Imaging cultures as if they were static, homogeneous entities has shaped the global map from a Western perspective over the past 200 years and more. Enlightenment thinkers defined the notion of “culture” as the opposite of “nature,” however, in effect including only Western high culture (“Bildung”) and reference in a Euro-centric stance. In the 19th century, this concept of culture as a coherent, distinctive (id)entity was further substantiated by its aspired-to ideal congruence with one language, one people, one nation. In consequence of this, a monolithic Western concept of culture smoothly merged with its notion of “universal rationality.” A reciprocal self-confirmation characterizes the relationship between the concept of cultural homogeneity and its reputed ability for universal thinking – including a literally empowering effect for this Western idea of culture because its universal claim potentially extends to the entire world.

This conference suggests exploring perspectives that dispense with the notion of monolithically constructed “culture”, which creates artificial borders between alleged “cultural centers” or static “identities”. The question arises in which way a different notion of “culture” also entails a different notion of “rationality”. If one replaces, for example, the prism of modern “culture” by of existential relationality and multicollectivity in order to describe social dynamics in al-Andalus or Sephardi/Mizrachi life in the Middle East, a highly developed capacity for translation seems to be presupposed. All people – both those from an advanced educational background and more ordinary social strata – constantly switch in their daily lives between different social circles which often utilize different vocabularies or languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Ladino, Turkish etc.) and engage in different forms of knowledge (songs, customs, jurisdiction, art, cooking, liturgy, poetry, writing, exegesis, etc.). This necessity to translate between a polyphony of forms is an important but little appreciated source of how thinking is triggered – a hermeneutics which proceeds from the maxim: “using the language of the other in order to understand yourself” (Aaron W. Hughes).

Jews in particular living under Islam in medieval Babylon, Cairo, Tunis, Fez, Sevillia or Tóledo not only frequented and interacted with a remarkable great number of local and translocal collectives – such as manufacturers, physicians, rabbis, falāsifa, members of Sephardi synagogues, mutakallimun, Rabbanites, Karaites, Isawiyyas, Shīʿītes, etc. – but also translated as virtuosi between their different vocabularies and forms of knowledge under the conditions of Islam. As Steven Wasserstrom has shown, the emerging groups of the Rabbanites, Karaites, and the Isawiyya – which are labels from later times – shared and translated vocabularies of specific collectives within Islam. Rav Saadya Gaon, Maimonides, Bahya ibn Paquda or Yehuda Halevi were virtuous intra-linguistic (engaging in translanguaging) and cross-linguistic translators moving between various forms of knowledge which were common in different Muslim and Jewish groups, resulting in a highly original thinking in order to prove their version of an “orthodox” Jewishness.

However, there are good reasons to argue that such a replacement of the prism of culture can also shed new light on the rationality of Jewish groups within Islamicate contexts beyond the period of the Middle Ages. It is reasonable to assert that Jewish and Muslim abilities to translate variegated forms of knowledge in a multicollective environment did not disappear in modern times. Rather it was the overall historiographical concept of “decline” which rendered them invisible. Jews like Yishaq ben Yaʿish Halewi in Essaouira, Shlomo Bekhor Hutsin in Baghdad or Abraham Danon in Istanbul provide clear evidence for their multicollective abilities: they were simultaneously active as rabbis, Haskalah thinkers, printers, journalists, historians, musicians, biblical commentators, booksellers, school principals of both traditional and AIU schools, book collectors, reformers of the Hebrew language, founders of societies, etc. From these methodological assumptions – thinking in polyphonic translations within a multicollective environment – arises the question whether we can reconstruct in this way consistent arguments of these Sephardi/Mizrachi Jews towards the West, towards modernity, towards the Muslim Nahda, etc.

The conference especially seeks to encourage analyses of the polyphonic fabric of all types of translations (intralinguistic and cross-linguistic) between all forms of knowledge (linguistic and extra-linguistic) which were undertaken by women and men in the Near and Middle East in modern times. There are two major desiderata: first, where and how did the transmissions unfold which connect the multi-collective translations between medieval al-Andalus and Babylon with the productivity of Jewish writing and life in modern Mashriq, Maghreb and the Ottoman Empire? Second, do the magnifying glasses of the concepts of relationality and polyphonic translations between intralinguistic and cross-linguistic (even extralinguistic) forms of knowledge allow us to carve out some relevant parameters of Sephardic/Mizrachi rationality. Not the least, this would be helpful in order to differentiate manifestations of a Jewish Haskalah in the Muslim East from the better-known Haskalot in the Christian West.

The conference will be held on 18-20 July 2022 at the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies (IZEA), Halle University.
Ottfried Fraisse