Jewish Studies at King’s is an interdisciplinary network of students and scholars associated with King’s College London. Our research draws on anthropology, history, literary studies, religious studies, sociology and related fields to explore Jewish life in its various Christian, Muslim and secular contexts from antiquity to the present moment.
When studying and teaching the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, rabbinic literature, medieval Iberia, early modern Jewish worlds and Jewish modernity, we almost always encounter narratives, practices and key issues more than once. This is of particular interest to us: together, we explore Jewish texts and cultures not only within their specific historical contexts, but also in the process of their creative reception and transmission and in relation to current questions and debates.
Jewish Studies at King’s is a lively place of academic interaction and exchange locally and internationally. The centre is involved with the University of Amsterdam and the Open University of Israel in organising an International Winter School in Jewish Studies for MA and PhD students (Athens 2019, Prague 2020, Madrid 2022, Wrocław 2023). In July 2022, we hosted the international conference of the British and Irish Association of Jewish Studies (BIAJS): "Unfolding Time: Texts - Practices - Politics". The research group also offers reading groups, a research seminar, and the annual Maccabaean Lecture, and it regularly organises international workshops and conferences.
We are delighted to meet colleagues, students and members of the wider public interested in our research at our events. And if you consider studying with us, you can contact any of us for further information.
Publications
Recent publications:
-
Redeeming marriage? Bittersweet intimacy and the dialectics of liberation among Haredi Jews in London
Sheldon, R., Frosh, S. & Vyrgioti, M., 16 Jan 2024, (Accepted/In press) In: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI). 34 p. -
Un-writing the End: Histories and Counter-Histories in the Early Modern Yosippon
Schatz, A., 2024, In: From Josephus to Yosippon and Beyond: Text - Re-interpretations - Afterlives. Avioz, M., Bay, C. & Henten, J. W. V. (eds.). Brill, (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism). -
Who Counts? Anti-antisemitism and the racial politics of emotion
Sutcliffe, A., 24 May 2024, (E-pub ahead of print) In: ETHNICITIES. p. 1 21 p. -
Hope, Denial, and the Integration of Loss: Reading Lamentations in the Wake of Trauma
Joyce, P. M., 9 Oct 2023, (Accepted/In press) Readings of Trauma. Grund-Wittenberg , A. & Schult, M. (eds.). Leiden: Brill, (Studies in the Cultural Contexts of the Bible ). -
Literary Approaches to the Hebrew Bible
Joyce, P. M., 4 Oct 2023, (Accepted/In press) Understanding the Hebrew Bible: Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study. Barton, J. (ed.). Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press; Oxford -
The Politics of Language Choice in Haredi Communities in Israel
Munro, H., 2022, In: Journal of Jewish Languages. 33, 1, p. 1-31
Activities

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:

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).

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).
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.

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.
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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.
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.
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.
News
Professor Joan Taylor nominated for Jewish Studies book prize
Judges for the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies (BIAJS ) book prize give Joan Taylor honourable mention.

Events

Ambiguities of Exile - A Joint King's-Oxford Workshop
How did Jewish writing begin to reflect on ambiguities of exile, home and return already in ancient contexts, and how did such reflections evolve through...
Please note: this event has passed.

International Conference - Jews and Colonialism: Communities & Networks on the African Continent
This conference brings together fresh research on Jews and Jewish communities in colonial contexts, focusing on the African continent in the 19th and 20th...
Please note: this event has passed.

Lecture - Shmuel Feiner: The Jewish Eighteenth Century and the Transformative Year 1782
The Eighteenth Century was the first modern century in Jewish history. The deep changes that took place in its course shaped the following generations, and...
Please note: this event has passed.

Hebrew Bible Workshop and Ethel M. Wood Lecture
Keynote address and Lecture by Professor Konrad Schmid (Zurich)
Please note: this event has passed.
Introductions
Who's who? Our members' research and teaching interests in Jewish religion, culture and society:
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Laliv Clenman
Laliv’s research focuses on classical rabbinic sources, from the Mishna and Tosefta through the halakhic and aggadic midrashim to the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. She is currently exploring the complex interplay between legal and narrative texts for her book on Intermarriage in Rabbinic Law and Lore. Laliv’s interests in gender, sexuality and the fate of the individual under rabbinic law come together in her work on a feminist commentary to the first chapter of Bavli Ketubot. Laliv supervises PhD projects engaging with historical and contemporary issues related to rabbinic law and narrative at King’s, and teaches future progressive rabbis in Rabbinic Literature and languages at Leo Baeck College, London (LBC). – Laliv’s webpage at the LBC.
Yuval Evri
Yuval’s current research project focuses on a group of Arab-Jewish intellectuals in early 20th-century Palestine who viewed their time as an ‘Andalusian moment’ in which Jews and Muslims came together in a shared homeland, as they had done in medieval Iberia before the expulsion. While the increasing hostility between Jews and Arabs opened a linguistic breach between Hebrew and Arabic, they insisted on holding on to both languages, positioning themselves in the borderland between them, and using translation as a political and cultural tool. Yuval’s research focuses on linguistic, structural, and thematic aspects that reflect the turbulent Palestinian politics of the 1920s and 1930s, on their public reception, and on their broader political context and implications. Since 2021, Yuval is an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University.
Wendy Filer
Wendy’s PhD research focuses on the judicial system of London’s Sephardic Jews in the 18th and early 19th centuries to investigate the effects, both positive and negative, of local legal culture on a minority legal system. England’s pluralistic legal culture, favouring arbitration and mediation of disputes, provided a space within which the community’s Mahamad could offer a halakhically compliant informal dispute resolution service. This legal space promoted compromise as a religious value, whilst at the same time enabling access to secular justice when it failed. Wendy analyses how open access to secular justice affected individual jurisdictional choice, thereby shaping the vibrancy and long-term viability of this community-based Jewish legal space.
Paul Joyce
Paul’s work focuses on the exegesis and also the reception of selected Hebrew Bible texts, including the books of Ezekiel, Lamentations/ Eichah, and Amos. Publications include Ezekiel: A Commentary (T&T Clark, 2007), Lamentations through the Centuries (Blackwell, 2013, with Diana Lipton), and The God Ezekiel Creates (T&T Clark, 2015, edited with Dalit Rom-Shiloni). He is currently writing a commentary on Amos for the Illuminations Commentary series (Eerdmans). More information on Paul’s profile.
Susannah Rees
Susannah is a PhD student in her first year at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the role that cosmetics play in the construction and performance of identity in ancient Israel. She uses anthropological models, ethnographic material, and archaeological data to illuminate the role of body adornment in prophetic texts in the Hebrew Bible as well as comparative material from the Ancient Near East. Susannah is also the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies studentship holder in 2021-22.
Emma Rozenberg
Emma’s interdisciplinary PhD research explores mamzerut – a stigma which attaches to children born of certain forbidden relationships under Jewish law and is passed on, indefinitely, through generations. Her focus is on mamzerut as a contemporary issue within the British Jewish community. Through interviewing individuals affected by mamzerut, and rabbis, activists and others with professional experience of the issue, she combines qualitative research with halakhic analysis and gender and legal theory to examine the full impact of mamzerut in the UK today. – To participate in her research, or for more information, please contact emma.rozenberg@kcl.ac.uk.
Andrea Schatz
At the moment, Andrea wonders how ‘progress’ has been made: how did early modern European Jews engage – in Hebrew and Yiddish – with the history of their exilic times and places? How did they relate to ‘progress’ as an emerging normative concept in Christian, secular and colonial projects of modernity? How did they promote continuity and connectedness as critical terms? And how might their texts speak to current reflections on multiple temporalities, displacement and belonging in a fragile world? In 2020-21, Andrea has been pursuing these questions as a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). More information on Andrea’s profile.
Ruth Sheldon
Ruth explores what is at stake when conflicting groups are brought into contact within secular-Christian and post-colonial spaces in contemporary Britain. She has approached this through a long-term ethnographic study published as Tragic Encounters and Ordinary Ethics: Palestine-Israel in British Universities (2016). More recently, she has studied everyday relationships between neighbours in Hackney, London. These projects have given rise to her interest in questions about Jewish life within secular-modernity, leading to a study on ‘Jewish unbelief’, and ongoing reflections on what it means to undertake Jewish ethnography within the field of British sociology. More information on Ruth’s profile.
Jonathan Stökl
Jonathan studies biblical texts in their ancient contexts, informed by modern philology, theory, and understanding of the wider ancient world. I currently study priestly ordination in the Bible and in other ancient Near Eastern texts. In the past my work has focussed on prophets and prophecy. More information on Jonathan’s profile.
Adam Sutcliffe
Adam is a historian of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, in particular in relation to the early modern and modern history of western thought. His book on the idea of Jewish world-historical purpose, among both Jews and non-Jews, from c. 1600 to the present has been published by Princeton University Press in 2019. More information on Adam’s profile.
Joan Taylor
Joan Taylor works on Second Temple Judaism, through to the Bar Kokhba Revolt, particularly in regard to history, archaeology and women. In terms of literature, she is most interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo and Josephus, and also in classical authors writing about Jews. She is the author of numerous books and articles in this field, including Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria: Philo’s ‘Therapeutae’ Reconsidered (2003) and, most recently, the Essenes, the Scrolls and the Dead Sea (2012). Her commentary on Philo of Alexandria’s treatise De Vita Contemplativa is shortly to appear with Brill/SBL. More information on Joan’s profile.
Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz
Lindsey’s research focuses on modern Jewish women and different facets of their religious lives. Her current projects include an investigation into the possibly magical nature of some contemporary Jewish women’s practices, a study of the first three women to receive Orthodox rabbinic ordination, and a gender-based reappraisal of Haym Soloveitchik’s famous article, ‘Rupture and Reconstruction’ (1994). Lindsey also teaches at the London School of Jewish Studies (LSJS) and is active in interfaith textual study, particularly Scriptural Reasoning. Her book Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women has been published by the Littman Library in 2019.
Julian Weiss
Julian teaches and researches the literary culture of medieval and early modern Iberia with a particular focus on interfaith relations between Muslims, Jews and Christians. As part of a major collaborative research project funded by the AHRC, ‘Language Acts and Worldmaking’, he is currently studying the cultural legacies of these relations after the expulsions from Iberia at the end of the Middle Ages. His book project on the early modern reception of Josephus examines how translations, prints and reading practices open up multiple perspectives on Christian/Jewish relations in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking worlds and their contact zones, while his research on the modern ballad tradition in ladino from Morocco and elsewhere explores how the poetic representation of the medieval Christian/Muslim frontier operates as a form of cultural memory for Sephardic Jews of the twentieth century. More information on Julian’s profile.
Publications
Recent publications:
-
Redeeming marriage? Bittersweet intimacy and the dialectics of liberation among Haredi Jews in London
Sheldon, R., Frosh, S. & Vyrgioti, M., 16 Jan 2024, (Accepted/In press) In: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI). 34 p. -
Un-writing the End: Histories and Counter-Histories in the Early Modern Yosippon
Schatz, A., 2024, In: From Josephus to Yosippon and Beyond: Text - Re-interpretations - Afterlives. Avioz, M., Bay, C. & Henten, J. W. V. (eds.). Brill, (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism). -
Who Counts? Anti-antisemitism and the racial politics of emotion
Sutcliffe, A., 24 May 2024, (E-pub ahead of print) In: ETHNICITIES. p. 1 21 p. -
Hope, Denial, and the Integration of Loss: Reading Lamentations in the Wake of Trauma
Joyce, P. M., 9 Oct 2023, (Accepted/In press) Readings of Trauma. Grund-Wittenberg , A. & Schult, M. (eds.). Leiden: Brill, (Studies in the Cultural Contexts of the Bible ). -
Literary Approaches to the Hebrew Bible
Joyce, P. M., 4 Oct 2023, (Accepted/In press) Understanding the Hebrew Bible: Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study. Barton, J. (ed.). Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press; Oxford -
The Politics of Language Choice in Haredi Communities in Israel
Munro, H., 2022, In: Journal of Jewish Languages. 33, 1, p. 1-31
Activities

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:

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).

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).
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.

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.
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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.
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.
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.
News
Professor Joan Taylor nominated for Jewish Studies book prize
Judges for the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies (BIAJS ) book prize give Joan Taylor honourable mention.

Events

Ambiguities of Exile - A Joint King's-Oxford Workshop
How did Jewish writing begin to reflect on ambiguities of exile, home and return already in ancient contexts, and how did such reflections evolve through...
Please note: this event has passed.

International Conference - Jews and Colonialism: Communities & Networks on the African Continent
This conference brings together fresh research on Jews and Jewish communities in colonial contexts, focusing on the African continent in the 19th and 20th...
Please note: this event has passed.

Lecture - Shmuel Feiner: The Jewish Eighteenth Century and the Transformative Year 1782
The Eighteenth Century was the first modern century in Jewish history. The deep changes that took place in its course shaped the following generations, and...
Please note: this event has passed.

Hebrew Bible Workshop and Ethel M. Wood Lecture
Keynote address and Lecture by Professor Konrad Schmid (Zurich)
Please note: this event has passed.
Introductions
Who's who? Our members' research and teaching interests in Jewish religion, culture and society:
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Laliv Clenman
Laliv’s research focuses on classical rabbinic sources, from the Mishna and Tosefta through the halakhic and aggadic midrashim to the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. She is currently exploring the complex interplay between legal and narrative texts for her book on Intermarriage in Rabbinic Law and Lore. Laliv’s interests in gender, sexuality and the fate of the individual under rabbinic law come together in her work on a feminist commentary to the first chapter of Bavli Ketubot. Laliv supervises PhD projects engaging with historical and contemporary issues related to rabbinic law and narrative at King’s, and teaches future progressive rabbis in Rabbinic Literature and languages at Leo Baeck College, London (LBC). – Laliv’s webpage at the LBC.
Yuval Evri
Yuval’s current research project focuses on a group of Arab-Jewish intellectuals in early 20th-century Palestine who viewed their time as an ‘Andalusian moment’ in which Jews and Muslims came together in a shared homeland, as they had done in medieval Iberia before the expulsion. While the increasing hostility between Jews and Arabs opened a linguistic breach between Hebrew and Arabic, they insisted on holding on to both languages, positioning themselves in the borderland between them, and using translation as a political and cultural tool. Yuval’s research focuses on linguistic, structural, and thematic aspects that reflect the turbulent Palestinian politics of the 1920s and 1930s, on their public reception, and on their broader political context and implications. Since 2021, Yuval is an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University.
Wendy Filer
Wendy’s PhD research focuses on the judicial system of London’s Sephardic Jews in the 18th and early 19th centuries to investigate the effects, both positive and negative, of local legal culture on a minority legal system. England’s pluralistic legal culture, favouring arbitration and mediation of disputes, provided a space within which the community’s Mahamad could offer a halakhically compliant informal dispute resolution service. This legal space promoted compromise as a religious value, whilst at the same time enabling access to secular justice when it failed. Wendy analyses how open access to secular justice affected individual jurisdictional choice, thereby shaping the vibrancy and long-term viability of this community-based Jewish legal space.
Paul Joyce
Paul’s work focuses on the exegesis and also the reception of selected Hebrew Bible texts, including the books of Ezekiel, Lamentations/ Eichah, and Amos. Publications include Ezekiel: A Commentary (T&T Clark, 2007), Lamentations through the Centuries (Blackwell, 2013, with Diana Lipton), and The God Ezekiel Creates (T&T Clark, 2015, edited with Dalit Rom-Shiloni). He is currently writing a commentary on Amos for the Illuminations Commentary series (Eerdmans). More information on Paul’s profile.
Susannah Rees
Susannah is a PhD student in her first year at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the role that cosmetics play in the construction and performance of identity in ancient Israel. She uses anthropological models, ethnographic material, and archaeological data to illuminate the role of body adornment in prophetic texts in the Hebrew Bible as well as comparative material from the Ancient Near East. Susannah is also the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies studentship holder in 2021-22.
Emma Rozenberg
Emma’s interdisciplinary PhD research explores mamzerut – a stigma which attaches to children born of certain forbidden relationships under Jewish law and is passed on, indefinitely, through generations. Her focus is on mamzerut as a contemporary issue within the British Jewish community. Through interviewing individuals affected by mamzerut, and rabbis, activists and others with professional experience of the issue, she combines qualitative research with halakhic analysis and gender and legal theory to examine the full impact of mamzerut in the UK today. – To participate in her research, or for more information, please contact emma.rozenberg@kcl.ac.uk.
Andrea Schatz
At the moment, Andrea wonders how ‘progress’ has been made: how did early modern European Jews engage – in Hebrew and Yiddish – with the history of their exilic times and places? How did they relate to ‘progress’ as an emerging normative concept in Christian, secular and colonial projects of modernity? How did they promote continuity and connectedness as critical terms? And how might their texts speak to current reflections on multiple temporalities, displacement and belonging in a fragile world? In 2020-21, Andrea has been pursuing these questions as a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). More information on Andrea’s profile.
Ruth Sheldon
Ruth explores what is at stake when conflicting groups are brought into contact within secular-Christian and post-colonial spaces in contemporary Britain. She has approached this through a long-term ethnographic study published as Tragic Encounters and Ordinary Ethics: Palestine-Israel in British Universities (2016). More recently, she has studied everyday relationships between neighbours in Hackney, London. These projects have given rise to her interest in questions about Jewish life within secular-modernity, leading to a study on ‘Jewish unbelief’, and ongoing reflections on what it means to undertake Jewish ethnography within the field of British sociology. More information on Ruth’s profile.
Jonathan Stökl
Jonathan studies biblical texts in their ancient contexts, informed by modern philology, theory, and understanding of the wider ancient world. I currently study priestly ordination in the Bible and in other ancient Near Eastern texts. In the past my work has focussed on prophets and prophecy. More information on Jonathan’s profile.
Adam Sutcliffe
Adam is a historian of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, in particular in relation to the early modern and modern history of western thought. His book on the idea of Jewish world-historical purpose, among both Jews and non-Jews, from c. 1600 to the present has been published by Princeton University Press in 2019. More information on Adam’s profile.
Joan Taylor
Joan Taylor works on Second Temple Judaism, through to the Bar Kokhba Revolt, particularly in regard to history, archaeology and women. In terms of literature, she is most interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo and Josephus, and also in classical authors writing about Jews. She is the author of numerous books and articles in this field, including Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria: Philo’s ‘Therapeutae’ Reconsidered (2003) and, most recently, the Essenes, the Scrolls and the Dead Sea (2012). Her commentary on Philo of Alexandria’s treatise De Vita Contemplativa is shortly to appear with Brill/SBL. More information on Joan’s profile.
Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz
Lindsey’s research focuses on modern Jewish women and different facets of their religious lives. Her current projects include an investigation into the possibly magical nature of some contemporary Jewish women’s practices, a study of the first three women to receive Orthodox rabbinic ordination, and a gender-based reappraisal of Haym Soloveitchik’s famous article, ‘Rupture and Reconstruction’ (1994). Lindsey also teaches at the London School of Jewish Studies (LSJS) and is active in interfaith textual study, particularly Scriptural Reasoning. Her book Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women has been published by the Littman Library in 2019.
Julian Weiss
Julian teaches and researches the literary culture of medieval and early modern Iberia with a particular focus on interfaith relations between Muslims, Jews and Christians. As part of a major collaborative research project funded by the AHRC, ‘Language Acts and Worldmaking’, he is currently studying the cultural legacies of these relations after the expulsions from Iberia at the end of the Middle Ages. His book project on the early modern reception of Josephus examines how translations, prints and reading practices open up multiple perspectives on Christian/Jewish relations in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking worlds and their contact zones, while his research on the modern ballad tradition in ladino from Morocco and elsewhere explores how the poetic representation of the medieval Christian/Muslim frontier operates as a form of cultural memory for Sephardic Jews of the twentieth century. More information on Julian’s profile.
Contact us
Jewish Studies at King’s
c/o Department of Theology & Religious Studies
King’s College London
22 Kingsway
London WC2B 6LE
Find out about events, studying at King's, PhD studies or Research areas by emailing one of the team.