Seminars

Within two years of the Expulsion from Spain, a family of Sephardi exiles in Ottoman Constantinople had established a printing press, which produced the first book known to have been printed with movable type in the Islamic world: the Arba’a Turim (Istanbul, 1493). The Ibn Nahmias family and their collaborators continued to print books for the following four decades, creating an invaluable window into the experience of Sephardi Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the sixteenth century. In this presentation, Dr. Sienna explores the work of the Ibn Nahmias press in Constantinople, surveying not only the content of the books they produced but also the significance of their physical and visual forms, as windows into the connections and transformations of Mediterranean Sephardi communities between the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. Focusing on the role of printing in the religious and social transformations of the early modern world, this presentation will offer a glimpse into the unique atmosphere of an early modern Jewish print house in the Islamic world.

In this presentation, Dr. Bloch will offer a broad overview of the transformation of tsniut (traditional female modesty) and explore its wider significance in several domains: the role of halakhah in shaping modern Judaism; the construction of gender and gender ideology within contemporary Jewish frameworks; and the strategies through which Orthodox Judaism engage with complex modern issues such as gender dynamics, legal authority, sexuality, and embodiment, all while attempting to preserve an image of seamless social, religious, and political continuity.

This book is a study of the life and thought of the Polish Jew Solomon Yom Tov Bennett (1767-1838), who immigrated to London, where he spent the last forty years of his life. In focusing on Bennett’s learned life, it underscores the significance of this singular writer, artist, and public figure, especially his remarkable dual interests in art and thought, his biblical scholarship, his social and intellectual connections with some of the most famous and accomplished Christian intellectuals of London, and his self-determination to complete his life-long ambition of serving Western civilization by correcting and rewriting the entire standard edition of the English Old Testament. Bennett’s Christian associates respected his learning and were willing to accept him as a Jew in their ranks. His integration into the upper echelons of the Christian literary establishment—dukes, jurists, theologians, and other scholars—did not impede his loyalty to his faith. On the contrary, Bennett’s Christian friends made him more Jewish, more convinced of Judaism’s moral force, and more secure in his own skin as a member of a proud minority among Christian elites supposedly liberated, so he hoped, from the dark hostility of the Christian past. His supreme act of translating the Bible constituted the ultimate payback he could offer the altruistic Christians he had met, open to welcoming him not despite his Jewishness but because of it. Bennett’s transformation from a Polish Jewish immigrant to a proud Anglo-Jew exemplifies a unique path of modern Jewish life and self-reflection, one ultimately shaped by the particular ambiance of his newly adopted country.