The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations warmly invites you to attend an upcoming public lecture with Eve Krakowski of Princeton University, entitled “The Jewish Courts of Tenth-Century Fustat: Clues to a Historical Mystery.”
Abstract: Thousands of Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic legal documents from medieval Egypt and Syria survived in the Cairo Geniza. This talk will zoom in on the earliest layer of this corpus, which offers indirect clues to a lost history of Judaism during the first Islamic centuries.
Speaker biography: Eve Krakowski is an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East and its Jewish populations, interested especially in family life and in the mundane settings of legal and religious practices. Her first book, Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton, 2018) examines women’s transition to adulthood among the Jews reflected in the Cairo Geniza. She is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Written Torah: The Reinvention of Judaism in the Islamic Mediterranean.
LOCATION:Harvard Semitic Museum Rm 201, 6 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20191028T200000Z DTEND:20191028T220000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR