Modern Jewish Thought and Empire: The Early Modern Period

The past decades have witnessed remarkable advances in the historical and conceptual understanding of empire, imperialism, and colonialism. Focusing, chronologically, on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and geographically, on all the imperial configurations that are relevant to Jewish thought during this period, this workshop takes as its point of departure the fact that empire - as a reality or a phantasy - was a ubiquitous frame of reference that has been obscured or neglected in the scholarship on this genesis period of modern Jewish thought.

The workshop calls scholars to revisit a series of key Jewish intellectual figures, movements, and developments in their relationship to early modern empires and colonial expansion. It aims to shed original light on familiar and less-familiar topics and rethink some of the basic theoretical assumptions and priorities of the existing scholarship and stake out new directions for future scholarship.

This workshop is cohosted by the Duke Center for Jewish Studies, Duke Department of Religious Studies, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, the Bucerius Institute, North Carolina State University, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke, Duke Department of History, and the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies.