A Research Workshop of the Israel Science Foundation, held at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Edmond J. Safra Campus, Givat Ram, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Monday and Wednesday), and at the Prima Park Hotel, Jerusalem (Tuesday).
Early modern Europeans saw, heard, touched, tasted and smelled their way into the sacred. Preachers built their arguments out of the body’s appetites; kabbalists and mystics described contact with the divine in the grammar of sensation; polemicists on both sides of the Jewish-Christian divide policed the boundary between the traditions by disputing whose senses could be trusted. The senses were neither ornament nor illustration but the medium in which religious knowledge was made, contested and transmitted.
Sacred Sensoria gathers historians, literary scholars, art historians and historians of religion from Europe, North America and Israel in order to ask what happens when the two sensory regimes are studied together rather than apart. The workshop proceeds across three days: Frameworks, in which each tradition’s sensorium is described in its own terms; Contact Zones, on the sensory life of Jewish-Christian encounter, conversion, polemic and urban coexistence; and Comparative Senses, which reads sight, sound, touch, taste and smell across the confessional divide.
Keynote lectures: Prof. Bruce Gordon (Yale University), Prof. Magda Teter (Fordham University), and Prof. Stefan Michels (Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt).
Speakers include Daniel Abrams, Niall Atkinson, Renana Bartal, Reut Barzilai, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, Yossi Chajes, Raz Chen-Morris, Yaacov Deutsch, Maria Diemling, Serena Di Nepi, Cristiana Facchini, Yael Fisch, Talya Fishman, Massimo Carlo Giannini, Christine Goettler, Ahuvia Goren, David Graizbord, Tamar Herzig, Kimberly Johnson, Maoz Kahana, Debra Kaplan, Annette Kern-Staehler, William Kolbrener, Martin Lockshin, Piergabriele Mancuso, Eliana Miraglia, Maximilian de Moliere, Elke Morlok, Noam Reisner, Pinchas Roth, Stephanie Shirilan, Alexander van der Haven and Elisabeth von Baumbach.
Convened by Dr Yaakov A. Mascetti (Bar-Ilan University) with Dr Channah Damatov (Bar-Ilan University).
Attendance is free and open to all; no registration is required.
Full programme and details: https://iias.huji.ac.il/event/sacred-sensoria-jewish-and-christian-embodied-experience-early-modern-europe