Event

This is the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies 
Seventeenth Annual Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Lecture

Speaker: Yosef Kaplan, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Response by Roger Chartier, University of Pennsylvania/Collège de France

Please join us on Wednesday, February 5, 2014, for the Seventeenth Annual Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Lecture in Judaic Studies. Yosef Kaplan, Professor Emeritus of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, will focus on an episode in the life of a seventeenth-century Portuguese Converso, Cristobal Mendes—alias Abraham Franco Silveira—whose peregrinations and adventures placed him in contact with some of the most important centers of the Judeo-converso diaspora. Kaplan's analysis of this colorful microhistory will itself be a historiographical journey of the Western Sephardic Diaspora in the Early Modern Period.

Yosef Kaplan is Bernard Cherrick Emeritus Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the current chairman of the Humanities Section of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His most recent monograph is An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Western Sephardi Diaspora in the Seventeenth Century (2000). Kaplan is the editor of several volumes, including Fins des Siècle–End of Ages (2005) and The Dutch Intersection (2008), as well as the author of over one hundred articles. He is currently a member of the "Eros, Family, and Community" research group at Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies where he is completing a project titled Religious and Cultural Changes in the Western Sephardi Diaspora in the Early Modern Period. In 2013, Professor Kaplan was awarded the Israel Prize for his work on the history of the Jewish people.

Roger Chartier is Annenberg Visiting Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor at the Collège de France. His research is dedicated to the history of education, the history of the book, and the history of reading in early modern Europe. His work is deeply interdisciplinary, moving between literary criticism, bibliography, and sociocultural history.

Cosponsors:
Jewish Studies Program 
Department of History

Image:
Detail from Francisco Goya, For Being Born Somewhere Else (1810–11), one in a series of sketches of scenes from the Inquisition. Victims of the Inquisition wore conical caps and special tunics upon which were inscribed the accusations levied against them. Prado Museum, Madrid.

For more information visit our website: http://katz.sas.upenn.edu/meyerhoff/yosefkaplan or call 215-238-1290