Jewish Studies Program

Description

This talk will present Jewish authors from the Middle East, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean – specifically Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and Rhodes – who emigrated to Italy in the 1950s and 1960s. Based upon the analysis of a corpus of novels, autobiographies and memoirs published over the last thirty years, I will discuss the history of Sephardi migration to Italy and how the memories of the country of origin have been narrated vis-à-vis the country of arrival. The works of authors such as Miro Silvera, Isacco Papo, Daniela Dawan, Paolo Terni, Esther Fintz Menascé and others will be interpreted as Mediterranean Afterlives that allow us to see what remains of allegedly lost Jewish worlds and to retrace which feelings and historical events – from nostalgia to Sefarad and the Holocaust – are mobilized against the backdrop of postcolonial Italy.

Dario Miccoli is Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he also coordinates the MA in Transmediterranean Studies. His research focuses on the contemporary history and memory of the Jews of the Arab world and of the Mediterranean, as well as on Sephardi and Mizrahi literature. Among his publications: A Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories across the Modern Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022) and Histories of the Jews of Egypt: an Imagined Bourgeoisie, 1880s-1950s (Routledge, 2015).

Sponsor: Jewish Studies Program

Description

The Talmudic story at the center of this presentation is one about Mar Ukva, leader of the Jewish exile in Babylon, in the fourth century CE, and his wife (who appears nameless in the story).

The perspective Kosman offers on the story initially uses a close reading and subsequently explores the theological questions that the story poses. The surprising point of view of the Talmudic narrator on the relationship between the masculine and the feminine is present at both levels of Kosman's analysis.