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Fellow seminar: “Mothers Sell Their Little Children”: Imagining Blackness in Eastern European Yiddish Culture
17 October @ 16:30 - 18:30
Gil Ribak (Relevance of the Humanities, Oct – Dec ’24) will present the topic:
“Mothers Sell Their Little Children”: Imagining Blackness in Eastern European Yiddish Culture
on 17 October 2024 (Thursday), at 16:30.
Moderated by: Pavlo Yeremieiev
Abstract:
How does one group of people imagine another group which it has never met and what can we learn from it about the ways knowledge about race, hierarchy, and difference is created and transmitted? What imageries were generated in that modernizing process and how is it linked to Europeanization?
My study examines Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe (Tsarist Russia, Habsburg-ruled Galicia, and Romania), a population bedeviled by grinding poverty and economic and residential restrictions, and their view of another maligned population – Black Africans and African Americans – with whom they had no contact. Although most of them would not see a Black person throughout their lives, or if they immigrated only upon their arrival in America, East European Jews already acquired some level of information – however skewed – that served as a basis for imagining Black people. The study is organized according to various venues of Yiddish culture (literature, press, and theater): focusing mostly on the 19th and early 20th centuries (through the 1930s), my research looks at a wide range of materials, such as rabbinic exegesis, pious advice, travel narratives (either original or adapted from other languages), folklore, scientific explorations, pulp literature, press reports, political rhetoric, educational materials, theater shows, and films. Whereas those sources were far from monolithic, they ascribed to Black people characteristics of savagery, primitiveness, less-than-human nature, cowardice, heightened or depraved sexuality, and being devoid of familial feelings.
In addition to revisiting and upending much of the scholarship about Black-Jewish relations, and especially its assertions about the religious component or historical experience that ostensibly led to Jewish identification with African Americans, my findings are significant to the larger context of immigration history. They demonstrate how would-be immigrants have had preconceived imagery of Black people prior to setting foot in America (same notions are true for those who stayed in the Old Country). It is noteworthy that similar patterns can be found among other populations. Parallel cases of imagining people without meeting them can be shown with other ethnic groups who also lived in areas that had no Black population, whether in Europe or Asia. Those themes are especially relevant to studying the dynamics of racism, as they expand our understanding of the genealogy of knowledge. In that respect, this study is also important to fields such as translation studies and history of science, as it examines how literature, scientific texts, and travel accounts trickled down and transformed when disseminated in a different culture.
Details
- Date:
- 17 October
- Time:
- 16:30 - 18:30
Organizer
- Centre for Advanced Study Sofia
Venue
- Centre for Advanced Study Sofia
-
7B Stefan Karadzha St, entr. 3
Sofia, 1000 Bulgaria+ Google Map