Jewish-Christian-Muslim

Intellectual Exchanges in the Medieval

& Early Modern Mediterranean
SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS
Storrs, Connecticut
October 25-26, 2017
 Program Symposium
October 25-26, 2017

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2017

5:30 PM RECEPTION

6:30 PM WELCOME
Jeremy Teitelbaum, Interim Provost & Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs; Professor of
Mathematics, University of Connecticut, USA

OPENING REMARKS
Gregory E. Sterling, Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean of Yale Divinity School Lillian Claus Professor of
New Testament, Yale University, USA

6:45 PM DINNER

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2017

8:30 AM CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST

9:15 AM WELCOME & OPENING REMARKS

Daniel Weiner, Vice President for Global Affairs; Professor of Geography, University of Connecticut,
USA
Zaid Eyadat, Professor of Political Science, University of Jordan, Jordan; Director of Human Rights
Programs in the Middle East, University of Connecticut, USA

9:30 AM SESSION I – INTERCULTURAL ENCOUNTERS

Mohammed Abattouy, Professor of History & Philosophy of Science, Mohammed V University,
Morocco
Ronald Kiener, Professor of Religious Studies, Trinity College, USA
Daniel Lasker, Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
Session Chair: Zaid Eyadat, Professor of Political Science, University of Jordan, Jordan; Director of
Human Rights Programs in the Middle East, University of Connecticut, USA

10:45 AM COFFEE BREAK

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 Program

11:00 AM SESSION II – SCIENCES: RECEPTION & TRANSLATION

Nader El-Bizri, Professor of Philosophy, American University of Beirut, Lebanon
Brian Long, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,
Canada
Nicola Carpentieri, Assistant Professor Chair of Arabic & Islamic Studies, University of Connecticut,
USA
Joseph Ziegler, Associate Professor of History; Director of the School of History, University of Haifa,
Israel
Session Chair: Susan Einbinder, Professor of Hebrew & Judaic Studies, University of Connecticut,
USA

12:15 PM LUNCH

2:00 PM SESSION III – REVELATIONS: POLEMICS & PROPHESIES

Alexander Fidora, Research Professor, Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies
(ICREA) at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
Andrea Celli, Assistant Professor of Italian & Mediterranean Studies, University of Connecticut, USA
Mayte Green-Mercado, Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers University, USA
Ahmed Chahlane, Professor Emeritus of Arabic & Judaic Philology, Mohammed V University,
Morocco
Session Chair: Zaid Eyadat, Professor of Political Science, University of Jordan, Jordan; Director of
Human Rights Programs in the Middle East, University of Connecticut, USA

3:15 PM COFFEE BREAK

3:30 PM SESSION IV – GEOGRAPHIES & MOBILITIES

Daniel Hershenzon, Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of Connecticut, USA
Seth Kimmel, Assistant Professor of Medieval & Early Modern Cultural Studies, Columbia University,
USA
Benjamin Liu, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, University of California at Riverside, USA
Pier Tommasino, Assistant Professor of Italian, Columbia University, USA
Session Chair: Anne Berthelot, Co-director of Medieval Studies Program; Professor of French,
University of Connecticut, USA

4:45 PM CONCLUDING REMARKS & PATH FORWARD

Jeffrey Shoulson, Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives; Doris & Simon Konover Chair in Judaic
Studies, University of Connecticut, USA

5:15 PM RECEPTION

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Background UConn Abrahamic Programs
for Academic Collaboration in the Middle East/North Africa Region

The University of Connecticut is a global university. People from all over the world come to UConn to deepen
their knowledge and identify solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. At UConn, faculty,
scholars, students, practitioners, and community members from diverse backgrounds interact with a spirit of
inquiry, curiosity and global citizenship. In keeping with this tradition, the Office of Global Affairs is developing
a new initiative named UConn Abrahamic Programs for Academic Collaboration in the Middle East/North Africa
Region (UConn Abrahamic Programs). This initiative builds on the long-standing Connecticut tradition of
innovative thinking and scientific discovery, while promoting regional academic integration in the Middle
East/North Africa Region.

This initiative promotes critical thinking and cross-cultural interaction, drawing some of its inspiration from the
intellectual foundations of Abrahamic traditions. The Torah expresses the value of reason and learning: “Come,
now, and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18). The New Testament addresses critical thinking and the reliance
on reason to understand the essence of creation: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by
the renewal of your mind” (Romans, 12:2). And, the Quran instructs the faithful to seek knowledge and use
reason: “My Lord, increase me in knowledge” (Surat Taha 20:114). These scriptural traditions link the use of
reason and intellect to the pursuit of knowledge. They emphasize the value of acquiring knowledge, using
reason, and acting with wisdom. UConn Abrahamic Programs are grounded in this common epistemological
heritage.

We aim to become an innovative umbrella under which academic collaborations, cross-border research, and
intercultural communications are fostered. We acknowledge that religion can significantly shape cultural
traditions, academic inquiry, beliefs, and inclinations. We also know that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all call
on their adherents to use reason for constructive purposes. By recalling the commonalities among these major
cultural traditions, this initiative builds scholarly relationships with the hope of contributing also to regional
economic and social development. The emphasis will be on substantive, in-depth interactions that nurture
meaningful, lasting relationships and new research collaborations. Participants coming from diverse
professional, cultural, and social backgrounds will be able to explore emerging trends and issues of critical
importance while advancing scholarship and deepening individual knowledge.

UConn Abrahamic Programs will bring people and institutions together through student and faculty mobility,
scientific workshops, collaborative research, virtual communication, and a speaker series. While we hope for
positive change on a myriad of political problems, including an equitable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, we imagine our workshops and research focusing on a wide range of scholarly issues, from the social
to the scientific to the economic. This inaugural symposium highlighted historical cooperation between scholars
of the three monotheistic religions, and how these collaborations led to great scientific and scholarly
contributions.

For more information visit: https://abrahamicprograms.uconn.edu

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 Opening
Remarks

Gregory E. Sterling
Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean of Yale Divinity School &
Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament, Yale University, USA
“Abrahamic Faith and the Politics of Violence”

The role of religion in violence torn regions is debated: some consider it irrelevant, others blame it as a cause
for the violence, and still others contend it is a possible source of unity. What role do scholars of religion have
in such situations? This symposium understands that intellectual exchanges among Jews, Christians, and
Muslims, is not only an important historical subject but has potential to point to possibilities beyond the
academy.

Abrahamic Faith. The symposium and the larger Abrahamic project that supports it, embraces three of the
world’s major religions. There are several reasons why Judaism, Christianity, and Islam should be treated
together. First, we all believe in one and the same God. We do not understand God in the same way, but we
agree on the most fundamental of all concepts, the concept of one God. The three religions are also religions of
the book. Again, we do not agree on the specifics, but we all lay claim to some of the same texts and believe
that the contents of these texts are authoritative. For Jews it is Tanakh; for Christians, it is the Bible–in all of its
multiple forms; and for Muslims it is some sections of the Bible as well as the Qur’an and the lost Suhuf Ibrahim.
Finally, we all recognize that our ethics are grounded in our religion. Again, we have differences, but unlike
ancient Greeks or Romans or Buddhists or Hindus whose ethics are grounded in ancestral traditions, our ethics
are grounded in our faiths. This makes our relationships with one another a matter of our religion and gives
urgency to the need to take religion seriously in political discussions.

Religion and Violence. Is our monotheistic faith ineluctably linked to violence? This is a well-known criticism,
and it would be wrong not to own the challenge that monotheism is not as pliable as other systems of thought.
At the same time, it is clearly not true that this is an exclusive challenge for monotheistic faiths; the Buddhist
ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar. How can we hold restrictive beliefs and yet be unrestrictive
politically?

Let me offer two suggestions. First, a person can be pluralistic without being entirely relativistic. It is possible to
make relative judgments within a pluralistic framework. Two, Sufyan Thauri said: “The best of rulers is he who
keeps the company of scholars of learning and the worst of scholars of learning is he who seeks the society of
rulers.” When religion is instrumentalized and used to legitimate a political agenda, it can be lethal. We have to
look for the ideals in our traditions and not permit religions to become tools for other ends.

This is where scholars can make a contribution. Scholarship should provide an awareness of the precedents for
periods when competing religions co-existed and the opportunity to examine the connection between religion
and politics without the threat of force. If we cannot have such conversations in universities dedicated to
academic freedom, where can we have them?

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 Proceedings SESSION I
Intercultural Encounters

Mohammed Abattouy
Professor of History & Philosophy of Science, Mohammed V University, Morocco
“Intercultural Transmission of Science in Medieval Andalus:
The Examples of Bār Ḥiyya and Ibn ʿEzra”

Few time periods in world history offer as unique a glimpse into cultural cohabitation as the one that existed in
medieval Spain, where, in an exceptional piece of space and time, there existed a long period of peaceful
coexistence filled with cultural exchanges in which the believers in the three Abrahamic faiths created a
miniature version of the global culture so often spoken of today. An important aspect of this intellectual
cooperation regarded science, especially mathematics and astronomy. In this short abstract, a special focus will
be laid on the survival of some classical Arabic texts of mathematics and astronomy in Hebrew through the
works of Abraham Bār Ḥiyya and Abraham Ibn ʿEzra.

Very little is known about Abraham Bār Ḥiyya’s biography. He died around 1140, after he lived probably in
Huesca, in northern Spain, where he attained mastery of Arabic sciences under the rule of the Banū Hūd dynasty.
Bar Ḥiyya’s scientific oeuvre covers several scientific fields in which he wrote works in Hebrew: astronomy,
mathematics, the Jewish calendar, astrology and philosophy. In his Treatise on Mensuration and Calculation, a
mathematical work conceived as a nontechnical textbook for the use of landholders and judges, he went far
beyond the practical needs of land measurements and added relevant theorems and their mathematical
demonstrations. Astronomy in Bar Ḥiyya’s oeuvre, dealing with the “science of the stars,” which is a calque
translation of the Arabic expression ʿilm al-nujūm, is represented by several works, among which is a
distinguished set of astronomical tables and their canons. Upon close scrutiny, it turns out that Bar Ḥiyya’s
astronomy reflects influences of previous works by Arabic astronomers al-Farghānī and al-Battānī.

Abraham Ibn ʿEzra or Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhim ibn ʿEzra (ca 1089-ca 1167) excelled in mathematics and astronomy. He
left various works in Hebrew. In astronomy, he was concerned with the calendar, the astrolabe, and with
permutations and combinations of the planets’ positions, as is shown in his Book of the World. He is also the
author of a set of astronomical tables, which are now lost, but their canons are extant in a Latin version. He also
translated from Arabic into Hebrew Ibn al-Muthannā’s Commentary on the Astronomical Tables of al-Khwārizmī,
of which the Arabic original is lost. In mathematics, Ibn ʿEzra composed several books on number theory and
measurements, the fundamental operations of arithmetic, and the decimal system for integers with place value
of the numerals from left to right.

Because Ibn ʿEzra was one of the first Jewish scholars to write on scientific subjects in Hebrew, he had to invent
many Hebrew terms to represent the technical terminology of Arabic. For example, he introduced terms for the
center of a circle, for the sine, and for the diagonal of a rectangle. On the other hand, in as much as Abraham
Ibn ʿEzra's works were widely copied in Hebrew and translated into European languages, he was responsible for
the availability of much Arabic science in Hebrew and Latin, and he helped to spread the new Hebrew
astronomical literature throughout Europe.

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 Ronald Kiener
Professor of Religious Studies, Trinity College, USA
“A Mystical Consanguinity between Judaism and Islam?”

While the modern term “Abrahamic religions” is a relatively recent construction born of both supercessionist
and ecumenical impulses, the question ought to be raised: is there any sense of a shared spiritual patrimony
amongst actual practitioners of each faith?

The spiritual domain occupied by religious mystics provides some of the most overt and open-hearted examples
of ecumenical equanimity between Jewish and Muslim mystics.

The question of shared Abrahamic patrimony on the mystic path is something hotly debated in the modern
scholarship of mysticism. Some have argued that there is Mysticism East & West, the former an intimate
realization of Ultimate Reality via an interior path that is described as a meditation and realization of the Self,
which is identical to the One; the latter via an exterior path to the beyond-soul of the transcendent/immanent
One.

In the 13th century there were some Jewish mystics calling out admiringly towards Muslim mystics; and similarly
there were Muslim mystics calling out admiringly towards Jewish mystics. Examples of “cultural”—quite possibly
unconscious—influences between Kabbalists and Sufis have been amply demonstrated by modern scholarship.
But more to the point, some Jewish mystics self-consciously appropriated from their Muslim mystic
contemporaries. Similarly, some Muslim mystics self-consciously drew from their Jewish mystic contemporaries.

The presentation briefly examined Abraham Abulafia, Abraham Maimuni, and Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi—two
Jews and a Muslim of the 13th century—for examples of this open-hearted acknowledgment of this long-lost
Abrahamic mystical consanguinity.

Daniel Lasker
Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
“Interreligious Debate and the Development of Medieval Religious Philosophy”

Daniel J. Lasker discussed the interplay between religious philosophy and interreligious polemic among medieval
Jews, Christians and Muslims. Often these two areas are considered independent, each with its own
conventions, with more scholarly interest devoted to strictly philosophical issues. Nevertheless, it was
theological competition among the Abrahamic religions that was a major stimulus behind the development of
systematic philosophical theologies in the Middle Ages. As members of each religion attempted to convince
both themselves and their opponents of the truth of their own religion and its superiority to the competitors,
they developed a repertoire of arguments. Many of these arguments were exegetical and historical, and since
the partisans of each religion approached exegesis and history from such different perspectives, it was hard for
them to find a common language in their debates.

In contrast, quite a number of arguments were derived from philosophical speculation, and the polemicists used
assumptions and methodologies which were theoretically common to all sides. Furthermore, after borrowing
from philosophy, these polemicists in turn made an impact on philosophical discourse. In order to illustrate this
point, Lasker discussed how interreligious debate made an impact on philosophical doctrines and how
philosophical doctrines informed the polemics. For instance, Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers all agreed

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that God is one, but they argued about the nature of that oneness. Therefore, those who discussed the nature
of God’s unity often began their treatment of this subject with reference to Greek philosophical views about the
divine and definitions of the term “one.” In the specific case of Christianity, God’s triune unity was understood
as a reflection of three divine attributes, an interpretation of the words used to describe God which was rejected
by Muslims and Jews. Polemical arguments concerning divine unity and attributes then influenced subsequent
philosophical reflections on what one can say about God. Oftentimes, the polemical background of such
philosophical discussions is often lost on the reader not familiar with the interreligious controversial literature.
Lasker explained how members of all three religions maintained beliefs in the unity and incorporeality of God,
but how interreligious competition among them forced the religionists to define these terms more precisely.

Another topic which exemplifies the relationship between medieval philosophy and interreligious polemics is
the nature of humanity as reflected in a belief in original sin. Although there are classical Jewish sources which
understood that Adam and Eve’s sin had an impact on all their descendants, when this belief became central in
Christianity, Jewish thinkers generally eschewed it. Yet, partially as a result of polemical discussions between
believers in the two religions, late medieval Jews, especially, but not only, the Kabbalists, slowly incorporated a
belief in original sin into their own theological systems.

Lasker’s examination of divine unity and human nature demonstrated how philosophy and polemics were often
intimately tied together in the medieval world of Judaism, Christianity and Islam especially in the Middle East
and the Mediterranean basin.

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 Proceedings SESSION II
Sciences: Reception & Translation

Nader El-Bizri
Professor of Philosophy, American University of Beirut, Lebanon
“Science in the Classical Islamicate Milieu The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham”

This expanded abstract offers selected highlights from a lengthier paper that was presented at the University of
Connecticut on October 26, 2017, and that examined principal leitmotifs from the Arabic classical traditions in
the history of science, along with their adaptive assimilation and expansion of ancient Greek scientific
knowledge, and their subsequent transmission and reception within the European medieval and Renaissance
circles of scholarship. This inquiry was thematically focused on the science of optics of the Arab polymath Ibn
al-Haytham (known in a Latinate rendition of his name as: Alhazen; d. ca. 1041 CE), with an emphasis on his
Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics; translated into Latin in the 12th century as: De aspectibus or Perspectiva; and
printed in 1572 in Basel under the title: Opticae Thesaurus Alhazeni). This opus contained Ibn al-Haytham’s
explications of the nature and comportment of light and direct vision, including studies and instruments in
catoptrics and dioptrics, all as grounded on his novel scientific experimental method of controlled testing, which
was underpinned by an isomorphic composition between geometric modelling and physics in studying natural
phenomena. Ibn al-Haytham resolved the ancient disputes over the nature of vision between the exponents of
the emission theory as advocated in Euclidean and Ptolemaic mathematical traditions, and the advocates of the
Aristotelian intromission thesis in natural philosophy. Ibn al-Haytham’s theory of visual perception rested on
investigations in geometry, physics, physiology, and psychology, by studying visible phenomena such as colour,
distance, position, solidity, shape, size, opacity, beauty, etc. Vision was explicated by him as a psychological and
physiological process that pertained to the passage of physical light through healthy ocular lenses, and how this
generates sensations via properly functioning optical nerves that reach the last sentient organ in the anterior
part of the brain. This ultimately results in cognitive acts of discernment and judgement as aided by the faculties
of imagination and memory to determine the nature and visible properties of the object that is seen. These
investigations impacted the perspectiva traditions in the medieval European milieu within the history of science
and their subsequent intersections with the pictorial and architectural spatial arts of the Renaissance. Besides
his research in optics, Ibn al-Haytham was also an astronomer who critiqued Ptolemy’s Almagest, Planetary
Hypotheses, and Astronomical Optics, and offered a Model for the Motions of the Seven Planets in a
geometrized geocentric system that had epicycles without equant in anticipation of the geometric “Tusi-Couple”
rolling device, which carried mathematical resemblances to what figured later in Copernicus’s heliocentric
model. Ibn al-Haytham also advanced a thorough geometrical critique of the conception of topos as presented
in Book Delta of Aristotle’s Physics by way of geometrizing place in a mathematical approach to spatiality that
later carried resonances in conceptions of extensio in the 17th century.

References:
Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham), The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham. Books I-III: On Direct Vision, introduced and translated
by A. I. Sabra (London: Warburg Institute, 1989).
Nader El-Bizri, “A Philosophical Perspective on Alhazen’s Optics”, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy (Cambridge
University Press), Vol. 15, Issue 2 (2005): 189-218.

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Nader El-Bizri, “In Defence of the Sovereignty of Philosophy: al-Baghdadi’s Critique of Ibn al-Haytham’s
Geometrisation of Place”, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press), Vol. 17, Issue 1
(2007): 57-80.

Brian Long
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Canada
“'The cursed monk, Daun Constantyn': Medicine and Morality in the Abrahamic Mediterranean”

By taking the Abrahamic Mediterranean as an object of analysis, we place the paradoxical nature of the region's
history at the center: attention to the Abrahamic religions suggests the influential role played by religion in the
region, while histories of the Mediterranean, as conceptualized by Fernand Braudel and his successors such as
Horden and Purcell, often draw our attention to long-term environmental economic and environmental forces.

In much the same way, the translation of medical works in the medieval Mediterranean reveals tensions and
paradoxes that require elucidation. Medical texts, after all, can be understood in an instrumental way, grounded
in the materiality of health and sickness, but, viewed the other way around, seem inextricable from cultural
attitudes towards illness, the care of the body, and death. This piece begins in the eleventh century, from the
realization of thinkers in Byzantium and the Latin West that Arabic texts had made substantial contributions to
Galenic medicine, and examines the ways that texts negotiated this moment of encounter. Works by both
Symeon Seth (in Byzantium) and Constantine the African (in southern Italy) drew on Arabic sources but kept
them at arm's length; most dramatically, Constantine only referred to his Arabic sources a handful of times
throughout his voluminous output.

At the same time, however, the close examination of these figures illustrates that it was not merely anxiety that
met these translations from Arabic—scattered hints suggest that new translations were eagerly debated by
specialists, while the works of both men reveal an awareness that their status and their successful careers
resulted, in part, from their access to rich, novel medical texts, even as they maintained a studied ambiguity
about their sources. Finally, the texts of these early translators help us to problematize overly abstract narratives
about the encounter between monolithic Abrahamic traditions; instead, we can see that the decisions of
individual translators often played a decisive role. Constantine the African's translations of works by Ibn al-Jazzar
show, for example, that the Muslim cleric possessed a greater sensitivity to the nuances of sexual ethics than
did the Latin monk.

Nicola Carpentieri
Assistant Professor and Chair of Arabic & Islamic Studies, University of Connecticut, USA
“Protean Guises of Madness: Arabic and Latin Transformations of ‘Melancholia’ and ‘Phrenitis’”

The classification of mental illnesses from antiquity to the late Middle Ages is marvelously uneven. Theoretical
shifts and drifts in explaining mental disease can be best observed diachronically when we approach a cohesive
corpus of writings, such as the commentaries on a given work. This presentation is concerned with changing
theories on the diseases known as melancholia and phrenitis within the corpus of the Arabic commentaries on
the Hippocratic Aphorisms. The discussion highlighted the progressive changes in the classification and
description of these two pathologies as they transitioned from Greek into Arabic. Carpentieri demonstrates

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what repercussions these changes, which were often due to deviant textual transmissions, had on the
development of medical theories on the aetiology, course and therapeutics of these elusive ailments.
Tangentially, his presentation also cast a glance at the nomenclature used for phrenitis in Gerard of Cremona's
Latin translation of Avicenna's Canon, documenting yet another semantic drift in this text, which was to become
Europe's main medical reference throughout the Middle Ages and the pre-Modern period.

Joseph Ziegler
Associate Professor of History and Director of the School of History, University of Haifa, Israel
“The Common Language of the Human Body: A Comparative Look at
Pre-modern Latin, Arabic and Hebrew Physiognomy”

Physiognomy from the Greek phusis – nature, and gnōmōn – interpreter, or gnōmé – indicator, or knowledge-
carrying mark (late medieval physiognomic texts linked the suffix to onoma – name, or nomos – law, and
pontificated about this branch of knowledge as ‘the law of nature’); hakarat panim - recognition or knowledge
of the face, from Isa. 3.9, or ẖokhmat ha-partsuf – wisdom of the face in Hebrew; firāsa in Arabic, is the art of
judging character and potential behavior by the overall external appearance of bodily organs through analysis
of their size, proportion, shape, color, texture, motion, and voice. It is a trans-cultural and trans-historical branch
of knowledge. In antiquity, from India to Egypt and Mesopotamia, in ancient Greece and Rome, in ancient Israel,
in the Latin, Greek, and Arab medieval worlds, and increasingly throughout the early modern period,
physiognomic consciousness emerged, declined and then reappeared in a variety of forms and intellectual
contexts. Common to all these cultures was a recognition of the human body as a locus of signs and meanings
transcending the simple observation of its physical health.

Ancient Greek physiognomy, the foundation of both Latin and Arabic physiognomy, did not undertake to predict
the future but to profile character, behavioral patterns, and personality traits for practical and rhetorical
purposes. This observation applies also to all Latin medieval physiognomic texts from 1200 onwards. Overall,
the physiognomic tradition in pre-1500 Europe was largely scientific, fused into high-level scholastic discourse
and studies, and practiced by academic physicians and natural philosophers. On the other hand, among scholars
of Hebrew and Arabic physiognomy, a mantic tilt of physiognomy relegated the significance and the use of this
body of knowledge to the arena of magic, divination and the esoteric. But was there really such a striking rift
between mystical, esoteric, and mantic Hebrew and Arabic physiognomic interests and the learned
physiognomy discussed and practiced as an integral part of the general scientific culture and as a branch of
Aristotelian natural philosophy and Galenic medicine in the West?

Two examples (the first based on Giambattista della Porta’s discussion of hooked or aquiline noses in his De
humana physiognomonia from 1586; the second based on Michele Savonarola’s physiognomic portrait of Christ
in his Speculum phisionomie from c. 1450 and Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn 'Arabī’s (d. 1240) physiognomic portrait of the
Prophet) reinforce the common language of physiognomy shared and exchanged by all three cultures. At the
height of the Turkish threat to Europe, real Turkish Sultans served physiognomers as exemplary virtuous figures
next to ancient heroes and Christian Saints. Muslims and Christians used an identical set of bodily signs to
visualize the founder of their religions. When adopting this strategy, the Arabs preceded learned Latin
physiognomers by some 200 years. But one can cautiously claim that by intertwining the portraits of Christ and
Muhammad into the physiognomic discourse, physiognomers from both cultures were reacting similarly to the
religious challenges that this science posed.

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Throughout pre-modernity, four core texts (two ancient—Ps. Aristotle’s Physiognomonics, and Polemon of
Laodicea’s De physiognomonia liber; and two medieval—book II of Rhazes’s (Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn
Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī), Liber almansoris (or regalis, or ad regem almansorem, or al Kitāb al Manṣūrī fī l-ṭibb), and
book 8 of Ps. Aristotle’s Secret of Secrets) shaped the discourse of learned physiognomy in the three cultures.
The evolution of this discourse does not allow us to tell a story of a simple exchange of ideas: none of the Arabic
physiognomies were translated into Latin; there is no equivalent text to Avicenna's Canon which could unify the
Arabic and Latin scientific discourses on physiognomy, as it did, to a large extent in medicine. Yet the purpose
of this presentation is to make a plea: whoever wishes to study Latin, Hebrew, or Arabic physiognomy, should
look carefully also at the neighboring cultures if she wishes to interpret accurately the specific findings and avoid
errors. Such a parallel history of learned physiognomy in the three cultures will identify points of cultural
similarity and difference, demonstrate the emergence of similar discourses through parallel developments
rather than direct transmissions, and in particular, identify shared cultural and behavioral experience and needs
that turned Christians, Muslims and Jews into a global community without erasing the mighty religious and
distinctive cultural differences that distinguished them.

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 Proceedings SESSION III
Revelations: Polemics & Prophesies

Alexander Fidora
Research Professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA),
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
“The Latin Talmud and the Extension of Papal Jurisdiction over Jews”

In the middle of the 13th century, Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert, approached Pope Gregory IX with a list of
thirty-five articles against the Talmud, which would become the basis of the inquisitorial process against the
Talmud held in Paris in 1240. This process constitutes the backdrop of the very first translation into Latin of
almost 2,000 passages from the Babylonian Talmud entitled Extractiones de Talmud, which must be considered
a decisive step towards the extension of papal jurisdiction over Jews that radically changed their traditional
status. This presentation focused on an intriguing passage from the prologue of the Extractiones de Talmud
which reveals the complex interplay of legal and theological arguments in the controversy surrounding the
Talmud.

Andrea Celli
Assistant Professor of Italian & Mediterranean Studies, University of Connecticut, USA
“Aljamiado Hagar: Hybridization and Polemical Usages of a Biblical Narrative in Early Modern Spain”

Reappraisals of the Biblical story of Hagar and Ishmael in Early-Modern Spain represent a relevant, though
almost overlooked, case of conflicting interpretations of the same foundational myth across confessional
borders. This section of the Abrahamic narrative had long played a key role in derogative Jewish and Christian
representations of Islam, and vice versa. However, from the 16th century, while Catholic apologetics still offer
disparaging actualizations of the story, whose juridical language of inheritance is often quoted by advocates of
expulsion, alternative readings of the story emerge in Morisco milieus. This presentation examined some
aljamiado sources (e.g. Mancebo de Arévalo, Ali al-Garibo, Muhammad Rabadan), that display affirmative
appropriations of the story, to contrast Jewish and Catholic genealogical exegesis. In order to contextualize
these sources, the presentation also mentioned some Islamic versions of the narrative circulating among
Catholic audiences via the influential work of conversos such as Juan Andrés.

Mayte Green-Mercado
Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers University, USA
“The ‘Nine and a Half Tribes’ and the Conquest of Iberia: Morisco, Converso, and
Christian Prophecies of the End Times”

On August 11, 1609, a twenty-five year-old Morisco doctor named Juan de Toledo testified before the inquisitors
of Toledo against his cellmate, a Portuguese Converso by the name of Felipe de Náxera. The Morisco testified

12
that he had never seen his jail companion pray or invoke any of the saints. The young doctor desperately needed
to convince the inquisitors that he was a good Christian. He had been accused of superstition, witchcraft, and
invocation of demons, so any information against Náxera that would demonstrate his allegiance to the Christian
faith could win the favor of his captors. He described many conversations he had with his fellow prisoner in
great detail, some of which shed important light on the religious beliefs and practices of Portuguese Conversos
regarding the End of Times. For example, Juan de Toledo claimed to have heard that the Portuguese Conversos
who arrived in that region used to cross a river where, at the top of a canyon, lived an old hermit who was said
to be either the prophet Elias or the prophet Enoc. He had heard Náxera state that the “nine and a half” [sic]
tribes [of Israel] would soon gather at that site, because he knew that the area would be conquered. We know
from other statements made by the young Morisco that the Converso was possibly referring to a Muslim
conquest of the Peninsula. Náxera also spoke of the prophecies of the shoe-maker Bandarra, which confirmed
the exodus of these nine and a half tribes, among other things. Shining light on the Muslim conquest of the
Iberian Peninsula, Náxera also sentenced that “the door that the Arians [Visigoths] had opened to the African
kingdoms would never be closed.”

This presentation examined the circulation of apocalyptic ideas between Moriscos and Converso Jews on the
eve of the expulsion of the Moriscos. Green-Mercado argued that Moriscos and Conversos were well aware of
each other’s apocalyptic traditions—Juan de Toledo’s testimony was shaped by Christian and Converso
apocalyptic narratives—and that this knowledge inflected their ideas, hopes, and aspirations for the political
future of the Iberian Peninsula, and of their own communities. Focusing on the question of a future Islamic
conquest of the Peninsula, Green-Mercado traced the genealogy of this theme in early modern Muslim,
Morisco, Converso, and Christian prophetic traditions.

Ahmed Chahlane
Professor Emeritus of Arabic & Judaic Philology, Mohammed V University, Morocco
“Ibn Rushd Thought in the Mediterranean Jewish Community”

Greek thought in the Islamic West defined a new course which relied on Aristotelian foundation, and differed
from its course in the East, especially with the seminal work done by Ibn Rushd in his commentary on the
Aristotelian Encyclopedia.

The Jews of the Iberian Peninsula attended with special care to the entirety of the Rushdian encyclopedia by
thoroughly reading it initially in the Arabic language. This was expressed in the words of one the greatest Jewish
philosophers, Moses Maimonides, who explained that he compiled all the works of Ibn Rushd except the Book
of ‘Al Hiss Wal-Mahsous’. This special attention and care to the work of Ibn Rushd was furthered by translating
his whole encyclopedia from Arabic into Hebrew. This was followed with a translation of this encyclopedia into
Latin, to be first published with the original texts of Aristotle, in the ‘edition de la junta’.

This intellectual process summarizes the peak of this cognitive overlap, which was centered by Moses
Maimonides in his attempts to bring religion closer to philosophy, which has moved the intellectual path,
spurring division among the Jewish communities where two parties emerged; those who commended the
philosophical lesson, and those who rejected it. This conflict continued to exist among the Jewish communities,
and was further fueled by Ibn Rushd.

13
The translation of the book Dalalat Al-Ha’ereen from Arabic to Hebrew was a very important event for the Jews
of southern France and northern Spain. By dint of this, their scholars unraveled the mysteries of the Torah, as
this aided them in devising the intellectual approach necessary to solve the problems of the text of The Book.

Following this, Jews reverted to their Arab heritage, which they carried with them from Andalusia. They carried
out the great translation movement, where Ibn Rushd constituted a central part; whether in the volume of
translated or explicated texts, or the number of circulated copies which was equivalent to copies of the Torah.

However, this does not mean that Ibn Rushd gained popularity among the whole society of the Jews of the
Middle Ages. It is a man’s fate to be subjected to the injustice of people through generations, from those who
considered his thoughts to be threatening their science, status or power. This has happened in the Muslim
community as well as in the Christian community.

Upon the arrival of some of its origins from the East, this knowledge commenced an intellectual stir whose
motifs interfaced in the Lower Bank: Kairouan, Fes, Marrakech, the Iberian Peninsula, south of France and the
Italian monarchy. This interfacing constituted the basis of medieval knowledge in Europe after the 17th century,
the champions of which were thinkers who embraced Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or other faiths; but ultimately
worked in solidarity for the greater good of mankind.

14
 Proceedings SESSION IV
Geographies & Mobilities

Daniel Hershenzon
Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of Connecticut, USA
“Captives and Renegades: Confrontations, Conversions, and Connections across
the Early Modern Mediterranean”

Between 1450 and 1800, two to three million Christians and Muslims were taken captive and enslaved across
the Mediterranean. Christian fleets and pirates captured Muslims, and Muslim corsairs captured Christians.
Captivity and the ransom economy that facilitated the freeing of some of the captives created a host of
unexpected links between Spain, Ottoman Algiers, and Morocco. This presentation explores some of these
entanglements by focusing on the relations between Christian captives and renegades, Christians who
converted to Islam within the context of captivity in the early modern Maghrib. More specifically, in this
presentation Hershenzon analyzed letters that captives had written on behalf of renegades, in which the authors
had vouched for the renegades’ “true Christianity”. Renegades sought such letters because they either planned
on returning to Spain or were afraid of being captured by Spanish forces. In either case, renegades knew they
would have to face the Inquisition and account for their conversion. By obtaining such letters, renegades hoped
to provide mitigating circumstances for their conversion. The exchange of such letters, Hershenzon
demonstrated, allowed the Spanish Inquisition a foothold in the Maghrib, shaped social hierarchies among
captives in the Maghrib, and bestowed a legal persona on enslaved captives, defined by pre-modern legal theory
as “dead things”.

Seth Kimmel
Assistant Professor of Medieval & Early Modern Cultural Studies, Columbia University, USA
“Commonplaces and Places in Common: Sacred Geography after Al-Andalus”

Sixteenth-century Christian Hebraists like Benito Arias Montano and his interlocutors from Rome, Madrid,
Seville, and Antwerp eagerly pursued their interest in the sacred geography of Jerusalem and its surroundings.
These men undertook their research on the eastern Mediterranean by drawing on sources that the Jewish and
Islamic communities of the Iberian Peninsula and the wider western Mediterranean had helped to produce and
preserve, often in scholarly compilations such as Bible commentaries, encyclopedias, and commonplace books.
Among the products of this research were printed maps of the Holy Land and architectural drawings of King
Solomon’s temple, as well as a scale model of Jerusalem produced for Philip II by the Jesuits Juan Bautista
Villalpando and Jerónimo Prado.

The early modern period’s new mathematical and geographic research practices were partially honed in the
realm of biblical commentary. Yet the same practices also served a wider array of scholarly fields and projects,
including antiquarian endeavors and land surveys concerned specifically with peninsular history and geography.
Think not only of the Escorial, whose overall design some contend was based on Solomon’s temple and whose
library was carefully conceived by Montano and other early librarians as a three-dimensional “map” of

15
knowledge, but also of contemporary research on Iberian antiquities undertaken by the historian Ambrosio de
Morales and the study of peninsular place names realized by the lexicographer Diego de Guadix.

Taking the Escorial library as a paradigmatic example, this presentation showed how early modern librarians
like Montano scaled up the longstanding spatial features of bibliographic and antiquarian practice to meet the
cartographic pretensions of Philip II and other royal patrons. Put simply, those scholars who catalogued texts
also often catalogued territories, tagging and cross-referencing the expanding sets of natural historical,
antiquarian, and ethnographic data that characterized the fields of both sacred and secular geography, just as
they had done with titles, authors, and subject headings.

The presentation considered two emblems of this relationship between bibliography and mapping, on the one
hand, and between scholarship on the eastern and western Mediterranean, on the other hand. The first was a
late sixteenth-century map of ancient Spain, included from 1590 onwards in Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis
Terrarum and dedicated to Montano, upon whose research it was surely based. The second was a map of the
Holy Land in antiquity, published along with an extensive set of scholarly commentaries in the eighth volume of
the Antwerp Polyglot Bible, which Montano edited.

As the historian Zur Shalev has shown, it was not lost on Montano and his contemporaries that a reconstruction
of the Iberian Peninsula and the Holy Land in antiquity represented parallel historical challenges, the most
important of which was how to balance Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and pagan sources. The main contribution of
this presentation to this line of research was to show that in seeking to address this challenge, the meaning of
the Holy Land’s contested sites of religious memory and the Iberian Peninsula’s multiconfessional history came
to shape each other in the early modern period.

Benjamin Liu
Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, University of California at Riverside, USA
“Imperial Maps, Morisco Mobilities”

Two alternative ways of perceiving the world are enfolded in the genre of Persian and Arabic books of
geography: Kitāb al-Masālik wa'l-Mamālik/Book of Roads and Kingdoms. One is dynamic, one is static; one
connects, one divides; one particularizes, one totalizes; one takes the form of a story, one that of a map.
Medieval mappae mundi, themselves often products of inter-communal intellectual encounters, show the
geographical outlines of territories in relation to each other (e.g. al-Idrisi’s Tabula rogeriana or Abraham
Cresques’s Atlas catalan); while narration embodies a traveler situated in a place at a given moment of time
(e.g. Benjamin of Tudela’s Travels or the Libro de conoscimiento de todos los reinos).

In this presentation, Liu expounded on some of these distinctions with two roughly contemporary examples
from the 16th century. A well-known passage in the second book of Alonso de Ercilla’s epic La Araucana (1578)
depicts a global geopolitical view of the Iberian world. The naval battle of Lepanto (1571), reframed as a global
civilizational conflict between European Christendom—Spain, Italy and Germany—and an ethnically diverse
Ottoman empire for geopolitical power from “the Ganges to Chile and from pole to pole.” The world at stake is
further described in a prophetic vision of a translucent, spherical world map. An itinerary of place names from
around the globe are enumerated from the “beginning of Asia” in the East to Spain’s American colonies in the
West.

16
Ercilla’s epic mappa mundi transparently pays homage to the “imperial optic” of Phillip II’s monarchy, as re-
imagined through the magical arts of an indigenous Arauco shaman. At nearly the same time of Ercilla’s writing,
in 1576, Phillip II issues an edict to regulate and restrict the movements of Moriscos from Granada. This “travel
ban” responds to an incident involving an itinerant Morisco mule-driver whose ordinary trade (one frequently
plied by Moriscos) involved transportation and geographical mobility, that is, masalik, roads rather than
kingdoms.

In the relatively sparse written accounts of Morisco travel that Liu examines, this seems to be the practical
question of life at ground level: how to get around as a Morisco who inhabits the unstable boundaries of a
Christian legal identity and a Muslim faith community. But these varied texts, written in aljamiado-morisco,
Spanish transliterated into Arabic script, also raise the larger question of the underlying epistemological tensions
between forms of geographical knowledge, whether visual or narrative, official or clandestine, about kingdoms
or roads.

Pier Tommasino
Assistant Professor of Italian, Columbia University, USA
“Communication and Creativity: Francesco Pecorini’s Letter in Arabic to Francesco Redi (1667)”

This presentation is based on Tommasino’s ongoing research on Oriental studies in Florence in the second half
of the 17th century, and especially on a group of letters composed in both Arabic and Latin script by African and
European scholars based in Italy. These letters circulated between Florence and Italian ports such as Livorno
and Genoa. Tommasino’s starting point is a letter written in Arabic by the physician Francesco Pecorini to the
physician Francesco Redi in the spring of 1667.

Recent studies have deepened our knowledge of the history of communication across early modern global
networks, with a particular focus on commercial and intellectual exchanges between Europeans and non-
European merchants and scholars.

The aim of Tommasino’s presentation is instead to underline the creative aspects of writing and inscribing letters
across Mediterranean alphabetical, linguistic and rhetorical systems. He argued that writing letters is not just
about communication. It is foremost about writing, which is to say the rhetorical construction of a letter’s text
and paratext, as well its material inscription on paper. The study of this cross-cultural creativity and playfulness
in using languages and alphabets helps us to better understand how early modern European scholars
collaborated with and learned from the Muslim elites who traveled among Italian ports.

17
 Speakers’
Biographies

Mohammed Abattouy
Professor of History & Philosophy of Science, Mohammed V University, Morocco

Mohammed Abattouy is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Mohammed V University in Rabat,
Morocco. He began his career by investigating the history of science in the 17th century and specialized in
Galileo's manuscripts of physics for his Ph.D. dissertation from Paris I University (June 1989). Between 1992 and
1995, he worked in the ‘Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique’ (Paris and Nice) and at the ‘Observatoire
de la Côte d’Azur’ (Nice) in collaboration with French and Italian colleagues in history of mathematics, on one
hand, and on exploring the genesis of modern science in the works of young Galileo, on the other hand. He
joined the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin as a scholar (1996-2003), where he shifted
his academic focus to the investigation of the history of Arabic classical sciences. During this period, he
investigated the history of Arabic mechanics and reconstructed the tradition of the Arabic science of weights
(ʿilm al-athqāl) which he reconstructed in full from manuscripts. From March 2007 to May 2014, he was senior
research fellow at the Foundation of Science, Technology and Civilization (FSTC) in Manchester, UK, where he
acted as chief editor of the academic web portal MuslimHeritage.com and participated in major projects of the
Foundation, including the content preparation for ‘1001 Inventions,’ an educational touring exhibition.

Mohammed Abattouy is the author of several books and more than 50 articles on the history of science. He
participated in numerous conferences on the history of science and organized several of them himself. His book
published in English in London in summer 2014 on Al-Isfizārī’s corpus of mechanics was awarded two prestigious
prizes, an international award for translation of science from Arabic to other languages and the prize of the best
Moroccan book of social sciences in 2016.

Currently, he is preparing for publication the Corpus of the Arabic Science of Weights, with English translation.
He is also writing a commentary on Galileo’s science including: (1) a book-length essay in French on Galileo’s
manuscripts of physics; (2) the first Arabic translation of the Discorsi, Galileo’s great book of mathematical
physics published in 1638; and (3) another book exploring the unique case represented by the ‘Galileo Affair’ as
a case study of the complex problem of the relationship between science and religion.

Anne Berthelot
Co-Director of the Medieval Studies
Professor of French & Medieval Studies, University of Connecticut, USA

An alumna of the École Normale Supérieure and “agrégée des Lettres” (specialized in Latin and Ancient Greek),
Anne Berthelot is Professor of French and Medieval Studies at the University of Connecticut. She specializes in
Arthurian Literature with a comparative approach and has published numerous books and articles on this topic,
especially on Merlin. She is currently engaged in a multi-volume project on Late Arthurian Texts in Europe (LATE)
with Professor Christine Ferlampin-Acher (Université Rennes 2) and working on a literary study of the so-called
Roman des fils du roi Constant by Baudouin Butor.

18
Recently, she has started exploring magical texts from the Middle Ages and the so-called Renaissance period,
and has created several courses—at both undergraduate and graduate levels—on the history of magic, and
variations of belief in the supernatural area.

Nicola Carpentieri
Assistant Professor and Chair of Arabic & Islamic Studies, University of Connecticut, USA

Nicola Carpentieri is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies, in the Department of Literature, Cultures, and
Languages at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on Arabic literature across the Mediterranean
and on transcultural approaches to the history of medicine. He received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies
from Harvard University in 2012. Subsequently, he worked at the University of Manchester in the United
Kingdom and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain.

His most recent work is centered on the Arabic songs and odes composed by court secretaries (kuttāb) in
medieval Sicily. These long-neglected texts are compellingly entangled with the history of cultural tropes and
practices of the wider Mediterranean: the early Italian poetic tradition, Byzantium, the Muslim East, North
Africa, and Iberia. His other academic interests cover Arabic medical texts (particularly on psychosomatics),
Greek into Arabic and Arabic into Latin translations, the 'School of Toledo,’ the Sicilian-Arab poet Ibn Ḥamdīs,
and contemporary Arabic writings.

Andrea Celli
Assistant Professor of Italian & Mediterranean Studies, University of Connecticut, USA

Andrea Celli is Assistant Professor of Italian and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Connecticut. He
graduated in “Letteratura moderna” at the Univerità di Padova, Italy, where he also received his Ph.D. Before
joining the University of Connecticut, he lectured at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. He recently edited a
collection of essays titled, “Experience and representation of Islam in Mediterranean Europe (16th-18th
centuries),” Rivista di Storia e Letteratura religiosa (Olschki), LI/3, 2015. Celli has published several monographs
and book chapters on issues related to European interest in Islam and translated a number of works from French
and Arabic authors (e.g. the Orientalist Louis Massignon and the poet Adonis). He is currently working on two
main projects: a monograph on early-modern treatments of the narrative of Hagar and Ishmael (Genesis, 16;
21) in the context of interreligious polemics in the Counterreformist Mediterranean; and a second book whose
tentative title is Stories of Pledge, Slavery and Love: Essays on Italian Literature in the Context of Medieval and
Early-Modern Mediterranean.

Ahmed Chahlane
Professor Emeritus of Arabic & Judaic Philology, Mohammed V University, Morocco

Ahmed Chahlane is Professor Emeritus of Arabic and Judaic Philology at Mohammed V University in Rabat,
Morocco, where he served on the faculty from 1974 to 2009. From 1991 to 1995, Chahlane served as the
Director of the Office for the Arabization of the Arab world, at the ALECSO Ligue Arabe. Chahlane received his
bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Arts at Fez (Morocco) and an École normale supérieure diploma in 1967.
He received a second BA in Hebrew at the Sorbonne and a master’s degree in Modern Hebrew at the Institut

19
des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris in 1974. He also holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the Sorbonne
and a Doctorat d’Etat in Islamic Studies (Averroès et la pensée juive au Moyen Age) from Mohammed V
University. Since 1991, Chahlane has served as the Secretary General of the Moroccan Association of Oriental
Studies; and he is a member of the Association of Moroccan Authors for publication. He has also been a visiting
professor at many universities around the world, a member of the ERA (CNRS), Paris, and the Secretary General
of the Association for Humanities Research at Mohammed V University.

His publications include: The Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart Bahya Ben Joseph Ibn Pakuda Men
(2010); Les Juifs du Maroc depuis leur origine jusqu’à l’heure de leur dispersion (2009); and De la Langue
phénicienne à l’Aarabe. Une étude comparative dans les langues sémitiques et La lexicographie (2009). The
following works will be published soon: Édition critique de la traduction hébraïque de Kitab et Al-kashf 'an
manahij al- adilla fi'aqaid al-milla d’Averroès (La vraie méthode des preuves dans les dogmes de la foi)
(Traduction médiévale); Édition critique de Kitab al-muhadara wa-l-mudakara de Moïs ben Ezra; and, a
translation from Hebrew to Arabic of, Paraphrase de L'Éthique à Nicomaque d’Aristote, par Ibn Ruchd (Averroès).
Chahlane has also published hundreds of scholarly and press articles on history, Medieval Judao-Arabic
philosophy, comparative literature, and comparative lexicography, and he has translated many texts from
Hebrew and French into Arabic.

Nader El-Bizri
Professor of Philosophy, American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Nader El-Bizri is Professor of Philosophy and Civilization Studies at the American University of Beirut. He also
serves as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and as the Director of the General Education
Program, and of the Anis Makdisi Program in Literature. El-Bizri formerly acted as the Director of the Civilization
Studies Program, and as Coordinator of Islamic Studies at the University’s Center for Arab and Middle Eastern
Studies. He previously taught at the University of Cambridge, University of Nottingham, University of Lincoln,
London Consortium, and Harvard University. He was also a researcher at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in
London and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. El-Bizri has published and lectured widely,
and serves on the editorial boards of publishers such as Oxford University Press. He has also acted as a
consultant to the Science Museum in London, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Geneva, the Guggenheim
Museum in Berlin, and contributed to BBC radio/TV programs. He received awards and honors, including the
Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences Prize, and has been elected as a Mellon Global Fellow of
the Liberal Arts at the Claremont McKenna College in California, USA.

Susan Einbinder
Professor of Hebrew, Judaic Studies & Comparative Literature, University of Connecticut, USA

Susan Einbinder is the author of two monographs on medieval French Jews, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and
Martyrdom from Medieval France (Princeton 2002) and No Place of Rest: Literature, Expulsion and the Memory
of Medieval France (Philadelphia 2009). Her next book, After the Black Death: Plague and Commemoration
among Iberian Jews, is scheduled to appear next spring with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Prior to
arriving at the University of Connecticut in 2012, she taught at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. She
is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and has been the grateful recipient of fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for
Scholars & Writers, the National Humanities Center, the UConn Humanities Institute and more.

20
 Zaid Eyadat
Professor of Political Science & Human Rights, University of Jordan, Jordan
Director of Human Rights Programs in the Middle East, University of Connecticut, USA

Zaid Eyadat is Professor of Political Science and Human Rights, expert on international and comparative politics
and the chairperson of the board of trustees and the advisory board of Arab Renascence for Development and
Democracy (ARDD). He is the founding chairperson of the Department of Human Rights—which later became
the Department of Political Development—and the founding Dean of the Prince al-Hussein School of
International Studies at the University of Jordan. His training and research interests are in the fields of
International politics, comparative politics, international political theory, modelling and game theory. He is a
leading and distinguished expert on Middle East politics, Human Rights, Islamic thought and Islam & Human
Rights. His research has been published in many leading scholarly journals.

Some of his published articles and book chapters include “Minorities in the Arab World: Faults and Faults Lines,”
“Islamic Feminism: Roots, Development, and Policies," “The Calculus of Consensus: an Alternative Path to Arab
Democracy,” "Fiqh Al-Aqalliyyât and the Arab Spring: Modern Islamic Theorizing," "Public Reason and Islamic
Reason in the Post-Secular,” "The Rationality of Political Violence: Modelling Al-Qaeda vs. the United States,"
"A Transition Without Players: The Role of Political Parties in the Arab Revolutions," and "Arab Revolutions of
2011: An Explanatory Model.” He is also the co-editor of the book Migration, Security, and Citizenship in the
Middle East, and the co-translator of Count Bernadotte's Mediation to Palestine 1948: Mediation and
Assassination. He has just completed the translation of a book entitled Global Justice: Towards an International
Theory of Human Rights.

Alexander Fidora
Research Professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA),
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

Alexander Fidora, born 1975 in Offenbach, Germany, studied philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, obtaining
his Ph.D. in 2003. He is a Research Professor of the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) in
the Department of Ancient and Medieval Studies of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he co-directs
the Institute of Medieval Studies. His research focuses on medieval philosophy, in particular, epistemology and
metaphysics as well as the intercultural and interreligious dimensions of medieval thought, with more than forty
books edited. Currently, he is directing the ERC Consolidator project: “The Latin Talmud” (2014-2018), which
explores the hitherto unedited Latin translation of the Talmud prepared in Paris in 1244/45. Founded the Journal
of Transcultural Medieval Studies, together with G. Hasselhoff and M. Tischler. He is also the vice-president of
the Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale. Recent publications include:
- Latin-into-Hebrew: Texts in Contexts, ed. A. Fidora, H. Hames and Y. Schwartz, Leiden/Boston, 2013.
- Guido Terreni, O. Carm. († 1342): Studies and Texts, ed. A. Fidora, Barcelona/Madrid 2015.
- Arnau de Vilanova: Über den Antichrist und die Reform der Christenheit, German translation and introduction
A. Fidora, Barcelona/Münster i. W., 2015.
- Appropriation, Interpretation and Criticism: Philosophical Exchanges between the Arabic, Hebrew and Latin
Intellectual Traditions, ed. A. Fidora and N. Polloni, Barcelona/Rome, 2017.

21
 Mayte Green-Mercado
Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers University, USA

Mayte Green-Mercado received her BA in History from the University of Puerto Rico, and her Ph.D. from the
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, specializing in Islamic
Studies. She is currently Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ, where she teaches
courses on Islamic Civilization, Islamic history in Spain and North Africa, and early modern Mediterranean
history. Her courses deal with questions of religion, politics, identity, and race and ethnicity in the medieval and
early modern periods. Before joining Rutgers, she was Assistant Professor of Mediterranean Studies in the
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.

Green-Mercado’s research focuses on the religious, cultural, and political history of the early modern Iberian,
Mediterranean, and Islamic worlds. Her book manuscript currently under review, titled A Morisco Apocalypse:
The Politics of Prophecy in the Early Modern Mediterranean, studies the production and deployment of
apocalyptic prophecies among Moriscos, Muslims who were forced to convert to Catholicism in 16th century
Spain. Tracing the circulation of such prophecies within the Iberian Peninsula and the wider Mediterranean not
only reveals a well-defined Morisco political culture, but it also places this minority group at the crossroads of
the messianically-inflected Habsburg-Ottoman imperial rivalry for the control of the Mediterranean Sea. She
has recently edited a special issue in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO)
forthcoming in January 2018, titled “Speaking the End Times: Early Modern Politics and Religion from Iberia to
Central Asia,” that explores the cross-pollination of apocalyptic beliefs and practices among Muslims, Christians,
and Jews in the early modern period. Her future projects include an exploration of Morisco diasporas and
networks around the Mediterranean in the early modern period.

Daniel Hershenzon
Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of Connecticut, USA

Daniel Hershenzon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the
University of Connecticut. His book entitled Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean: Captivity, Commerce,
and Communication (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2018) explores the 17th century entangled
histories of Spain, Morocco and Ottoman Algiers, arguing that captivity and ransom of Christians and Muslims
shaped the Mediterranean as a socially, politically, and economically integrated region. Hershenzon has
published articles in Past and Present, the Journal of Early Modern History, African Economic History, History
Compass, Philological Encounters, and in other edited volumes. He held fellowships from the Social Science
Research Council, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, European University Institute in Florence, Institute for the
Humanities at the University of Michigan, and the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute.

Ronald Kiener
Professor of Religious Studies, Trinity College, USA

Ronald C. Kiener is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Trinity College, and Director of Trinity’s Jewish
Studies Program. Kiener received his BA in Hebrew Literature from the University of Minnesota in 1976, and
earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1984.

22
Kiener is the co-author of The Early Kabbalah, part of the Classics of Western Spirituality series published by
Paulist Press. He has also published articles in the field of medieval and modern Jewish and Islamic thought in a
variety of scholarly journals. Kiener is currently working on a scientific edition of Saadia Gaon's Book of Beliefs
and Opinions, to be published by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem.

Seth Kimmel
Assistant Professor of Medieval & Early Modern Cultural Studies, Columbia University, USA

Seth Kimmel is Assistant Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Cultural Studies in the Department of Latin
American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. He is the author of Parables of Coercion: Conversion and
Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 Harry
Levin Prize for the best first book in the field of comparative literature by the American Comparative Literature
Association.

Daniel Lasker
Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values, Ben-Gurion University, Israel

Daniel J. Lasker is the Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values (emeritus) in the Goldstein-Goren
Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. He holds a Ph.D., MA
and BA from Brandeis University, and also studied at Hebrew University. Lasker has taught at Yale University,
Princeton University, the University of Toronto, Ohio State University, University of Texas, University of
Washington, Boston College and other institutions. He is the author of over 250 publications in the fields of
medieval Jewish philosophy, especially on the thought of Rabbi Judah Halevi; the Jewish-Christian debate,
including the edition of a number of central Jewish polemical texts; and Karaism. His most recent books are
From Judah Hadassi to Elijah Bashyatchi: Studies in Late Medieval Karaite Philosophy (Leiden/Boston: Brill,
2008); and The Sage Simhah Isaac Lutski: An Eighteenth-Century Karaite Rabbi - Selected Writings (Jerusalem:
Ben-Zvi Institute, 2015 [Hebrew]).

Benjamin Liu
Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, University of California, Riverside, USA
Benjamin Liu is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He studies the
literatures and cultures of the medieval Iberian Peninsula. He is the author of Medieval Joke Poetry: The Cantigas
d' Escarnho e de Mal Dizer (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 2004), articles in Yearbook of
Comparative and General Literature, Medieval Encounters, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, La Corónica, and Nueva
Revista de Filología Hispánica, as well as several book chapters. His current research considers the relationship
between money and literature, the economic modes of interfaith relations in early Spanish literature, and how
the circulation of money and goods among Christians, Muslims and Jews configures complex interpersonal
networks and boundaries among these groups. He is also developing new research on travel literature, maps,
geographical knowledge and trade routes in the Spanish Middle Ages.

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 Brian Long
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Canada

Brian Long is an intellectual and cultural historian whose research focuses on medical translations from Arabic
into Greek and Latin, with particular attention to the works of Symeon Seth and Constantine the African, about
whom he is currently preparing a monograph. He is the Latin editor of the Viaticum, Constantine the African's
translation of Ibn al-Jazzar's Zad al-Musafir, and has a strong interest in digital text editing. He holds a Ph.D. in
Medieval Studies from the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame and is currently an Andrew W.
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto; he was previously a
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities in the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Humanities Forum, a
Visiting Assistant Professor of Mediterranean History at Whitman College, and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation
Completion Fellow.

Gregory E. Sterling
Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean of Yale Divinity School & Lillian Claus Professor of
New Testament, Yale University, USA

Gregory E. Sterling is the Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean of Yale Divinity School and Lillian Claus Professor of New
Testament. Sterling became dean of Yale Divinity School in 2012 after more than two decades at the University
of Notre Dame, where he served in several capacities including Dean of the Graduate School.

Sterling, a New Testament scholar with a specialty in Hellenistic Judaism, concentrates his research on the
writings of Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, and Luke-Acts, with a focus on the ways in which Second Temple Jews
and early Christians interacted with one another and with the Greco-Roman world. Sterling is the author or
editor/co-editor of seven books and more than seventy scholarly articles and essays. He is the general editor for
the Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series (E.J. Brill), co-editor of the Studia Philonica Annual, and a member
of the editorial board of Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft. He served as editor of
the Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity Series (University of Notre Dame Press) for twenty years.

The holder of a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies/New Testament from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley,
Sterling is a minister in the Churches of Christ.

Jeffrey Shoulson
Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives and the Doris & Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies,
University of Connecticut, USA

Jeffrey Shoulson was appointed Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives in August 2017. He is also the Doris
and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies, and Professor of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. Born and
raised in northern New Jersey, he attended Ramaz School and Yeshivat Har Etzion before earning his AB from
Princeton University, M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, and Ph.D. from Yale University. His scholarship
focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in the medieval and early modern periods, especially the ways in which
Jews and Judaism are represented within Christian writings and Christianity influences or is thematized in Jewish
writings. His first book, Milton and Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity, was awarded the American
Academy of Jewish Research’s Salo Baron Prize. His most recent book is Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians,

24
and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England. His current research project is a literary and cultural history of
English Bible translations from Tyndale to the King James Version.

Jeremy Teitelbaum
Interim Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Professor of Mathematics, University of Connecticut, USA

Jeremy Teitelbaum became the University of Connecticut’s Interim Provost and Executive Vice President for
Academic Affairs on February 1, 2017. He previously served for more than eight years as Dean of UConn’s
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, beginning in August 2008. He came to UConn in 2008 from the University of
Illinois at Chicago, where he was Senior Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor
of Mathematics.

A native of New York City who grew up in Denver, he earned a BA in mathematics (summa cum laude) from
Carleton College and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University. He was on the faculty of the University of
Michigan before joining the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1990. He is best known academically for his work
in number theory, particularly a series of papers with Peter Schneider, of Münster, Germany, on the
development of locally analytic representation theory.

Pier Tommasino
Assistant Professor of Italian, Columbia University, USA

Pier Mattia Tommasino is Assistant Professor of Italian at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 at
the Scuola Normale Superiore, in Pisa, Italy, and he was the Francesco De Dombrowski fellow at the Harvard
University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti, Florence) in 2010-2011. His first book, L’Alcorano
di Macometto: Storia di un libro del Cinquecento europeo, was published in 2013, and it will soon be published
in English by the University of Pennsylvania Press, with the title The Venetian Qur’an: a Renaissance Companion
to Islam. He is a member of several collaborative projects on Christian-Muslim relations, polemic, and
conversion in the early modern world. With Konstantina Zanou (Department of Italian, Columbia University), he
organizes The Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium at Columbia University, a seminar on the relations between
the Italian peninsula and the Mediterranean world. His current book project explores the role of Oriental studies
in Florence in the second half of the 17th century.

Daniel Weiner
Vice President for Global Affairs and Professor of Geography, University of Connecticut, USA

Daniel Weiner joined the University of Connecticut in 2012 as Vice Provost for Global Affairs and Professor of
Geography. In February 2016 he was appointed as Vice President for Global Affairs. Prior to his tenure at UConn
he served four years as Executive Director of the Center for International Studies at Ohio University and 11 years
as Director of the Office of International Programs at West Virginia University. Weiner received his B.A. (1979),
M.A. (1981) and Ph.D. (1986) in Geography from Clark University.

In his role as Vice President, Weiner serves as the University’s senior international officer (SIO) and is responsible
for the development and oversight of a wide variety of university initiatives relating to global education and

25
institutional internationalization. His objective is to advance the University’s commitment to
internationalization and facilitate the coordination among the University’s internal and external programs and
initiatives.

Weiner is a development geographer with area studies expertise in eastern and southern Africa and is a
specialist in the theory and practice of participatory geographic information systems. His research areas include
agricultural geography, climate and society, land reform, participatory development and GIS and society. He has
received 15 externally funded grants totaling over $2.5 million, published three books, 30 journal articles and
29 book chapters. Weiner has lived in Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe for a total of three years and has
traveled widely in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

Joseph Ziegler
Associate Professor of History and Director of the School of History, University of Haifa, Israel

Joseph Ziegler is Associate Professor at the Department of History and the Director of the School of History at
the University of Haifa. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and earned his D.Phil. from
Oxford University (1994) where he studied various aspects of the relationship between medicine and religion
around 1300 in the Latin West. His revised thesis was published in 1998 as a monograph entitled, Medicine and
Religion c. 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova. Since then, he has deepened his interest and research in this
field [most recently 'Engelbert of Admont and the Longevity of the Antediluvians c. 1300', in Summa doctrina et
certa experientia. Studi su medicina e filosofia per Chiara Crisciani, ed. G. Zuccolin, Florence: SISMEL - Edizioni
del Galluzzo, 2017, pp. 313-336 and 'Why Did the Patriarchs Live so Long? On the Role of the Bible in the
Discourse on Longevity around 1300', Micrologus 26 (forthcoming, 2018)], but also embarked on another
project, which yielded numerous articles: The Rise of Learned Physiognomy 1200-1500 in the Latin West. He is
a co-editor (with Miriam Eliav-Feldon and Benjamin Isaac) of The Origins of Racism in the West, (Cambridge:
CUP, 2009).

26
 This symposium was made possible by the
generous support of the Marsha Lilien Gladstein
Foundation. Support was also provided by the
University of Connecticut’s Office of Global
Affairs, Office of the Provost, Middle East Studies
and Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary
Jewish Life.