16.-18. September 2024
Workshop des BMBF-Projekts „Sephardische Aufklärung im nordafrikanischen und levantinischen Kontext des sich modernisierenden Islam“
Local Knowledge Production and Translocal Connectedness – Sephardic Entanglements of Movement and Space
The biographies of Jews under Muslim rule have often been characterized by great -voluntary or involuntary – mobility. This dispersal facilitated the exchange of ideas, languages, and cultural practices, contributing to the rich tapestry of Jewish history and the development of distinct Jewish communities in various locations. This Jewish significance of place was aptly investigated by methods typically associated with the spatial turn in particular in the last two decades. As such space was not utilized as a container of traditions but construed as a local activity of people, goods, institutions or concepts and symbols which produce social order beyond the discursive plain (Lefebvre 1974).
But what has not yet received sufficient attention in research are the unforseen effects that border-crossings – cultural, geographical, political – have on the traveler’s making sense of the respectively local order of things on a variety of levels: hermeneutics, institutions, values, symbols, ideas etc. As a result of this creative tension or conflict between what they bring in and what they encounter on site their understanding of whole books can undergo fundamental transformations – occasionally abrupt and even downright illogical (e.g. from
today’s perspective). After the arrival of the Sephardim from Spain in North Africa, for example, they felt obliged to write substantial additions to the books of their own Sephardic Halakhah („taqanot megurshei kastilia be-fez“) – additions which were ultimately codified as a product of their new environment as well. We suggest that these dynamics which are highly characteristic for the transregional history of the Jews in the mediterranean – in the Middle Ages no less than in the period from the 17th to the 20th century – can be effectively
tracked down by the method of translocality (Freitag 2019).
This awareness and focus on local dynamics between both transgression and some kind of local order enables historiography to free itself from eurocentric, monolithic concepts such as „culture“, „tradition“, „enlightenment“, „secularization“, „pre-modernity“ or „modernity“ which become dispensable in favor of more fluid models of cultural encounter. The north-south historiography is replaced by a south-south historiography. Furthermore
the translocal approach might account for a differentiation between different perspectives of the actors – local people, migrants or observers. Last but not least, this method is characterized by a sociological and economical sensitivity. Thus the methodological multiperspectivity of translocality is still able to view or account for locality as socioculturally „produced“.
The workshop wants to engaging presentations steered in the direction of a collective conversation providing initial answers to the following questions: What is the relationship between real and imagined places, such as „al-Andalus“ or „Babylon“? How can observers‘ and actors‘ perspectives on the same phenomena be equally included in research? How can different scales of consideration be linked together? How can different disciplinary definitions of a concept (e.g. network) be combined with each other? How exactly does a locally predefined concept (e.g. Nahda) interfere with the local order as soon as it migrates? etc. etc.