"Entangled Jewish and Christian Retellings of the Hebrew Bible in Medieval Spain"
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Joseph and Gertie Schwartz Memorial Lecture
"Entangled Jewish and Christian Retellings of the Hebrew Bible in Medieval Spain"
David Wacks (University of Oregon)
Date: Monday October 4, 2021 4PM
Description: Medieval Iberians participated in a culture of Biblical narrative that fused the doctrines of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity with a vernacular culture common to all three groups. Medieval Iberians expressed these retellings in a corpus that includes versifications, chronicles, translations, art, and exegesis. In this talk, I will demonstrate how Iberian Jews and Christians created entangled, mutually intelligible, yet doctrinally distinct retellings of stories from the Hebrew Bible using shared traditions, techniques, and common spoken languages.
About the Speaker: David A. Wacks is Head of the Department of Romance Languages and Professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon. He earned his PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley in 2003. In 2006 he was Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. He is author of Framing Iberia: Frametales and Maqamat in Medieval Spain, (Brill, 2007), winner of the 2009 La corónica award, and Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature: Jewish Cultural Production before and after 1492 (Indiana University Press, 2015), winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Sephardic Culture, and Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World (University of Toronto Press, 2019). He is also co-editor, with Michelle M. Hamilton and Sarah J. Portnoy, of Wine, Women, and Song: Hebrew and Arabic Poetry of Medieval Iberia (Juan de la Cuesta, 2004); co-editor, with Michelle M. Hamilton, of The Study of al-Andalus: The Scholarship and Legacy of James T. Monroe (ILEX Foundation, 2018), and General Editor of Open Iberia/América: Teaching Anthology (https://openiberiaamerica.hcommons.org/). He blogs on his current research at http://davidwacks.uoregon.edu.
**This event will be conducted via Zoom. To attend the lecture, please visit *this* link on Monday, October 4th at 4pm.