Lecture Series of the Martin Buber Institute for Jewish Studies
History of Knowledge, Histories of Knowledges?
Premodern Jewish Epistemes and Their Contexts
Lecture Series: History of Knowledge, Histories of Knowledges: Premodern Jewish Epistemes and Their Contexts
The field of the history of knowledge has expanded remarkably in recent years. While earlier scholarship focused primarily on educational institutions and intellectual traditions, contemporary research examines a much wider range of knowledge production and transmission, including non-elite and indigenous cultures, practical expertise, oral traditions, and artisanal skills. This expansion has fostered new interdisciplinary fields and comparative frameworks, with scholars increasingly engaging across different cultural and methodological traditions to develop connected histories of knowledge that encompass the spectrum of elite and non-elite forms.
Recent approaches to Jewish knowledge emphasize the social and material contexts of learning, challenging traditional boundaries between scholarly and popular cultures through concepts such as “textual communities” and “communities of practice.” Methodologically, there is growing attention to the materiality of knowledge—including manuscripts, printed books, images, objects, and spaces—alongside digital tools for data analysis and visualization. This “Ringvorlesung” series will highlight diverse perspectives on premodern knowledge and learning, with a particular focus on Jewish epistemic milieus in contact and dialogue with non-Jewish contexts, and will address the challenges posed by varied disciplinary approaches and historiographical traditions to multiple forms and ways of knowledge-making.
Thursdays, 4:00–5:30
p.m., Philosophikum (103), Room 0.204 [S76]
Lecture series in the Studium Integrale program: https://klips2.uni-koeln.de/co/ee/ui/ca2/app/desktop/#/slc.tm.cp/student/courses/548360?$ctx=lang=EN&$scrollTo=toc_overview
Everyone is welcome!
Program
April 16: Zvi Kunshtat (Frankfurt), “Watch and Learn: How Clocks Transformed Ashkenazi Schooling and Synchronized Early Modern Ashkenazi Communities”
April 23: Pavel Sládek (Prague), “Early Modern Jewish Practices of Reading and Why There Was No ‘Knowledge Explosion’ Among Jews”
April 30: Roni Cohen (Frankfurt), “Manuscripts, Gamblers, and Medieval Hebrew Bestsellers”
May 7: Ilona Steimann (Münster), “Books, Their Makers, and Owners in an Age of Migration (DFG Project): Ashkenazi Book Collections in Italy”
May 21: Simone Hallstein (Cologne), “When We Need Them, We Should Speak to the Jews So That They Too May Understand: The Hebrew Bible in Christian Polemics: The Acquisition of Knowledge in Petrus Nigri’s *Stern des Meschiah* (1477)”
June 11: Anna Rutkowski (Cologne), “From Hebrew to Yiddish and Back: Menachem Amelander’s *Sheyres Yisroel* and the Transmission of Jewish Historical Knowledge”
June 18: Andreas Lehnertz (Trier), “Jewish Crathspeople and Crathy Knowledge in Medieval Ashkenaz”
June 25: Magdaléna Jánošová (Amsterdam), “Odd Man Out: Jewish Physicians, Medical Writings, and the Limits of Epistemic Communities in Early Modern Europe”
July 9: Katelyn Mesler (Heidelberg), “A Dozen Lives of Perets Trabot: Rabbi, Poet, Scribe, Schoolteacher, Lexicographer (14th–16th Centuries)”
July 16: Hanna Gentili (Hamburg), “Material, Social, and Cultural Contexts of Fifteenth-Century Jewish Philosophy”
July 23: Agata Paluch (Cologne), “How-To Books, Practical Knowledge, and Everyday Kabbalah in Early Modern Ashkenaz”