Dr. Noam Sienna, the Bildner Center’s Jerome and Lorraine Aresty Visiting Scholar, will offer a window into Jewish life in the Islamic world, from medieval Cairo to modern-day North Africa, through an examination of Jewish books and other written texts. Texts produced by Jews over the centuries in Egypt, the Ottoman Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East shed important light on the dynamics of interreligious encounters among Jews, Christians, and Muslims; local relations with the transnational Jewish diaspora; the legacy of the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492 CE; and the active role taken by Jews in Islamic countries during the complex, turbulent transition to modernity.
Cosponsored by the Rutgers Initiative for the Book
Mini-Course Session Details:
Session One (Jan. 14): The Jewish World of Medieval Cairo
In the first session, we will examine the riches of the Cairo Genizah, a trove of Jewish manuscripts and fragments, documenting one thousand years of history, and one of the largest and most diverse collections of medieval manuscripts in the world. From Maimonides’s philosophical views represented in the Guide to the Perplexed, to routine grocery lists, we will see how attention to texts can transform our understanding of Jewish history.
Session Two (Jan. 21): Jewish Printing in the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Mediterranean
The first press to print with moveable type in the Islamic world was a Jewish printing house, established in 1493 by Sephardi Jewish exiles in Istanbul. This session will focus on the development of Jewish printing houses in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and ex-plore how the technology of printing offered Sephardi Jewish communities’ new possibilities for artistic and literary creativity.
Session Three (Jan. 28): Jewish Visions of Modernity in North Africa and the Levant
In the nineteenth century, Jewish communities around the globe wrestled with complex questions about assimilation, tradition, identity, and nationalism. Although often portrayed as passive recipients of European modernity, Jews in the Islamic world formulated their own distinctive expressions of social and political thought. In the final session, we will delve into how Jewish writers and intellectuals in North Africa and the Levant envisioned modernity in books, novels, newspapers, and other print media.
Dr. Noam Sienna, a scholar of Jewish book culture in the medieval and early modern Islamic worlds, is the author of Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds (Indiana University Press, 2025) and is currently working on a study of the first Hebrew press in the Ottoman Empire. Sienna is also a book artist, whose work brings together historical and contemporary expressions of Jewish visual and textual culture with a focus on preserving traditions of Hebrew calligraphy and Jewish letterpress printing. His artistic practice explores the inter-sections of diverse languages, alphabets, and texts across the wide span of Jewish history. Learn more about Dr. Sienna here.
Event image (at top) is an Arabic petition to a Fatimid vizier, re-used for Hebrew piyyutim, ca. 1155 CE, from the Cairo Genizah (T-S Ar. 41.131, courtesy of Cambridge University Library).