Jelena Erdeljan (Relevance of the Humanities Fellowship, Oct ‘25 – Feb ‘26) will talk on her research topic:

Jewish Art and Visual Culture in the Balkans in the Pre-Modern Era: From Antiquity to the Age of Sabbatai Sevi

4 December 2025 (Thursday), at 16:30.

Moderated by: Zozan Tarhan

Abstract: Both art history and anthropology are actively pointing out the social life and impact of things as practically creations with a sense and sensibility of their own. The ancient, medieval and the world of the pre-modern era are replete with objects, from imagery created in different media to architectural structures, which are not only bearers of religious significance but also points of divine manifestation, points of contact with the higher reality. This designates them as vessels, mediators and actors in the power play of political and important factors i.e. subjects of networks of connectivity. With this in mind, we can definitely state that Jewish presence and pertaining visual culture in the Balkans in the pre-modern era, from antiquity to the age of Sabbatei Sevi, plays a highly significant but to date inadequately and insufficiently studied phenomenon. The re-centering of pre-modern Jewry owes a great debt to the work of S.D. Goitein, whose monumental study, “A Mediterranean Society”, established a portrait of Jewish society of that time that emphasized internal social unity and external symbiosis between Jews and other religious communities of the Mediterranean region. This vision of a free-flowing trans-regional society linking Jews to Muslims and Christians as well as to one another remains one of the most influential paradigms of both Jewish, Balkan, and Mediterranean history. What is the position and the role of the Jews in these pre-modern or early modern societies in the Balkans, given their direct connections with other parts of the Mediterranean world through the migration of the Sephardim, for example, and the actual political situation of the region, and what part in this is played by or reflected in elements of visual culture? Elements of Jewish visual culture to be examined include funerary monuments and cemeteries, books, book production, illustration and circulation, synagogues and synagogal art and liturgical objects, textiles and clothing as markers of Jewish identity. Key points to be studied on the geopolitical map of the Jewish Balkans include, among others, such significant centers of Jewish life as Stobi, Plovdiv, Thessaloniki, Bitola, Sarajevo, Niš, and Belgrade.