Yossef Schwartz, Jewish Orientalism: From the 19th Century to the Present
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Speakers
Description
David Lipson Memorial Lecture
Yossef Schwartz (Tel Aviv University)
Jewish Orientalism: From the 19th Century to the Present
Since Eduard Said's 1978 breakthrough publication and as the Middle Eastern conflict became pivotal in global post-colonial discourse, Jewish Orientalism became a primary concern of modern Jewish intellectual and political history. Is 19th-century Jewish central European scholarship so deeply embedded in classic oriental studies to be viewed as part of European hegemonic discourse of power or as an anti-Christian emancipatory movement? And how do things change with the emergence of Zionism, the establishment of the Palestinian–Israeli academic institutions, and finally, the establishment of the Israeli state? In my talk, I will focus primarily on the inner Jewish balance of power as it develops and shifts between the pre-modern and modern era and between Oriental and European Jews. Such an introverted perspective on global questions reveals the inter-cultural nature of Jewish historical existence, its inner tensions (well reflected within present Israeli society), and its complex relation to its different cultural environments.
Yossef Schwartz is Bertram and Barbara Cohn Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, which he directed from 2009 until 2015. He was the head of the School of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Science Studies at Tel Aviv University from 2015 to 2020. In the years 2020-22, he was a visiting professor at the historical seminary of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and in 2022-3 a visiting professor at the Theological Faculty at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He is the editor of the Cambridge Journal Science in Context and coeditor with Christian Wiese and Orit Bashkin of the Mohr Siebeck book series Religious Dynamics – Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.
His Research Interests include the Social History of Knowledge, emphasizing the study of Medieval Institutions of Knowledge, especially Translations and Migration of Knowledge. His ERC, ISF, and GIF projects concentrated on Medieval and Early Modern Christian Hebraism and Christian Kabbala and Jewish Hebrew reception of Scholastic ideas (Latin into Hebrew – Hebrew into Latin, Arabic into Hebrew and Latin). He dedicated further publications to modern Jewish German thought, especially in its historiographic dimensions.