Please mark your calendars for the upcoming Spring graduate student colloquium, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies.

 

Ethan Zadoff and Chris Rominger, PhD candidates in the History program, will present chapters from their dissertations in progress. The chapters will be precirculated before the colloquium to those who RSVP. Please feel free to spread the word as appropriate to other CUNY faculty and grad students

 

There will be breakfast and coffee. Please RSVP to Francesca Bregoli (fbregoli@gc.cuny.edu) by Monday, January 30, so I can send you the chapters and get a sense of how much food to order.

 

WHERE: CUNY Graduate Center, room 8301

WHEN: Friday, February 10, 9:30-11:30am

 

 

Ethan Zadoff will present on a chapter from his dissertation Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh:’ Medieval Jewish Marriage Law in Northern France and Germany 1000-1300. 

 

Ethan writes: This chapter, the second of three chapters that analyzes the views of Ashkenazi (Germany and Northern France) Halakhists regarding the phenomenon of child marriage, charts the continuities and differences between eleventh century German perspectives of the binary question of child marriage (whether the practice of child marriage is permitted or prohibited) and the ways in which the twelfth and thirteenth century German Halakhists perpetuated, questioned, and reimagined the earlier views. This chapter argues that while eleventh century German traditions of child marriage remained as a decisive underlying factor in the later German outlook, the twelfth and thirteenth century German views-expressed by Raban and his grandson Rabiah- are defined by variegated perspectives dictated by both local contexts as well as particular Halakhic approaches. Finally, this chapter will compare the views of the German Halakhists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on the issue of the binary question to their Northern French counterparts, pointing to the divergent ways the Halakhists of the two cultural spheres understood and perceived child marriage.

Ethan Zadoff is a doctoral candidate in Medieval History at the CUNY Graduate Center.

 

Chris Rominger will present a chapter entitled To See and Be Seen as Tunisian Jews: Intercommunal Tensions and the First World War

 

Chris writes: This chapter seeks to explain the ways in which French colonial rule and the instabilities provoked by the First World War impacted the Jewish community in Tunisia. In particular, a series of violent incidents between Muslim and Jewish Tunisians during the war provoked debates about the place of Jews in the colonial state and the emergent national community. In the process, the category of the “Tunisian Jew” hardened, pushing many to explore new political possibilities, such as deeper loyalty to France, new alliances with French Zionists, or even self-determination along Wilsonian lines.

The chapter is part of a dissertation entitled “Imagined Places and Fragmented Spaces: Tunisian Migrants and Political Subjectivity around the First World War, 1911-1925.”

Chris Rominger is a doctoral candidate in Middle Eastern and North African History at the CUNY Graduate Center.