CSoC would like to extend their wishes to all academics affected by the awful Corona Virus pandemic, and hope for better days where we can resume our international conferences and workshops, host guests from abroad and study in the same physical space. In the meantime, we revert to virtual study and research and are happy to assist our fellows and colleagues in any way we can. Please contact us here if we can be of assistance.
Reading Religious Conversion - EdX course
מומרים וגרים במרחבי ההסטוריה והמרשתת
30.6.2019
לחצו כאן כדי לצפות בסרטונים מהכנס "מומרים וגרים במרחבי ההסטוריה והמרשתת" שהתקיים באוניברסיטה הפתוחה ביוני 2019.
להמרות דת, לאורך ההיסטוריה האנושית, היו משמעויות דתיות, חברתיות, פוליטיות ומשפטיות, מהן אפשר ללמוד כיצד קהילות דתיות תפקדו, כיצד התמודדו עם שאלות זהות, באיזה אופן הציבו גבולות ומדוע עשו זאת. בחינת המרות דת מאפשרות גם התבוננות מושכלת על המבנים הפנימיים של הקהילות הדתיות; יחסי הגומלין שלהן עם אלו הנתפסים כ"אחרים", ומעקב אחר הדינמיקה של יחסי קבוצות מיעוט וקבוצות רוב המתגוררות זו לצד זו.
עם עלייתו של הקורס המקוון Reading Religious Conversion למרשתת, בחנו באירוע שהתקיים באו"פ ב30.6.2019 את תופעת "המרת הדת", והשפעת מגוון מופעיה על הבנת תהליכי מפתח בהיסטוריה האנושית, ולצד זאת- כמתחייב מאופי הקורס- את האופנים שבהם המרת התוכן המודפס בתוכן מקוון משפיעה על דרכי לימוד והוראת ההיסטוריה.
Testimontial of CSoC's MOOC on EdX
9.3.2020
Dear Rector Haimes,
I completed recently the course “Reading Religious Conversion” and founding no other way to contact the organisers of this excellent course , I take the liberty to contact you personally. I have followed until now 28 courses on Edx, Coursera and FutureLearn, and wanted to tell you that this is by far the best I completed. I am impressed and humbled by the number and the quality of the scholars that have been involved in compiling this course. The course content is well presented. The course documentation is impressive and the handouts are prepared with extreme care and are very well presented. A life changing experience. As an interested lay person in many of the subjects that are treated in this course , I realise that it is totally beyond an individual’s capacity, to gather equally scholarly researched information about 5% of the course’s subjects within a life time. So very rewarding indeed to complete because unique.
I have never mastered the technique of close reading but the combination of the texts with the questions and the answers helped me enormously. Again very remarkable in comparison with the other courses. So I wanted to express my sincere gratitude and admiration for this initiatiative . I will use the toolbox wisely.
With sincere thanks and great admiration for the course team.
קפצו קדימה לדקה 36:47 לשמוע את פרופסור אפרים שהם-שטיינר, מנהל המרכז לחקר המרת דת ומפגשים בין-דתיים, מדבר על רשימת חובות בשפה העברית על חיי הקהילה היהודית בגרמניה בימי הביניים.
Meet the Researchers for 2020-2021 "Materials and Materiality"
T. Fogel
20.4.20
Dr. Tom Fogel is a Folklorist and ethnographer. He studies Yemenite Jewish Folklore, Culture and Language, and addresses issues regarding Identity, Heritage and Tradition. Fogel is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the "Jewish Diaspora in the Indian Ocean" project, hosted by Dr. Menashe Anzi at the Department of Jewish History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Within the framework of this project, he studies the ethnographic work of Jewish-Baghdadi scholar and collector David Suleiman Sassoon. Additionally, Fogel is a research fellow in the ISF project "The varieties of Yemenite Arabic spoken by Jews" led by Dr. Ori Shachmon, in The Department of Arabic Language and Literature, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Object, Text, Place: between Kabbalists and Sufis in Lower Yemen
This research wishes to examine a cultural-religious dialogue between Jews and Muslims in Yemen, prior to the mass immigration of the Jewish community from Yemen to Israel. By using concrete objects that take part in magical healing practices, such as amulets, mystical texts and holy tombs, this research will portray the religious boundaries, and transitions, between Jews and Muslims in the mystical context of Kabbala and Sufism.
Y. Mabat
20.4.20
Dr. Yael Mabat is a historian of Modern Christianity in the Americas with an interest in Christian fundamentalist movements and Christian Restorationism. In her research, she implement concepts and approaches from the fields of Lived Religion, material religion and ritual studies. She's taught courses on Modern Christianity in the Americas, Popular Culture and Popular Religion and Latin American Modern History in both Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion University. Currently, Mabat is completing her first manuscript titled Christian Renewal on the Top on the Andes: The Early Dynamics of Latin America’s Religious Transformation.
Living like Christ: Material Religion and the Construction of a New Israel in the Andes
An idiosyncratic Christian denomination named “The Evangelical Association of the Israelites Mission of the New Universal Pact” emerged in Peru in the 1960s. This Church incorporates, produces, and interacts with a series of objects that are believed to be related to Judaism or ancient Israel and range from clothing, cooking utensils, and incense to the shofar replicas of the stone tablets. Specifically, Mabat examines sources of inspiration for the Church’s materiality and delves into the ways these objects changed in use and meaning in a new social setting.
T. Rotman
20.4.20
Dr. Tamar Rotman is a cultural historian of the early middle ages, she is particularly interested in hagiography, identity, and transmission of knowledge and cultural practices. She completed her PhD in the department of General History in Ben Gurion University, and for the last two years has been a post-doctoral fellow as the Department of General History in Bar Ilan University. Tamar is also one of the co-editors of the online magazine The Feminist (הפמיניסט.ית).
Relics, Hagiography and Identity in the early Medieval West
Identity is an important component for any attempt to reach a a more profound understanding of social, political, and cultural histories of past societies. In this project, Rotman intends to examine the role of cults of saints in the early medieval identity discourse and offer new methods for studying this subject. To do so, she'll use hagiographical texts, that is, written records of saints and martyrs, and juxtapose them with material evidence, such as relics, reliquaries, tombs, and liturgical vessels. Given that the analysis of such sources requires a complex approach, the study combines methods and theories that are taken from history, philology, literature, and religious studies.
C. Shacham-Rosby
20.4.20
Dr. Shacham-Rosby completed her PhD in the Department of Jewish History at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, titled: “Elijah the Prophet in Medieval Ashkenazi Culture” in 2018. She was a doctoral research assistant at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters, Ben-Gurion University from 2014 to 2018, and contributed to the online course "Reading Religious Conversion". During 2019 and 2020, she was a teaching fellow in the Department of Jewish History at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Dr. Shacham-Rosby has presented and published her research in numerous platforms, in Israel and abroad.
The Honorable Chair of Ceremony: Elijah's Chair as a case study of a ritual object's transitions through eras, spaces and cultures.
The Chair of Elijah is an iconic component of Jewish circumcision ceremonies, found almost universally throughout the Jewish diaspora from the 8th century until the present day. Its chronologically and geographically expansive use makes it an ideal component of material culture for examining local traditions, shifts in practice and conceptualization, and exchanges between religious groups. This study will examine varied approaches to Elijah’s Chair across diverse Jewish communities, including how the theological and social meanings associated with the object were shaped by the Christian and Muslim societies within which they existed.
R. Tzoreff
20.4.20
Roni Tzoreff is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Arts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, under the supervision of Dr. Ronit Milano and Prof. Sara Offenberg. Her research focuses on the representation of feminine experiences in the religious space in contemporary art, from gender, aesthetic and Jewish thought perspectives. She is the recipient of the Nathan Rotenstreich (Vatat) scholarship for 2017-2021. Her article: "She Writes in White Ink: On Aesthetic, Religious and Gender Perceptions in the Work of Jacqueline Nicholls" was published in Ars Judaica 14, 2018.
In her Ph.D. dissertation, she deals with contemporary art works that correspond to synagogues’ “Shiviti” tablets. She stands on gendered, theological, and political perceptions of the tablets, and looks for ways that contemporary artwork can reflect those perceptions and harness them to elaborate new perspectives. Her research is designed to illuminate how the tablets and the artworks are interrelated, and the way that contemporary art reflects a religious dimension and can be interpreted in a theological context.
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