translation across Islamic, Greek, Jewish (Talmudic and Halachic) bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing
- The influence of Maimonides’ knowledge on contemporaries and peers and vice versa
- Translation as dialogue & dialogue as translation
- Intercommunal and interreligious exchange in the Mediterranean
- Maimonides’ interfaces with Muslim intellectuals and dignitaries
- Legacy as a process of translation
- From the Cairo Genizah to the multilingual archive – preservation, fragmentation, interpretation
- Preserving Maimonides’ through material heritage (e.g. the Cairo Genizah, Maimonides’ statue in Cordoba, museum and heritage sites)
- Animating Maimonides via creative means: film, literature, theatre, etc.
- Maimonides as received and reimagined by later thinkers and writers
- Mediterranean and Sephardic identities: Resonances in the present
- Maimonides’ (re)signification for contemporary Sephardic identities
- Contemporary artistic engagements with or inspired by Maimonides and his work
- Present-day anthropological engagements with Maimonides and his work
In line with the Maimonidean tradition, we are particularly keen to cultivate an interdisciplinary conversation. Thus, while this conference is rooted in Jewish Studies, we invite researchers from across European institutions in the fields of theology, philosophy, literature, history, Islamic studies, sociology, law, Medieval studies, anthropology, medical humanities, arts-based practice and other allied fields.
Papers from early career researchers are especially welcome.
Organising team: Anoushka Alexander-Rose, Anastasia Badder, Eliaou Balouka, Sami Everett, Melonie Schmierer-Lee
Please note, participants will need to be either Full, Associate or Student Members of the EAJS at the time of the Virtual Conference.
Abstracts should be sent to the following email address: translatingmaimonides@gmail.com