Sacred Sensoria: Jewish and Christian Embodied Experience in Early Modern Europe
A Research Workshop of the Israel Science Foundation
25-28 October 2026
Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Edmond J. Safra Campus, Givat Ram, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Monday and Wednesday), and Prima Park Hotel, Jerusalem (Tuesday)
Early modern Europeans saw, heard, touched, tasted and smelled their way into the sacred. Preaching, devotion, mystical practice and confessional polemic alike were conducted in the grammar of sensation, and the boundary between Jew and Christian was often drawn by disputing whose senses could be trusted.
Sacred Sensoria gathers historians, literary scholars, art historians and historians of religion from Europe, North America and Israel in order to study the two sensory regimes together rather than apart. The workshop proceeds across three days: Frameworks, in which each tradition’s sensorium is described in its own terms; Contact Zones, on the sensory life of Jewish-Christian encounter, conversion, polemic and urban coexistence; and Comparative Senses, which reads sight, sound, touch, taste and smell across the confessional divide.
Keynote lectures: Prof. Bruce Gordon (Yale University), Prof. Magda Teter (Fordham University), and Prof. Stefan Michels (Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt).
Speakers include Daniel Abrams, Niall Atkinson, Renana Bartal, Reut Barzilai, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, Yossi Chajes, Raz Chen-Morris, Yaacov Deutsch, Maria Diemling, Serena Di Nepi, Cristiana Facchini, Yael Fisch, Talya Fishman, Massimo Carlo Giannini, Ahuvia Goren, David Graizbord, Tamar Herzig, Kimberly Johnson, Maoz Kahana, Debra Kaplan, Annette Kern-Staehler, William Kolbrener, Martin Lockshin, Piergabriele Mancuso, Eliana Miraglia, Maximilian de Moliere, Elke Morlok, Noam Reisner, Pinchas Roth, Stephanie Shirilan, Alexander van der Haven and Elisabeth von Baumbach.
Convened by Dr Yaakov A. Mascetti (Bar-Ilan University) with Dr Channah Damatov (Bar-Ilan University).
Attendance is free and open to all; no registration is required.
Full programme and details:
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://iias.huji.ac.il/event/sacred-sensoria-jewish-and-christian-embodied-experience-early-modern-europe&source=gmail&ust=1786959212204000&sa=E