Steve Weitzman (SW): Before we focus on your current research project, I wanted to note for our readers that you are just now publishing a new book. Could you share what it is about?
Natalie Dohrmann (NBD): Mary, tell us a bit about your scholarly interests and what especially excites you about them personally and/or intellectually.
Current fellow Hadar Feldman Samet has been working for years on a trove of particularly intriguing but difficult manuscripts. She is decoding the dense, multilingual songs of the sect of Sabbatians that maintained secretive religious beliefs and practices for centuries. Based on indicators in the handwritten texts of hundreds of hymns, full of kabbalistic and messianic symbols and abbreviations, she has managed to reconstruct the tunes that some were sung to.
Steve Weitzman (SW): Samantha, tell us a bit about your scholarly interests, and what drew you to them personally and/or intellectually.
Steve Weitzman (SW): Uri, might you begin by telling us a bit about your larger project on opera in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and what led you to this interest?
The Katz Center looks forward to a 2023–24 fellowship year devoted to the study of sound and music as a part of Jewish life, and we are delighted to announce the cohort of scholars who will join us for a year of research, conversation, and engagement with the Penn community and with the public.
When the invitation to contribute to a forum on the topic of “French Jewish Studies” in JQR 113.1 first appeared in my inbox from JQR, my immediate reaction was that I didn’t want my schola
Raanan Rein: Rather than being a scholarly field in itself, Jewish Latin American studies should be viewed as a subfield of both Latin American studies and Jewish studies. For many years Jewish Latin American studies fell outside of the main parameters of the two abovementioned fields.
JQR 111.4 is now available, online* and in print.
In this issue:
Hadar Feldman Samet’s essay Ottoman Songs in Sabbatian Manuscripts: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Inner Writings of the “Ma’aminim” (JQR 109.4) explores a little-known set of liturgical songs produced and used by members of the religious group devoted to Shabbetai Tsvi, a seventeenth-century messiah who was embraced by Jewish masses all over the world but then rejected by most after his conversion to Islam.