We wish all of our friends and colleagues another year of happiness and success. Let us continue to foster a spirit of friendship and collegiality as we work together to promote the study of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Origins in 2018.
The 9th Nangeroni Meeting
"The Period of the Middle Maccabees"
Date: June 10-15, 2018 Location: Milan, Italy
Historical assessment of the Maccabean Revolt and the early Hasmonean monarchy poses an increasingly complex conundrum. While few scholars reject the essential facticity of the main figures and events, there has been a sea-change in modern assessments of the ancient literary evidence on which historians rely. Much recent scholarship focuses on how profoundly content and form were shaped by the authors’ motivations, ideology, rhetorical strategies and literary precedents. In concert with new archaeological evidence, this has led to a recognition of a number of political and social improbabilities and incongruities, and to hypotheses of authorial fabrications. Increasingly, reading the ancient accounts compels choosing between a perspective of factual reliability and engineered re-imagining.
How can we make sense of the implications of this new scholarship? To what extent does reevaluation and consideration of all evidence, literary and archaeological, from within and beyond Judea, affect our reconstruction of events? How should we integrate the breadth of this material and its attendant historical revisions into our readings of the ancient narrative accounts? What new insights into ancient narrators and their strategies might result? This conference will probe many of these questions, focusing especially on the era encompassing the two generations between the death of Judas and the reign of his nephew John Hyrcanus, c. 160-104 BCE.
Date: June 17-21, 2018 Location: Rome, Italy Chairs: Shayna Sheinfeld (Centre College) and Kathy Ehrensperger (Abraham Geiger Kolleg)
While gender is discussed at other conferences and seminars on Second Temple Judaism, it is always as a peripheral topic: a presenter who discusses a text that includes women will usually touch on the subject; likewise, specific portrayals of masculinity may be noted in some texts. Gender as the focus, however, is rare. Our goal in this seminar is to bring into sharp focus the need for a discussion of women in particular and gender in general in light of Second Temple Judaism. Our ancient evidence is generally written and produced by and for men, creating specific challenges to modern interpreters in their quest for historical reconstruction of Second Temple Jewish communities. This seminar will focus on the methodological challenges of considering the ancient evidence and asking questions of gender, and the application of such methodologies to the ancient literary and material evidence.
We expect to have panels covering the following topics: 1) Methodological considerations, 2) Josephus and/or the Hasmonean Dynasty, 3) Material Evidence, 4) so-called Apocyrphal and Pseudepigraphic texts, 5) Dead Sea Scrolls, 6) Philo and/or Wisdom literature; and 7) Early Jesus movement. This seminar will be the first of two seminars on the topic. The second seminar will focus on Gender and Late Antiquity.
See the meeting webpage for more information and the Call for Papers.
7th Enoch Graduate Seminar
Date: July 26-29, 2018 Location: Université de Lausanne, Switzerland Chair: David Hamidovic (Prof. of Jewish apocryphal literature and History of Judaism in Antiquity)
The Enoch Graduate Seminar is an international convening of doctoral students where the goal is to share innovative research ideas in a collegial environment. Participants will gather for three days to present and discuss papers on a variety of topics related to their field of research. Each participant is expected to read the papers beforehand for maximum conversational engagement. Individual sessions will be held daily where each presenter will have the opportunity to share his/her research and receive constructive and supportive feedback.
The seminar welcomes doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers to present papers and participate in general discussion. Participants from various fields related to and including Hebrew Bible, Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha, Qumran Scrolls, as well as Christian and Rabbinic literature are invited to attend.
Proposals for papers (500-1,000 words) should be submitted by Jan 12, 2018. Completed papers (maximum 6,000 words) are due May 11, 2018 for review by the seminar committee. Completed papers will be made available in advance for all participants to read before the first day of the seminar.
In addition to paper presentations by participants, there will also be keynote addresses offered by Thomas Römer on Hebrew Bible, David Hamidovic on Apocryphal Literature, and Jörg Frey on the New Testament as well as a panel discussion led by other distinguished faculty members.
See the meeting webpage for more information and the Call for Papers.
