Online Exhibitions

Exhibit List

Jews in Modern Islamic Context ('18–'19)

The study of Jewish life in modern Islamic contexts during the 2018-19 Fellowship year at the Katz Center delved into the meaning of modernity in North Africa, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, Central and South Asia. In their work, the Fellows broke new ground by looking beyond the more familiar paradigms of modern and contemporary Jewish history in European, American, and Israeli contexts to explore complex relationships between Jews and their Muslim neighbors, or with members of other non-Muslim communities in the Islamic world.

Nature between Science and Religion: Jewish Culture and the Natural World ('17–'18)

During its 2017-2018 fellowship year, scholars at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies asked new questions about how the history of science, medicine and technology may be seen from the perspective of Jewish culture. Among the highlights featured in this web exhibition are studies of ecology and the environment, astronomical science; calendrical systems; geographical knowledge; medieval and early modern natural philosophy; the history of medicine; evolutionary biology; Spiritualism; contemporary research in genetics; as well as modern industrial technology.

Expanding Jewish Political Thought: Beneath, between, before, & beyond the state ('16–'17)

The 2016-17 Katz-Penn Libraries Web Exhibition brought together scholars working in a variety of fields of theory and praxis to unsettle regnant paradigms of power, authority, political action or inaction, law, human rights, gender inequalities, territorial sovereignty, and statehood. They drew upon a wide variety of sources and interdisciplinary methodologies to challenge established understandings of Jewish political history.

Jews Beyond Reason ('15-'16)

Focusing on the experiential, the sensual, as well as philosophical and theological reflections that occur within and beyond the rational dimension of human life, our scholars showed how emotions like love, anger, anxiety, joy, fear, empathy, sympathy, sadness, desire, pain, and pleasure—though rooted in neurological and physical responses—are shaped by culture.

Doing Wissenschaft: The Active Study of Judaism as Practice, 1818 - 2018 ('14-'15)

This past year's Fellows explored critical questions about the way in which academic categories and methodologies have framed how Jews and Judaism are understood—be they in parallel with Christian theology, political science, history, classical philology, or in relation to traditional learning contexts. In this exhibition, we find examples of the fruits of their intellectual labors in reconstructing the history of the academic study of Judaism from these early, diverse seedbeds.

Constructing Borders & Crossing Boundaries: Social, Cultural, & Religious Change in Early Modern Jewish History ('13-'14)

In order to probe the meaning of an early modern era of Jewish history on its own terms, scholars came together in 2013-14 to bridge often disconnected areas of scholarship. Borders and boundaries were understood geographically, but also as social, cultural, legal, political, and economic realities. In the year's web exhibition, the concept of the boundary is presented both as a dividing line and as a place of meeting and mixing between different groups (Jewish and non-Jewish) in an effort to illuminate the contexts and meanings of shared histories.

13th Century Entanglements: Judaism, Christianity & Islam ('12-'13)

This exhibition reexamines the formative period in Islamic history between the 7th and the 11th century in order to understand how both Muslim and Jewish societies were shaped in this period, and how the presence of the majority of Jewish population worldwide under Islam modified Jewish life profoundly.

Jews & Journeys: Travel & the Performance of Jewish Identity ('11-'12)

The subject of travel and its complex range of practices and representations have provoked intense scholarly interest in recent years. Historically, Jewish travel has taken on many forms and is documented in a wide array of primary sources: merchant records; legends of the Wandering Jew; travel itineraries; pilgrimage accounts; photographs; postcards; journalistic reportage; motion picture footage. What cultural and ideological work is performed by these texts and what kinds of images of self and other are generated through them? A sampling of these sources, and scholarly discussions of these questions by the 2011-12 Katz Center Fellows, is displayed here.

Taking Turns: New Perspectives on Jews & Conversion ('10-'11)

Taking Turns takes as its starting point the idea of converts and conversion - an unstable subject, in the double sense of a topic very much in need of definition, and a model of individual and group life that does not presume a fixed or univocal 'identity.' Through the study of conversion, our understanding of the very meaning of 'Judaic,' 'Christian,' and 'Islamic' identities has been complicated and even transformed.

Secularism & Its Discontents: Rethinking an organizing principle of modern Jewish life ('09-'10)

This exhibition about secularism and its discontents examines the complex interplay and often permeable boundary between the religious and the secular in modern Jewish history.

Jews, Commerce, & Culture ('08-'09)

This exhibition on Jewish economic history argues that economics is not solely materialist and quantitative in nature but is rather an integral part of the larger fabric of Jewish religion and folkways.

Jewish & Other Imperial Cultures in Late Antiquity ('07-'08)

In this exhibition, scholars of late antiquity grapple with the complex and multifarious material sources and received texts upon which are understanding of the Roman empire and its minorities is built.

Religious Communities in Islamic Empires ('06-'07)

This exhibition reexamines the formative period in Islamic history between the 7th and the 11th century in order to understand how both Muslim and Jewish societies were shaped in this period, and how the presence of the majority of Jewish population worldwide under Islam modified Jewish life profoundly.

The Jewish Book Material Texts and Comparative Contexts ('05-'06)

This exhibition on the history of material texts investigates how the materiality and formatting of texts from antiquity to the present shaped authorship, transmission, reception, and interpretation; how the business of Jewish book production and the market forces of book consumption affected Jewish life and culture; how the visual art and design of Jewish books shaped reading habits, legibility, recollection, and signification.

Modern Jewish Literatures: Language, Identy, Writing ('04-'05)

This exhibition on Jewish Literatures in the Modern Age takes literature itself as a site of intense struggle around the question of Jewishness and modernity in which all the resources of the linguistic imagination were called into play to negotiate the passage from traditional society to contemporary life.

Challenging Boundaries: History and Anthropology in Jewish Studies ('03-'04)

In this exhibition, scholars of Jewish history and anthropology explore the dynamic tensions that exist in the way religious traditions instruct people to live their lives and the way people go about living them, between the presumably normative and actually lived experiences found in Jewish culture and history.

Tradition and Its Discontents: Jewish History and Culture in Eastern Europe ('02–'03)

This exhibition considers Eastern Europe as home to the greatest living reservoir of Jewish civilization in the world for over three centuries and how it served as the location for key religious, intellectual, artistic, and political currents that shaped Jewish life across the modern period.

And We have Revealed to You: Jewish Biblical Interpretation in a Comparative Context ('01-'02)

This exhibition presents the common scriptural heritage of Judaism, Christianity and Islam while highlighting the distinctive traditions that each of them has developed for interpreting the Bible and what they believed to be its message and meaning.

Modern Jewry and the Arts ('00–'01)

This exhibition presents work in a rich diversity of cultural media and genres in an effort to illustrate and explore the characteristically modern features of Jewish aesthetic production and performance beyond the traditional texts that have defined Jewish identity and existence.

The Meaning of Words

This exhibition focuses attention on the relatively unknown intellectual movement called Christian Hebraism, an offshoot of Renaissance humanism whose devotees — biblical scholars, theologians, lawyers, physicians, scientists,philosophers, and teachers in Latin schools--borrowed and adapted texts, literary forms, and ideas from Jewish scholarship and tradition to meet Christian cultural and religious needs.

Printer, Publisher, Peddler: The Business of the Jewish Book

Book production is a business as well as a craft, a trade and an art form. Since the invention of moveable type in the fifteenth century, Jews as well as non-Jews have been engaged in the printing and sale of a surprisingly diverse array of editions of Judaica. This exhibition offers a small sampling of that vast panoply of creativity, based on the University of Pennsylvania’s distinguished library collections at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and at the Walter and Lenore Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The materials selected highlight not only the production but also the consumption side of the business of the Jewish book: who bought and sold printed Judaica. In this exhibit, you will see in particular how these precious books came to be part of Penn’s library collections. Each item label explains from whom books were purchased or who donated specific treasures, and otherwise documents how Penn continues to develop one of world’s largest and most important Judaica collections.

Hebraica Veritas?

This exhibition focuses attention on the relatively unknown intellectual movement called Christian Hebraism, an offshoot of Renaissance humanism whose devotees — biblical scholars, theologians, lawyers, physicians, scientists,philosophers, and teachers in Latin schools--borrowed and adapted texts, literary forms, and ideas from Jewish scholarship and tradition to meet Christian cultural and religious needs.

Tablet, Scroll, & Book: Judaic Treasures

This exhibition focuses attention on the relatively unknown intellectual movement called Christian Hebraism, an offshoot of Renaissance humanism whose devotees — biblical scholars, theologians, lawyers, physicians, scientists,philosophers, and teachers in Latin schools--borrowed and adapted texts, literary forms, and ideas from Jewish scholarship and tradition to meet Christian cultural and religious needs.

From Written Word to Printed Text

This exhibition examines how the transmission of Judaism has always been heavily dependent on written texts as well as the oral traditions surrounding them through the presentation of one of the critical moments in the transformation of the Jewish book from manuscript to print in the early modern period.