Project description
Studying Jews in Persianate societies
Persianate societies have included Jews for nearly 3 000 years, but most Jews left the Persianate world from the mid-20th century onwards. However, our knowledge about the daily interactions between Muslims and Jews is limited, as contemporary narratives about Jewish-Muslim relations are often highly polarised, and access to sources is restricted. The ERC-funded PersCom project will conduct the first comprehensive study of Persianate Jews from the 19th century to the present. It will analyse Jewish interactions within and outside their communities, focusing on everyday life to understand how they connected with and separated from the surrounding Muslim societies. The project will combine various sources, including the different languages used by Persianate Jews.
Objective
Who are Persian Jews and what can we learn from their history? Looking back on a history of almost 3000 years, the majority of Jews left the Persianate world from the mid-20th century onwards. As Jews who lived in Muslim cultures, their trajectories do not fit into mutually exclusive concepts of “Jews” and “Muslims”. However, we hardly know how interactions between Muslims and Jews worked on a daily basis because the contemporary narratives about Jewish-Muslim relations tend to be highly polarized, and access to sources in Persianate societies is hampered. Based on different forms of interconnectedness, this research provides the first comprehensive study about Persianate Jews from the 19th century until today. It analyses Jewish contacts within and outside of their communities in everyday life, to shed light on the various forms of connecting with and separation from the surrounding Muslim societies. It highlights religious identity as applied in context, rather than as fixed notion. This can only be achieved by an innovative method of combining a variety of sources that have not been brought into dialogue until now, including the different languages Persianate Jews used. Focusing on non-elites and everyday life also includes a completely new pool of data that until now was considered too mundane for analysis. Yet, exactly these documents from ordinary people and daily encounters provide significant new insights into Jewish life in the region, the role of transregional networks and their connection to global markets. In this way, the project aims to overcome the geographic, disciplinary and linguistic separation that has shaped modern Persianate Jewish history to date. Expanding this method systematically to a number of different archives will generate significant new insights on Jewish life in the region, present Jews as active members of Persianate societies, and contribute to preserving an endangered cultural heritage.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
1010 Wien
Austria