Please join us for our upcoming seminar on: "Social and intellectual processes among the Jews of Egypt in the 15th century" by Dr. Dotan Arad (Bar-Ilan University).
Monday, March 1, 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
The 16th century is considered as a period of a great change in Eastern Jewry. The huge immigration, mainly of the Sephardi exiles, changed many aspects of local Jewry in the Eastern Mediterranean shore. The culture of the local Judeo-Arabic speakers was deeply influenced by their exposure Jews to the traditions, customs and ideas brought by the immigrants. However, signs of change appeared already in the 15th century. In this lecture, I intend to discuss the intercultural encounter between locals and immigrants in this period. I want to search for the first signs of change that appeared among the local communities already in the 15th Century.
As a case study, I will focus on Egypt. My central source will be a unique corpus of documents: an archive of letters and documents of one of the leaders of the Jewish community of Alexandria in the second half of the 15th century. This corpus will be used for understanding some change processes which occurred among Eastern Jewry, and in Egypt in particular. Among these processes there were demographic changes, return to Judaism of conversos Jews, strengthening of the Maghrebi Jews in society and leadership, and intellectual developments within the Jewish Elite.
Dotan Arad (Ph.D. Hebrew University, 2013) is a senior lecturer in the department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry in Bar-Ilan University. His research interests include the Jews of Egypt, Palestine and Syria in the Mamluk period and the early Ottoman period; the Karaite Jews in those periods, Responasa literature of the Jewish sages in the Ottoman Empire, Judaeo-Arabic literature and the Cairo Genizah documents.
His last book (with Esther M. Wagner) is Wisdom and Greatness in One Place: The Alexandrian Trader Moses Ben Judah and his Circle (Leiden: Brill), will be published soon.
His current research focuses on the Karaite Jews in the Ottoman Empire, mainly in the Arab provinces. The aim of this research is preparing a comprehensive monograph on the Karaites in Egypt, Syria (Damascus), and Palestine (Jerusalem and Hebron) during the Ottoman period.