The UCSD Judaic Studies Program would like to invite you to hear Professor Bernard Cooperman, University of Maryland.

“Technology Censorship, and Inventing the Canon. Hebrew Book Culture in the Age of Print”
Thursday, May 12, 2011
12:30p.m.
H&SS 4025
(Humanities and Social Science Building)
Lunch will be served. Please RSVP to mtilley@ucsd.edu by May 10.

Description of Lecture: What was the impact of print technology on the presentation and shape of Jewish knowledge? Granted that literacy was relatively wide-spread among Jews, did the greater availability of printed books make a difference at a popular level and did it redefine the career and credentials of Jewish intellectuals? Starting with one book printed in Rome in 1546, we will explore the way in which Church and state policies towards the printed book served to redefine the Jewish canon and create what we now identify as Jewish traditional learning.

"Shylock's Daughter-in-Law. Adultery in Sixteenth-Century Jewish Rome" Thursday, May 12, 2011
8:00pm
IR/PS 3202
(International Relations and Pacific Studies)

Description of Lecture:
In March of 1543, Roman Jews were shocked to learn of an adulterous affair going on in the home of one of the community's wealthy moneylenders. The banker's daughter-in-law, a young wife and mother, was deeply involved with the family's trusted bank manager. We know about the affair, what the lovers did, and the intricate strategies adopted in response by the family from an unusually detailed rabbinic legal opinion written by Isaac de Lattes, a rabbi of the time. Basing ourselves on that rare document, we will explore the intimacies and pressures of Jewish domestic life during a prosperous period that preceded the establishment of the ghetto in 1555.

These events are free and open to the public.

Hosted by the UCSD Judaic Studies Program

For more information and to RSVP please contact mtilley@ucsd.edu