Principal Investigator:
Magdalen Connolly
Funded by:
Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
Timeframe:
2022–2024
This project is a comparative study of pre-modern written Muslim, Jewish, and Christian Middle Arabic. It challenges the long-held assumption that social and cultural segregation of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Ottoman-era Egypt caused significant divergences in their written languages.
By studying how kingship was conceptualised by a large group of Christian subjects of Islamic rule (the Syriac Orthodox, in the mid 7th through 10th centuries), this project probes how Christians adapted their tradition on kingship to accommodate Islamic kings.
This project emerged out of a MA-Seminar and is dedicated to manuscript hunting and, in particular, to the agents behind this enterprise: the great Manuscript Hunters. We try to understand what purpose the Manuscript Hunters’ travels served, which networks and modes of patronage they could rely on.
The project will take the perspective of entangled history, which is particularly suitable to the study of Jewish-Arab history: religious and everyday practices of Jews and Muslims, and many of their respective traditions, converged in the close cohabitation of space— a shared religious, intellectual, social, linguistic and economic world.
This project, jointly run by Sacha Stern (University College London), Nadia Vidro (University College London), and Ronny Vollandt (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich), will reconstruct, edit, and study, for the first time, the full corpus of Saadya Gaon’s writings on the Jewish calendar.
This project, a joint effort of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Ludwig-
Maximilians-Universität, Munich, focuses on the origins and history of Qaraite
exegesis in the 10th century CE.
