Date/Time
Date(s) - 28 Apr 2014
5:15 PM - 6:45 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Monday, April 28, Joseph Hacker (Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.)
Professor Hacker will be speaking on “Sephardi Culture: Book Collections and Jewish Book Owners in the Late Medieval
Kingdom of Aragon”
The seminar will convene at 5:15 in the Class of ’78 Pavilion, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections on the 6th floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
Professor Hacker writes:
The presentation will be based on the data of 113 book lists (from 1327 to 1495) owned by private Jewish owners, which include 3181 items. The research on this vast material is not completed, and the work is still in progress. After a short discussion of the size of the collections, a comparison to Late Medieval Christian private libraries in Spain will follow. An identification and classification of the manuscripts, as well as the circulation of certain books and the absence of others, will suffice a portrayal of the cultural scene of the Jewish society in the kingdom of Aragon in the Late Medieval period. Issues as academy curriculum, the centrality of the Maimonidean legacy in the Aragonese tradition, Rashi in Spain, the share of Kabbalah in their bookcase, liturgy etc. will be analysed, on the basis of the data culled from the notarial lists juxtaposed to the evidence already available in literary sources.
Joseph Hacker received his BA, MA, and PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and taught there from 1968 until his retirement in 2008, specializing in the social and intellectual history of Sephardi and Oriental Jewry. He has published more than 80 articles and books on Jewish History, focused on the 14th through the 17th centuries and has edited 40 volumes of articles and monographs on Jewish Studies. He is currently writing a book *on Culture and Economics – Contacts Between European Christians and Ottoman Jews in the 17th Century*, and a book of more than 200 documents on “Beit Halevi” – a Portuguese family in the Orient. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Yeshiva University, the Sorbonne, the University of Sydney, and the State University of St Petersburg, among many other institutions.
All are welcome! Those who do not hold University of Pennsylvania ID cards should bring another form of photo identification in order to enter the library building.