International Spring School in Jewish Studies

3 June 2022 – "Home, Belonging and Exile: Sepharad and Beyond" was the topic of the International Spring School in Jewish Studies that took places this week in Madrid and Toledo. Jointly organized by the University of Amsterdam, The Open University of Israel, King's College London and J-Med (CSIC-UCM) Madrid, the Spring School offered a unique opportunity to study the many facets of building homes and communities in the Sephardic diaspora and to consider questions of exile and belonging. Religious, cultural, social and material aspects were investigated in seminars that took students from literary texts circulating in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and Castilian in the 13th century to questions about social class and its impact on Jewish-Christian contacts before the expulsions from Iberia, and from the rich meanings of Ladino culture to the social practices of Turkish Jews in Barcelona and of Spanish Jews in Morocco in the 20th century. Particular highlights were the visits to Toledo, the Complutense Library and the El Escorial Library, where the material heritage of Spanish Jews is tangible and invites new engagement with it. Image: Professor Maurice Kriegel (EHESS, Paris), who gave the opening lecture, with organisers and students in the Tránsito Synagogue, Toledo.

BIAJS Conference 2022:

5 April 2022 – Registration for this year's BIAJS conference is now open. The conference will be held at King's from 11-13 July 2022, hosted by the Department of Theology & Religious Studies, where Dr Andrea Schatz, BIAJS President 2021-22, is teaching. For further details on the conference theme "Unfolding Time: Texts - Practices - Politics" and the conference itself, please see:

• https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/british-and-irish-association-of-jewish-studies-annual-conference

Discussion and Book Launch: What Are Jews For? History, Peoplehood, and Purpose

16 March 2022 – This discussion and belated book launch, co-supported by the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King's (CESK), the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), the Jewish History seminar, and the King’s History Department, is taking place on Wednesday 25 May, from 5.30 to 7.30pm in the King’s History Department (eighth floor, Strand Building). David Feldman (Birkbeck) and Miri Rubin (Queen Mary) will comment on Adam Sutcliffe’s recent book, What Are Jews For? History, Peoplehood, and Purpose; Adam Sutcliffe will respond. External (non-King’s) attendees should register via the IHR website.

Foreign Nations in the Prophets: A Joint KCL and UCL Hebrew Bible Study Day

10 June 2021 – The first Hebrew Bible day conference jointly organised by the Department of Theology & Religious Studies at King‘s and the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies at University College London is taking place on 17 June. It brings together senior scholars and early career scholars, who will speak about ‘Foreign Nations in Isaiah 13–23' (Hugh Williamson), ‘Burn the Witch: A Comparison between the Portrayal of Sorceress Babylon in Isaiah 47 and te Figure of the Witch in maqlû’ (Alinda Damsma), ‘Rowers in Great Waters: The King of Tyre, Pharaoh and the End of Monarchy’ (Madhavi Nevader & Andrew Mein), ‘Foreign Nations in the Book of Micah’ (Juan Cruz), ‘“Are You Not Like the Ethiopians to Me, O People of Israel?”: A Race-Conscious Reading of Amos 9:7’ (Tsaurayi Mapfeka), 'Mirroring Each Other’s Fate? Prophecy Concerning Foreign Nations between Prophecy of Doom and Prophecy of Salvation’ (Hannes Bezzel), and ‘When is a “Nation” not Simply a Nation? Nations as Ideological Entities in Israelite Prophetic Literature’ (Daniel Timmer).

• For more information and registration, please click here.

A Manly Swot: Ezra's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

20 May 2021 – This year's Ethel M. Wood Lecture (originally scheduled for 2020) will be held online on 26 May by Charlotte Hempel, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Birmingham and a leading scholar in Qumran Studies. She is the author of numerous articles and several books, has edited Dead Sea Discoveries, a leading journal in the field, and is co-editor with George J. Brooke of the T & T Clark Companion to the Dead Sea Scrolls (2018).

• For more information and registration, please click here.

Sephardi Thought and Modernity: 2021 Webinar Series

18 February 2021 – Organised by Angy Cohen (University of Calgary) and Yuval Evri (King’s College London), this series consists of a monthly lecture from February through June 2021. The series will present a general picture of different experiences of Sephardi modernization in different places and times to spark interest in processes of Jewish modernization not exclusively mediated by Europeanization. The questions we will be dealing with are related to non-dichotomic identities, multiplicity and loss of language, colonization, social transformation, and intellectual responses to it. We will approach these questions by looking at Jewish-Arab influences, the Sephardi response to European modernization, the responses of the rabbinic leadership and the work of Sephardi intellectuals.

In the Spotlight: Emma Rozenberg's PhD Research

3 January 2021 – Emma Rozenberg's research on the issue of mamzerut in the UK today has just been featured in the 'Jewish Chronicle', following Rozenberg's presentation of her project at Limmud UK, and quickly became the 'most read' item of the newspaper's online edition. As Rozenberg explains in the article, mamzerut is a stigma which attaches to children born of certain forbidden relationships under Jewish law, and affects Jews painfully to this day. Her research, which includes interviews with individuals affected by the stigma, rabbis and activists, highlights many new facets of the issue and analyzes diverse approaches to it.

• Continue reading: "The hidden pain of mamzerim in Britain" (Jewish Chronicle)

Ancient Near Eastern languages in contact

By Jonathan Stökl | 31 July 2020 – In response to the CoViD-19 crisis, Alinda Damsa, Lily Kahn (both UCL) and I decided to organise a series of e-lectures on the topic of language contact in the ancient Near East (understood rather flexibly, both in terms of area and of time). – The topics are far-ranging and often stray from the purely linguistic into the cultural. The first lecture by Mark Weeden (SOAS) was entitled ‘Language Contact between Hittite and Sumerian’, and in the lecture he convincingly showed that while there is no direct language contact, Hittite scribes at times translated Sumerian texts ‘wrongly’ in order to derive further meaning from them in ways that are consistent with wider ancient Near Eastern hermeneutic traditions, which live on through Rabbinic hermeneutics.

• Continue reading: Ancient Near Eastern languages in contact

The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes over Sephardic Culture and Identity between Arabic and Hebrew

By Yuval Evri | 25 July 2020 – This new book traces contested visions and representations of al-Andalus/Sepharad among modern Jews through a close analysis of the work of Sephardi/Arab-Jewish intellectuals in Palestine and their networks at the turn of the twentieth century. Particularly prominent among them were Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951), Abraham Elmaleh (1885–1967), Yosef Meyouhas (1868–1942), Nissim Malul (1892–1959) and Yitzhak Benyamin Yahuda (1863–1941), who formed part of a growing circle of Sephardi local scholars engaged in a variety of intellectual activities: translation, literary interpretation, journalism, lexicography, philology, and education.

• Continue reading: The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes over Sephardic Culture and Identity between Arabic and Hebrew
• Yuval Evri, The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2020 (in Hebrew). Cover: Nevet Yitzhak, 2013.

Dead Sea Scroll fragments thought to be blank reveal text

By Joan Taylor | 15 May 2020 – New research has revealed that four Dead Sea Scroll manuscript fragments housed at The University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library, which were previously thought to be blank, do in fact contain text. The discovery means that The University of Manchester is the only institution in the UK to possess authenticated textual fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. – The study was undertaken as part of a Leverhulme-funded study held at King’s College London, a collaboration between Professor Joan Taylor (King’s College London), Professor Marcello Fidanzio (Faculty of Theology of Lugano) and Dr Dennis Mizzi (University of Malta).

• Continue reading: Dead Sea Scroll fragments thought to be blank reveal text

Josephus in the modern world: Book launch

With a book launch and reception on Monday 13 January 2020, 6-7.30pm (Council Room, K2.29, Strand Campus), we celebrate three outcomes of the AHRC-funded research project ‘The Reception of Josephus in Jewish Culture from the 18th Century to the Present’, based at the University of Oxford and King’s: Josephus’s The Jewish War: A Biography (Princeton, 2019) authored by Martin Goodman; The Josephus Reception Archive, curated by Tessa Rajak; and Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture (Leiden, 2019), edited by Andrea Schatz.

• Continue reading: Josephus in the modern world: Book launch

Sephardic Haskalah and Al-Andaluz

Professor Eliezer Papo (Ben Gurion University of the Negev) will give a lecture on Sephardic Haskalah and Al-Andaluz: Transmission or Construction of Collective Memory? on Tuesday 10 December 2019 (5-6:30pm, King’s College London, Bush House, Lecture Theatre 2), focusing on Yaakov Mosheh Ḥay Altarats’s Trezoro de Yisrael. Yaakov Mosheh Ḥay Altarats was among the last traditional Sephardic hakhamim and one of the first autodidact maskilim. By examining how he teaches his Sephardic audience about the place of their ‘original origin’, the lecture will ask which parts of t/his knowledge might be traditional and which might represent the author’s exposure to modern historiography.

• Continue reading: Sephardic Haskalah and Al-Andaluz

In San Diego: Welcome to our reception (2019)

The 2019 Annual Meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature are taking place in sunny San Diego, California. Our reception will be held on Monday 25 November 2019, 7.00–8.30 pm, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel (Pacific 16 suite). Friends and guests, prospective students and alumni are warmly encouraged to join us to hear about recent developments in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, including exciting opportunities at Master’s and Doctoral level – and to enjoy a get-together to a background of some good London music.

Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women

Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz's new book, Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women, will be published by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in the coming year. As well as being the first academic study of Orthodox Jewish women in London, it traces wider developments that can be observed in Orthodox Jewish communities across the world, and explores how new norms of lived religion have emerged in London, influenced by both the rise of feminism and the backlash against it.

• Continue reading: Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women

4th International winter school in Jewish studies

The University of Amsterdam, Open University of Israel and the Department of Theology & Religious Studies at King’s are organizing the 4th International Winter School in Jewish Studies jointly with Charles University, Prague. From 17-23 January 2020, 30 MA and PhD students from Amsterdam, Israel, London and Prague will explore this year’s theme: ‘Jewish Cultures and Media of Transmission: From Prague Into the World’. Colleagues from all four institutions have just met in Prague to prepare for the Winter School – on a very bright summer day – and to put together the preliminary programme. If you would like to find out more about the Winter School, please e-mail Andrea Schatz. In 2021, our travelling Winter School will take place in Madrid. Images: Preparing for the Winter School in summer: Jana Tomešová, Dita Válová, Pavel Sládek, Bart Wallet, Andrea Schatz, Avri Bar-Levav.

Josephus: the first modern Jew?

By Andrea Schatz | 20 May 2019 Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture is the outcome of an AHRC-funded research project, based at the University of Oxford and King’s, on the reception of the ancient historian in the modern Jewish world. 14 authors from Europe, Israel and the United States explore how Jews read and re-imagined Josephus’s life and works for their own times. – Whether in early modern Amsterdam, in Moses Mendelssohn’s Berlin, in the pages of London’s Jewish Chronicle, in post-Napoleonic France, among Orthodox historians in Europe, Palestine or New York, in the theatre, radio and newspapers of the Yishuv, or in the Ghettos of Warsaw and Vilna, Josephus was evoked as a model, a warning, or an intriguing companion for the present moment. He was admired, imitated, criticized and put on trial as if he were a contemporary figure: a modern Jew avant la lettre. – Josephus’s presence in Jewish debates about the modern world is striking in its immediacy, whether he was addressed as a hero or a traitor, but, as this volume shows, such immediacy was the effect of many intense and fascinating efforts to mediate between ambivalent ancient texts and complex modern concerns. Sarah Pearce highlights a particularly fruitful period of mediation and re-appropriation in the Jewish Chronicle: "For [the] proponents of Jewish advancement and emancipation in Britain, Josephus is in many respects the model for key arguments about the contribution of Jews to western civilization and the compatibility of Jewish culture with Anglican Britain. As so many of the voices represented in the Jewish Chronicle make plain – from Hurwitz to Aguilar to Raphall – what was so urgently needed was a new Josephus to make the case for Jews in nineteenth-century Britain." Alongside the volume, the research project, led by Martin Goodman, has set up the Josephus Reception Archive, curated by Tessa Rajak, which offers a wide range of short introductions to key moments, authors and texts in the modern reception of Josephus. It also invites scholars to contribute their own findings about the modern Josephus and Josephus’s modernity.

• Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture, ed. Andrea Schatz (Studies in Jewish History and Culture, vol. 55), Leiden: Brill, 2019

Mass displacement in the mid-twentieth century: Maccabaean Lecture

Professor David N. Myers, Sady and Ludwig Kahn Professor of Jewish History at UCLA, held the Maccabaean Lecture 2019-20: ‘Mass Displacement in the Mid-Twentieth-Century: A Comparative Look at Europe, Palestine, and the Middle East’ (Monday 4 November 2019, 6pm, Old Committee Room, Strand Campus). The current moment of massive population displacement in the world leads us to seek out historical precedents and explanations. Most immediately, the Second World War and its aftermath come to mind, when millions of people were displaced, rendered homeless or repopulated.

• Continue reading: Mass displacement in the mid-twentieth century: Maccabaean lecture

Hebrew learning in medieval England

Professor Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, held this year's Maccabaean Lecture: ‘To Grasp the Hebraica Veritas: Different Hebrew Learning Approaches in Medieval England’ (Monday 4 February 2019, 6pm, Council Room, Strand Campus). – Thirteenth-century England witnessed an unprecedented interest in the study of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic commentaries among Christian scholars. In order to access these original texts, some scholars turned to their Jewish neighbours for instructions, others attempted to produce new paedagogical linguistic tools. This paper explores approaches to Hebrew grammar developed and implemented by Christian Hebraists in medieval England, and seeks to indentify their sources of Hebrew linguistic knowledge.

Four sexes, two genders

By Tali Artman-Partock | 4 December 2018 – In a new article, Moshe Lavee and I trace how a categorization we find in Jewish sources of the 2nd-3rd centuries that differentiates between four sexes – male, female, androgynes (both female and male), and tumtum (neither male nor female, or unknown if male or female) – interacts with a legal system that knows only of two genders – men and women. We show how the efforts of the earlier sources to accommodate the special status of intersex persons as non-binary and change the legal system accordingly is undermined in the later Babylonian Talmud. In the latter we find an essentialist turn, which ‘forces’ intersex people into binary gender categories and treats them ultimately as defective males or as cases of doubt, and not as a sex unto itself.

• Tali Artman Partock and Moshe Lavee, 'Four Sexes, Two Genders: The Rabbinic Move from Legal to Essentialist Polarisation of Identities', in: The Legal Status of Intersex People, ed. Jens M. Scherpe, Anatol Dutta, Tobias Helms, Intersentia, 2018.