Modern identity was forged, in large part, through a self-conscious distancing from a past construed as magical. Until the late nineteenth-century, to be modern meant to have “faith” in “reason & materialist science.” We will explore the ways this identity project worked in Jewish culture, as expressed by figures including the Italians Leone Modena (1571-1648) & Tobias Cohen (1652-1729), as well as in later eastern European Jewish debates on the border between the newly emerging realms of the “natural” and “supernatural.”

This exciting conference was organized by the Mediterranean Seminar at UC-Santa Cruz. Many of the talks will explore aspects of the Jewish experience in the Mediterranean region, including the construction of a pan-Sephardi identity, the creation of the Donmeh community, and the emergence of diasporic Andalusian musical traditions.

Join an international gathering of scholars on Italian Jewish history and culture for a weekend of events. Italian Jewish Culture in the Age of the Ghetto presented in association with the exhibit Il Ghetto: Forging Italian Jewish Identities, 1516 – 1870.