UPCOMING ZOOM LECTURES
Tue, Sep 3, 2024 07:00 PM Jerusalem (12 noon EST; 9 am PST; 5 pm UK; 10 am Mexico): FROM BARI WILL COME FORTH THE TORAH AND THE WORD G-D FROM OTRANTO: JEWS IN PUGLIA, A BIMILLENARY PRESENCE, Prof. Fabrizio Lelli
The bimillenary history of Judaism in Puglia is a distillation of thousands of stories of Mediterranean Judaisms – fragments that across the millennia collectively comprise a powerful identity. Here are stories of wandering, of links sustained across great distances by faith in ancient traditions; and stories of commercial and cultural exchange across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, where Jews have always played a mediating role. Jews seem to have settled in Puglia in the first century CE. According to tradition, after the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in the year 70, Titus sent to Rome the members of the most outstanding priestly families of Jerusalem and some of them settled in the area around Brindisi, the main Roman port on the Adriatic Sea. In our talk we will virtually visit the most relevant Jewish sites of the region and will travel in history, exploring the traces of a thriving Jewish presence that was uprooted in the 16th century, following the Spanish decrees of expulsion, and was revived in the 19th century and especially in the mid-20th century, when several Transit Camps were opened in the Adriatic region to host the Shoah survivors after WWII. The same seaports that received thousands of refugees from ancient Judea became the starting points for the post-war refugees who yearned to create a modern Jewish State in the Land of Israel.
Fabrizio Lelli is currently Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at the “La Sapienza” University of Rome, after teaching for over twenty years at the University of Lecce. His research activity mainly focuses on the philosophical and mystical literature of late Medieval and Early Modern Italian Jewish authors. He has launched a project aimed to preserve the memory of the Jewish refugees in the United Nations DP (Displaced Persons) Transit Camps, which were operative in Southern Italy after WWII. He is Co-Founder and Director of the Jewish Museum in Lecce.
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