Please join us for our upcoming seminar on: "Jews as Cultural Brokers: The Perpetuation of Arabic Scholarship in Christian Spain (Fourteenth-Fifteenth centuries)" by Dr. Ilil Baum (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

Monday, March 22, 2021, from 17:30 to 19:00 (Israel time) via Zoom.

To receive the Zoom link, please subscribe by contacting Alon Ben Yehuda on alon.ben-yehuda@mail.huji.ac.il.

ABSTRACT

A less familiar chapter in the history of Jews and of Islamic civilization is the perpetuation of the knowledge of Arabic among the Jews of Christian Spain during the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, hundreds of years after the end of Muslim rule. My analysis is based on over two-hundred mainly unpublished manuscripts written in Arabic in Hebrew script by Sephardic hands as well as Arabic-into-Hebrew translations from the period. I will concentrate on Jewish brokers, especially Jewish physicians and scientists who copied, translated, and owned Arabic manuscripts. Later than thirteenth-century Toledo, the testimonies point to the Crown or Aragon (notably in Barcelona and Saragossa) as an active center for Arabic erudition among Jewish families until their expulsion in 1492.

Ilil Baum is a postdoctoral fellow at the Buber Society of Fellows, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She earned her PhD from the Hebrew University (2018), which included two years as a visiting scholar at the University of Barcelona. Previously she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Frankel Institute for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and the Cohn Institute at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on the interplay of language and identity among the Jews of Spain on the eve of their expulsion; and on the role of language in the emergence of Sephardic identity in the early modern Mediterranean, especially in the Ottoman Empire (Salonica and Istanbul) and North Africa.