Playing Jewish Geography in the Nineteenth Century: Mendes I. Cohen’s Travels to Europe and the Middle East, 1829-1835

Speaker Prof. Daniel B. Schwartz, George Washington University

Sunday, May 31st at 1:00 p.m.

What might a Jew sailing from America to explore Jewish life in Europe and the Middle East in the nineteenth century likely have discovered in his travels? In this talk, Prof. Daniel B. Schwartz (George Washington University) will follow on the heels of Mendes I. Cohen’s voyage to and through the “Old World,” leading the audience on a tour of some of the major sites visited by Cohen from 1829 to 1835, and providing a mini-history of Jewish society in an age poised between tradition and change.

 

Daniel B. Schwartz teaches Jewish history at George Washington University, where he is an associate professor of history and the director of the Judaic Studies program. He is the author of The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (2012), which was a co-winner of the Salo Baron Prize for the best first book in Jewish Studies and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the category of history. He is currently writing a history of the word ghetto from when it was first used with reference to Jews in sixteenth-century Venice to the present, as well as editing a documentary reader of Jewish responses to Spinoza.