DIES ACADEMICUS 2024, October 8th

Join us for the 2024 Dies Academicus on October 8th

Jews and Arabic: Judeo-Arabic, Its Literature, and Why It Matters

In this lecture, we will immerse ourselves in the revolutionary innovations in Jewish literature that occurred during the critical era of Rabbinic Judaism between the sixth and eleventh centuries. During this period, Arabic was the native language of the vast majority of the Jewish population, and Arabic was without a doubt the language of choice for Jewish authors. We will emerge with an understanding of the sweeping linguistic and cultural transformations in Judeo-Arabic religious scholarship that shaped Judaism as we know it today.

Miriam Goldstein was trained at Harvard, Cambridge and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A specialist in medieval Judeo-Arabic texts, Goldstein focuses on interreligious relations in the medieval Arabic-speaking world as well as Judeo-Arabic Bible exegesis.

She is author of A Judeo-Arabic Parody of the Life of Jesus: The Toledot Yeshu Helene Narrative (2023) and Karaite Exegesis in Medieval Jerusalem (2011), as well as numerous articles on Arabic and Judeo-Arabic literature, and is co-editor of Beyond Religious Borders: Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World (2011) and Authorship in Mediaeval Arabic and Persian Literatures (2019). Her work has been supported by the Israel Science Foundation, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Minerva Stiftung, and the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development. She is currently completing a critical edition and translation of the Judeo-Arabic Genesis commentary of the tenth-century Karaite scholar Ya‘qub al-Qirqisani, and leads the project “Parodies on the Life of Jesus in Yemen: Towards the Origins and Development of the Toledot Yeshu Literature” (Israel Science Foundation 2063/22).