Avner Ofrath

Avner Ofrath is a senior research fellow of the Volkswagen Momentum programme “From Pre-Modern to Modern Perspectives in Judaic Studies”. His current research project “A Language of One’s Own: Writing Politically in Judeo-Arabic, c. 1860-1950” is a connected history of Judeo-Arabic political writing in and between the Maghrib and the Mashriq. It explores writers and writings that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century recreated Judeo-Arabic as a language of political elaboration.

Tracing the trajectories and careers of rabbis, publishers, and writers who moved and maintained ties throughout the Arabic-speaking and Mediterranean world, this study explores a new social type that shaped Jewish writing and thought in the late 19th century: that of the hypermobile, multilingual, well-connected writer-publisher.

The new men of letters who emerged in the Arab-Jewish world thoroughly transformed the position and function of the Judeo-Arabic vernacular. Whereas written Judeo-Arabic had previously served mainly local, community-specific liturgic purposes, writers in the late nineteenth century created a frame that concerned the Jewish world as such, as well as interactions with non-Jewish societies and institutions.

This rich textual production created a new conversation on modernity. The journals, treatises, codices, petitions and folklore stories published in the late nineteenth century were crucial for debating and negotiating the private and public sphere, education, community organisation, and the role of women in Jewish community life. By engaging with a language in transition, we may trace the shifting boundaries of public and private, sacred and profane, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. Looking at vernacular political expression allows us to see firsthand how a public sphere was imagined and negotiated, how boundaries shifted, how authors situated themselves within history and geography.

Curriculum Vitae

• Since 2023: Alfred Landecker Lecturer in History, Freie Universität Berlin
• 2023: Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
• 2019-2023: Lecturer in History, Universität Bremen
• 2014-2018: D.Phil in History, University of Oxford
• 2008-2014: Undergraduate and graduate studies in History, Freie Universität Berlin

Areas of Interes

Judeo-Arabic Literature, Global History, Jewish Intellectual History, Political Writing and Vernacular Modernity, Maghrib–Mashriq Connections

Publication