'All Liberties are Sisters': Europe and the Orient in Jewish Responses to the "Damascus Affair" Seminar
- Time:
- 18:00
- Date:
- 1 November 2016
- Venue:
- Lecture Theatre C, Avenue Campus, University of Southampton SO17 1BF
For more information regarding this seminar, please email The Parkes Institute at parkes@southampton.ac.uk .
Event details
Part of The Parkes Institute's Research Seminar Series for 2016/2017.
'All Liberties are Sisters': Europe and the Orient in Jewish Responses to the "Damascus Affair"
In 1840, members of the Jewish community in Damascus were accused of having murdered two Christians for ritual purposes. When news of the ‘Affair’ reached France, Germany and England, European newspapers did not reject the accusations out of hand: the blood libel was discussed again across Europe at a time when European Jews hoped to be accepted, finally, as full and equal citizens. This paper will turn to Jewish responses to the ‘Affair’ that have not received much attention: it will discuss notions of political and historical connectedness between Europe and the ‘Orient’, as they were articulated in Jewish journals in France and Germany, as well as visions of separation. With particular attention to the critical interventions of Adolphe Crémieux and Heinrich Heine, it will be asked how concepts of interdependence as well as hopes for independence were interrogated in the Jewish, European and colonial contexts of the time.
This seminar will be chaired by Professor Joachim Schlör.
Speaker information
Dr Andrea Schatz, King's College London. Dr Andrea Schatz is a Reader in Jewish Studies at King’s College London. Her current research focuses on ‘imagined geographies’ in Jewish historical writing, while she also pursues a long-standing interest in Hebrew and Yiddish as two languages that shaped Ashkenazic interpretations of nation and diaspora. She has published widely on questions of secularism and on Jewish ‘connected histories’ in the early modern period and the eighteenth century. Recently, she was a co-investigator in the AHRC-funded research project "The Reception of Josephus in Jewish Culture from the Eighteenth Century to the Present" (Oxford).