Ammiel Alcalay (Queens College and the Graduate Center CUNY)

The Future of Old Scholarship: A Poetics of My Experience Studying Jews and Arabs in the Levant

Ammiel Alcalay inaugurated the second edition with a dialogue about his experiences researching Jews and Arabs in the Levant. We discussed the need to come up with non-linear models to represent history and see the connections and reverberations between time-periods, modes of thought, languages, genres, etc. Alcalay brought to the fore George Kobler’s idea that it would be much more productive to our understanding of history if, instead of taking Biology as a model, we rather used the language of electrodynamics as metaphors and thus we spoke about generating centers, relay points, circuits, etc. He spoke about his experiences researching Mizrahi literature and shared how his theoretical production is embedded in his own experiences in the field conducting research with activists, witnessing a historical period and the struggle of a people, the conflicts of a country, the marginalization of populations, the abuse of power. Alcalay discussed the politics of translation and how certain translations never get to be published because they don’t fit a certain narrative about a people, a country, a culture. 

Lital Levy (Princeton University)

Esther Moyal, Emile Zola and Alfred Dreyfus: An Arab-Jewish Feminist on Affair that Rocked the World

Lital Levy introduced us to the work and history of Esther Azhari Moyal, the only Jewish woman writer of Arabic in her day. Levy discussed Esther Moyal's role as a star of 19th-century Arab feminism, prolific journalist, and literary translator, as well as an activist for Jewish causes. Her lecture led us to discuss the need to change the scholarly frames so experiences such as those of Jewish writers in Arabic and their stories may not only be comprehended in adequate terms but also get a chance to have a legitimate place in history. We recalled our previous conversation with Ammiel Alcalay in the first meeting of this series, about the need to come up with non-linear models to represent history and see the connections and reverberations between time-periods, geographical points, modes of thought, languages, genres, etc. Lital Levy built on this idea to emphasize the importance of creating new and different epistemic frames for thinking about Arab-Jewish modernity and the participation of Jewish Arabic writers in the discourses of their time and place.

Deborah Starr (Cornell University) and Eyal Sagi-Bizawe (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Nostalgia as Critique: The Case of Jews in Egyptian Cinema

Deborah Starr and Eyal Sagi-Bizawe shared with us an amazing dialogue about the representation of local Jews in Egyptian cinema. Through clips from different movies, they took us on a historical journey through the transformations in the representations of Egyptian Jews. They drew on a concept of nostalgia as critique of the present and capable of subverting nationalistic narratives of purity. We saw clips that presented Jews as both local and loyal to Egypt, in a past that could be described as Levantine, cosmopolitan and tolerant, even if that past was also not exactly void of conflict and ambivalence. Their discussion added another angle to one of the themes that keep appearing in this year’s seminar: the mutation of the Judeo-Arab historical reality into an oddity or an anecdote with limited impact on how we think about Jewish history. However, the number of researchers and cultural stakeholders working on the reparation of different conceptualizations of the Levant as a cultural horizon and on the transformation of canonized Jewish history should certainly give us all hope. Our seminar is a modest attempt to contribute to these trends of thought. 

Vanessa Paloma Elbaz (University of Cambridge)

Rhizomic Networks of Unruptured Continuity From 16th Century Italy to 21st Century Casablanca

Vanessa Paloma Elbaz shared with us a fascinating presentation on her research on Sephardi Jewish music repertoires from the perspective of memory transmission and the exploration of the interconnection between music, ritual, philosophy and belief. Dr Elbaz emphasized how the words of the past, both those of our sages and those of our ancestors, continue to impact our lives today in a very specific way, which should have a repercussion on the way we conceive and create our epistemic frameworks. She said “The temporality of the words of the ancestors is immediate and there is little perceived distance between the life and experience of the rabbis and the antiguas, the matriarchs of medieval Al Andalus and a Moroccan Jew in Paris, Casablanca, Caracas o Ashdod. Of course, this perception of an unruptured continuity creates avenues for insertion of attitudes and relationships to time, sounds and being that might seem foreign to others who have accepted the idea of the nonnegotiable rupture of the Enlightenment, but that makes perfect sense and works quite well within the construction neo- Al Andalus in many Sephardi communities”. She built yet another layer to this collective effort to reclaim old approaches, old scholarship, as Ammiel Alcalay mentioned in his lecture, and pull their thread to continue weaving ours in the present.