HJS News
UCL Festival of the Arts May 7-17
Start:
May 7, 2013 1:00:00 PM
End:
May 17, 2013 7:30:00 PM
Location:
various venues, UCL Bloomsbury Campus More...
Europe and the Holocaust - Shifts in Public Debates in Poland, Germany and the UK
The panel investigates shifts in the role of the Holocaust in European
public debates in the recent past. Contrasting developments in Poland,
Germany, and Great Britain, we will identify common threads as well as
differences in perceiving, presenting, memorizing the mass murder of
European Jewries.
More...
Graduate Student Conference: Jewish Spirituality in Eastern Europe
The Yiddish Forverts has recently published a report from the Graduate Student Conference on ‘Jewish Spirituality in Eastern Europe – a Textual Perspective,’ held at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, UCL on 6-7 June, 2012. The article, authored by conference participant Adi Mahalel (Columbia University), is available online on the website of the Forverts: http://yiddish.forward.com/node/4589 More...
New publication: The Russian-Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917-1937
Over a period of three years, the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department at
UCL has been cooperating in a research project devoted to 'Cultural Continuitiy
in the Diaspora: Paris and Berlin in 1917-1937', based at the Department of
European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath, and in cooperation
with the Centre for European and International Studies at the University of
Portsmouth. The project had been funded by the Leverhulme Trust Academic
Collaboration-International Network scheme. Among the initiators of the project
had been the late John D. Klier. More...
International Graduate Student Conference 2012
The Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL is pleased to announce plans for an International Graduate Student Conference, devoted to explorations of multiple aspects of Jewish spirituality in Eastern Europe, to be held on 5th and 6th of June 2012 in London. The conference organizers invite graduate students and recent PhD holders to submit their proposals. We welcome presentations addressing any aspect of the religious history and religious culture of Eastern European Jewry, with an emphasis on their textual products. We are particularly interested in proposals which open up new perspectives and pose new questions regarding conceptual frameworks and traditional definitions used to describe Eastern Europe in the field of Jewish Studies. Topics may include:
More...
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Medieval Christian and Jewish Calendar Texts
A Leverhulme-Funded Research Project
The social and cultural importance of calendars was recognized by all
faiths in the Middle Ages, which explains why medieval scholars became
interested in the calendars of faiths other than their own. Jewish and
Christian scholars in the English Midlands, northern France, and western
Germany of the 12th - 15th centuries produced a substantial literature on
calendars. Although they each focussed on their own tradition, they also
took a great interest in each other's calendars: Christians wrote
extensively about the Jewish lunar calendar, and Jews about the Julian
calendar and the computation of the date of Easter. These writings
combined, in rich and variegated forms, the subjects of calendars,
chronology, astronomy, and liturgy.
This Leverhulme-funded research project will survey a large number of Hebrew and Latin calendar manuscripts that have been largely neglected until now in modern scholarship, prepare critical editions and translations of the texts, and investigate their broader historical and cultural implications. It will explore how information about calendars was exchanged between Christian and Jewish medieval scholars, and what motivated this unique manifestation of scholarly Christian-Jewish relations. It will also investigate how the study of calendars by Christians and Jews contributed to scientific developments in the field of astronomy and mathematics, as well as being grounded in the religious, liturgical practices of their respective religious traditions.
The project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust with an award of £134,338, running from October 2011 to September 2013. It is led by Prof. Sacha Stern (as Principal Investigator), an expert on ancient and medieval Jewish calendars and currently Principal Investigator of other research projects within the Department on the theme of medieval calendars: 'Medieval monographs on the Jewish calendar' (funded by the AHRC) and 'The Jewish calendar in early Islamic sources' (funded by the Leverhulme Trust). Most of the research for this project is carried out by Justine Isserles and Philipp Nothaft as Postdoctoral Research Associates. Justine Isserles is an expert in Jewish medieval liturgical-legal compendia from Franco-Germany in the tradition of the Mahzor Vitry, which contain substantial sections on Jewish and Christian calendars; Philipp Nothaft is an expert in Christian, Latin medieval texts on the computation of the date of Easter and the development of scientific chronology.
