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The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations warmly invites you to attend an upcoming public lecture with Dr. Miriam Goldstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, entitled Toledot Yeshu ("The Life of Jesus") among the Jews of Medieval Islamic Lands.
More information: This talk will explore the astonishing popularity of Toledot Yeshu—a parody of the life of Jesus, first attested in Late Antiquity in Aramaic—among the Arabic-speaking Jews of the medieval Islamic world. Presenting Toledot Yeshu as a product of medieval Judeo-Arabic literature and as a Jewish narrative shared and exchanged between the Near East, the Mediterranean and Europe, it will illuminate sustained Jewish interest in the work for more than a millennium and a half in the Near East, as well as the significance of this enduring appeal for understanding Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations in the Islamic milieu.
Miriam Goldstein is associate professor of Arabic Language and Literature and chair of the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on medieval Judeo-Arabic literature and relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the medieval Arabic-speaking world. She is the author of Karaite Exegesis in Medieval Jerusalem (Tübingen, 2011) as well as the editor of Beyond Religious Borders: Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World (Philadelphia, 2011) and Authorship in Mediaeval Arabic and Persian Literatures (Jerusalem, 2019). She has published numerous articles on Arabic and Judeo-Arabic literature, directs Minerva Foundation and DFG-funded projects focusing on the Judeo-Arabic manuscript collections of the Russian National Library, and is currently researching the Near Eastern versions of Toledot Yeshu. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she studied at Harvard College and held a Marshall Fellowship at the University of Cambridge before completing her doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.