[Andalusi Studies] please post--Sephardic Identities Fellowship application due October 9

[Ryan Szpiech]

Please post. Deadline is October 9.


The Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan is now accepting applications for fellowships in the 2018-2019 academic year (September to April), organized around the theme of " Sephardic Identities, Medieval and Early Modern.” Please consider applying (the due date is October 9), and also please feel free to circulate with colleagues. The theme description, which is also online at https://lsa.umich.edu/judaic/institute/themes.html <https://lsa.umich.edu/judaic/institute/themes.html> follows below.
 
For a link to the application website and for further information, see https://lsa.umich.edu/judaic/institute/applications.html <https://lsa.umich.edu/judaic/institute/applications.html>
 
"Sephardic Identities: Medieval and Early Modern"
Before the contemporary period, the Jews of Sepharad (Iberia) were regularly depicted—and regularly depicted themselves—as part of a unique and exclusive group, more distinguished than the Jews of other lands. From highlighting biblical references to “the captivity of Jerusalem, that is in Sepharad” (Obadiah 1:20) as evidence of the antiquity of Sephardic Jewry, to preserving medieval myths about refugee rabbis from Babylon, reviving Talmudic academies in Iberia, examples abound of how Sephardic identity was always marked by a claim to unique origins and distinguished membership. What are the origins of this traditional claim to Sephardic exceptionalism? How were traditional claims enhanced or altered by the decline in Jewish-Christian relations in the Christian kingdoms of Iberia in the later Middle Ages and by the eventual expulsion of the Sephardim, first from the Spanish kingdoms in 1492 and then from Portugal in 1496? How did such claims survive or evolve over the early modern period and contribute to Haskalah myths of the Sephardic “Golden Age” or to the eventual rhetoric of Jewish emancipation? “Sephardic Identities: Medieval and Early Modern” proposes to look at Sephardic myths of identity from a diachronic perspective. Rather than focusing on only one period, this Frankel Institute year looks to bring together two different lines of inquiry into Sephardic identity: the origins of Sephardic exceptionalism within medieval Sephardic communities themselves; and the evolution of such notions under pressure from forced conversion and inquisition, expulsion and diaspora, and ghettoization and emancipation.

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Ryan Szpiech
Editor, Medieval Encounters
Associate Professor, Romance Languages & Judaic Studies
University of Michigan
http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/ryanszpiech/ <http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/ryanszpiech/>

Mailing address:
4108 MLB
812 E. Washington St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275

 szpiech at umich.edu <mailto:szpiech at umich.edu>
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