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SEFER DAT YEHUDIT: A Maghrebi Book in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean

Sun, December 16, 4:15 to 5:45pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cityview 1 Ballroom

Abstract

The early modern Mediterranean presents a context where books served as nodes of connection between communities, and circulated across national boundaries through personal and communal ties. In this paper, I investigate how one such book, Sefer Dat Yehudit, came to be, and what this book might have meant in the nineteenth-century Maghreb: how it emerged out of the transnational movements of North African Jews in the Mediterranean, as well as how it was embedded in local cultures of reading and book circulation. Originally the product of two Moroccan-Gibraltarian rabbis, Dat Yehudit offers a vernacular summary of Jewish household laws for women. I argue that the story of Dat Yehudit demonstrates how the methodology of centring and following the material book can map out the Mediterranean networks of Jewish readers and writers.
Printed five times over the course of the nineteenth-century in both Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Arabic (Livorno 1827, Algiers 1855, Jerusalem 1878, Vienna 1881, and Algiers 1894), Sefer Dat Yehudit reveals the importance of vernacular Mediterranean Jewish literature in the context of a Maghrebi reading community. I believe that this case study demonstrates the need for a methodological shift, both for scholars of Jewish history to think beyond the boundaries of national and identitarian categories; and for scholars of North Africa to understand the Maghreb, and especially its Jewish communities, as nodes in a dense network of transnational and transimperial connectivity.

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