Christopher Atkins, Graduate Student in Religious Studies and Classics
Jewish and Egyptian Polemic, Priesthood, and Philosophy at Rome in 41 CE
This project seeks to illuminate the intersection of ethnicity, religious identity, and imperial philosophy during a formative episode of anti-Judaism in antiquity: the events surrounding the delegations of the Alexandrian Jewish community to the Roman emperors Gaius Caligula and Claudius in 39 and 41 CE. Ethnic violence and attacks against Jews raged in 38/39 CE during the tenure of the Roman governor Flaccus. Flaccus rescinded the Jews’ rights of citizenship, thereby making them resident foreigners. This occasioned the formation and commission of a Jewish embassy in 39 CE to Gaius in Rome. Yet the Jewish delegation was by all accounts a failure: the Jews, who would not render worship to Gaius as a god, were accused of impiety and sedition. Soon after, however, Gaius was himself assassinated and Claudius took the throne (41 CE), resulting in a second Jewish embassy. Claudius restored some rights but not citizenship to Jews. While many scholars have explored these traumatic events’ political ramifications, both immediate and on into the devastating Kitos War of 115–117 CE, this project refocuses the conversation on the roles, relationship, and common strategies between the Jewish philosopher and Torah commentator Philo and the Egyptian priest and Stoic philosopher Chaeremon. Both Alexandrians—one Jewish, one Egyptian—represented their communities on rival delegations to Rome and appear to have adopted similar strategies. I consider the ways in which Philo creatively appropriated the philosophical and religious values of imperial culture to counter polemical ethnic slanders and thereby to defend the Jewish community as a beacon of philosophical-religious excellence and social-political stability. More broadly, the project seeks to illuminate the embodied strategies of ancient Jewish communities for relating to and defining themselves within a dominant imperial culture in innovative ways. In this way, the project contributes to a larger conversation about historical circumstances of imperial expansion and ethnic violence that occasioned creative intellectual and cultural responses of Jewish self-fashioning.
Clare Kemmerer, Graduate Student in Divinity School
The Deggendorfer Gnad was, until 1992, one of the longest-running Roman Catholic pilgrimages in Europe. Culminating in a visit to the Holy Sepulchre Church in Deggendorf, Bavaria, the pilgrimage commemorated the desecration of a host in the fourteenth century, a story associated with a massacre of the city’s Jewish residents that occurred in this century. This project will examine both the Deggendorfer Gnad and other, less prominent host miracle stories in the context of the political and economic environments that produced them and the material culture that commemorated them. Culminating in site visits to host-miracle shrines in Germany and Austria, the project will attend particularly to the ways that host-miracle stories were commemorated and disseminated, examining the “long shadow” cast on the culture of this region by the pervasive presence of these sites, stories, and objects.
Charlotte Kiechel, Graduate Student in History
My dissertation, “The Politics of Comparison: Holocaust Memory and Vision of ‘Third World Suffering’” charts a new history of Holocaust memory. It uncovers the critical role that visions of past Nazi crimes and mass Jewish death played in defining West Europeans’ confrontations with non-European suffering. And it reaffirms Holocaust memory’s import in shaping the global Cold War’s political vernacular. As part of this project, I look at how members of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) deployed the memory of the Holocaust in their mid-century campaigns against empire. Between 1954 and 1962 and in the context of the Algerian War of Independence, FLN members produced a canon of anti-atrocity literature. The chief ambitions of this canon were twofold. First, it aimed to document the extent of Algerians’ sufferings. Second, it aimed to incite moral and political outrage. In an effort to realize both ambitions, FLN members frequently drew upon a constellation of Nazi-inflected reference points and, as such, mentions of past Jewish suffering also filtered into their relevant discussions. With the generous support of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Student Research Grant, I will be able to consult this corpus of anti-atrocity literature. This summer, I will travel to archival collections in France and Algeria. And there, I will evaluate how visions of Jewish and “Third World” suffering became entwined.
Linford Ranck and Basya Gartenstein, Graduate Students in Divinity School
Linford Ranck and Basya Gartenstein are emerging religious leaders in their respective communities (Orthodox Jewish and Episcopalian Christian).
This project serves as a testing ground for applying academic theories of religious pluralism to inter-religious education and friendship among members of the “Abrahamic faiths”—in this case, Christians and Jews. To do so, stereotypically informed narratives of the religious “other” are confronted by connecting lay members of religious communities at times absent from the tables of inter-religious exchange. Social media can fuel intergenerational mistrust, sectarian triumphalism, and uncontested images and stories that inform and generate antisemitism in communities that lack exposure to one another. Such essentialism requires oversimplifications and reductionism; therefore, this project aims at expanding the narrow perspectives that drive problematic images that Jews and Christians harbor toward one another. We hope to leverage the power of social media to promote a more nuanced conversation by producing a video series that addresses issues of religious difference at the heart of anti-Judaism. Viewers will have a platform for questions and responses to the video series via a two-hour Zoom forum. Through this educational project, viewers and respondents will learn to articulate how anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism are linked to one another and the role of inter-religious encounter and relationship in addressing these challenges between the Christian and Jewish communities. The approach of this project is guided by acknowledgment of difficult histories and religious differences to build toward a new shared understanding. Ultimately, we will model ways to forge an informed friendship between members of the two groups that can reach beyond tolerance.
Adam Tucker, Undergraduate Student in Molecular Biology
The main objective of my research is to shine light upon the differences between American and Israeli perspectives on antisemitism. In particular, my project will examine how differing Israeli and American notions of antisemitism may serve as an overlooked factor underlying a broader Israeli-American political divide. In addition to examining scholarly perspectives, I plan to conduct interviews with Jewish Americans and Israelis of diverse backgrounds in order to connect the historical evolution of distinct conceptions of antisemitism with contemporary differences in lived reality. With the hope of fostering greater mutual understanding, I aim to reconcile the unique American and Israeli points of view in the context of each Jewish community’s own historical and cultural narratives.
Faculty:
Carolyn J. Dean, Charles J. Stille Professor of History and French
Carolyn J. Dean is Charles J. Stille Professor of History and French. She is a historian of modern Europe with a focus on the twentieth century whose work explores the intersection of ideas and culture, most recently in the context of genocide. Her latest book, The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell, 2019) traces the history of the witness to genocide, tracking the changing representation of violence over the last hundred years and demonstrating how the cultural meaning of genocide was distinguished from war and imperial conquest. She is the author of five other books that focus on the historical and cultural representation of victims, most recently Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Cornell, 2010) and The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Cornell, 2004). She has also written extensively about gender and sexuality in France and on the intellectual history of French theory. She held the John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University, where she taught before coming to Yale in 2013, and has been the recipient of several fellowships, including an ACLS and a Guggenheim, among others. In 1996 she was awarded Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Council for the Advancement of Support of Education.