Please join us for our upcoming seminar on: "Formulae as a window to Cultural Brokerage: The Case of Catalan Jewish bilingual Charters" by Dr. Micha Perry (University of Haifa).

Monday, February 15, 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 center of medieval knowledge transmission from Arabic to Latin (and in Jewish culture: from Judeo-Arabic to Hebrew) was located in the Iberian changing frontiers between Islam and Christianity. During the late 11th- and 12th centuries Catalonia took a prominent place in this process known today as “the translation movement.”

This same region has left us dozens of Jewish bilingual charters, in Latin and Hebrew, from the 10th- and 11th-centuries. Through a comparison of the Hebrew formulae in these charters to Latin and Aramaic ones, I argue that Jewish landlords, ‘everyday’ Jews from economic circles, not only predated, but may have ushered in the intellectual translation movement.

Micha J. Perry (Ph.D. Hebrew University, 2008) is a senior lecturer of medieval Jewish history at the department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. His book: Tradition and Transformation: Knowledge Transmission among Medieval Jews was published in Hebrew, in 2010; His second book, Eldad’s Travels: from the lost Tribes to the Present, was published by Routledge in 2019. During 2018-2019 he was a visiting professor at Yale’s program in Judaic studies and History Department. His current project is A Cultural History of Jews and Languages in the Middle Ages.