Professor Alessandro Guetta (INALCO, Paris) Films a MOOC

This week the Center has been delighted to welcome Alessandro Guetta, Professor of Jewish intellectual history at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris, to be the second annual Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies [SIMS]/Herbert D. Katz Center Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Manuscript Studies. The fellowship, funded in part by the David Ruderman Distinguished Scholar fund, pairs a prominent scholar in any field of Jewish studies with a manuscript in one of our collections.

Guetta spent the week looking at an early modern Italian Manuscript in the Schoenberg holdings: Malkiel Aschkenazi’s Tavnith ha-mishkan and Hanukath ha-bayith (now CAJS Rar Ms 460), produced in Mantua in the early seventeenth century. The full digital manuscript is available online.

On Wednesday June 28, 2017, Professor Guetta filmed a short-form Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) —a minicourse on the value of manuscript studies for Jewish history. The course explored the nature of the document, the significance of its material form, and what this rare document reveals about the Jewish landscape of Renaissance Italy.  He moved from libraries to book burnings, and philosophy to architecture, in his wide-ranging introduction to the early modern fascination with the biblical Tabernacle and Temple.

The mini-MOOC is now in production and will be available free and universally this winter. It will sit alongside the one filmed last year by Professor Y. Tzvi Langermann, on a 15th -century Sicilian medical miscellany. To watch Langermann’s MOOC click here, and for more information click here.