Katz Center Special Events
- We are pleased to introduce our 2012-2013 Fellows, on the theme Institutionalization, Innovation, and Conflict in 13th-Century Judaism: A Comparative View
- Call for Applications for the 2013-2014 fellowship year:Constructing Borders and Crossing Boundaries: Social, Cultural and Religious Change in Early Modern Jewish History
- News from the Katz Center libraries: Recent Acquisition
Recent acquisition by the Katz Center Library: A 19th-century Livorno Haggadah
The Katz Center library is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of a Livorno, Haggadah shel Pesah im Ha'Pitaron Bilshon Sefaradi
The richly illustrated Haggadah was printed in Livorno, Italy, with dozens of woodcut illustrations and historiated initials. The text is in Hebrew with Ladino translation, from the press of Mosheh Yeshu'ah (1838). Hebrew printing in Venice ceased by the end of the 18th century when Venice was replaced as a center of printing by Livorno. While the Livornese Hebrew printers developed their own styles and typography, they freely borrowed from earlier imprints. Among the illustrations are the thirteen-panel stages of the Seder, the ten-panel depiction of the ten plagues, and one of Pharaoh bathing in the blood of Israelite infants to cure himself of leprosy--all originally in Venetian editions.
Purchased from London rare books dealer Samuel Gedge with the generous support of Gilbert Matthews, W,'70.
Image: Seen here are panels depicting the search for and burning of hametz.
Call for Applications: 2013-2014 Fellowship Year
Scholars working in a wide variety of disciplines have long identified the late fifteenth through the late eighteenth century as a discrete historical period called “Early Modern.” Among scholars interested in the place of Jews and Jewish culture within this period, however, there has been little attempt to think broadly about early modernity as a whole or to connect the insights of discrete studies in any coherent and meaningful way. This research group will create a conversation that connects these smaller units and so examines those changes in the Jewish world which characterized the Early Modern.
Click here to find out more: 2013–2014 Fellowship Program
The Katz Center in the news
The Jewish Exponent, and staff writer Robert Leiter just ran a piece on this year's them and fellows. Read it here. (February 12, 2012)
The 2011-2012 Katz Center fellows
The Katz Center opened its doors in September 2011 to welcome the incoming fellows. These scholars brought together a wide range of research projects that engage the year's theme, "Travel Facts, Travel Fictions, and the Performance of Jewish Identity." This vibrant international group works on topics that range from 3rd-century itinerant rabbis to tourism in 21st-century Israel, and from the US to India, Europe to Africa; they are historians, literary critics, anthropologists, film scholars; they take as their objects texts, film, oral testimony, and ephemera. They shared their work both during the Ruth Melzer Seminar series, the Gruss Colloquium "Jews and Journeys," and through our public lecture programs throughout greater Philadelphia and in New York.
