This paper explores a moment in the first half of the nineteenth century, through investigating the early writings of two contemporary foundational figures: Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), known as the founder of Modern Jewish Studies, and Rifa' al-Tahtawi (1801-1873), regarded as a pioneer of the Nahda, the modern Arab renaissance. Both men are often identified in the secondary literature as the first moderns in their respective fields. And both figures utilize a concept of science/knowledge in their early writings, central to that which they advocate (Zunz uses the term Wissenschaft and for al-Tahtawi, it is 'ilm/'ulum). Through focusing on the ways in which each depicts and utilizes "science," this paper offers possibilities for new ways in which to think about a concept of modernity (and of Europe) in the early nineteenth century. Both Zunz and al-Tahtawi identify an ideal universality to science while being committed to the particularity of the Jews, in the case of Zunz, or of Arabic and Islam, in the case of al-Tahtawi. It is this particularity that comes to link each figure with the subsequent respective development of Jewish or Egyptian nationalism, which are entwined with changing conceptualizations of literature, history and language. Both men strive to weave or to locate their people's particularities within a universalist vision. This interplay and dependency between the particular and the universal forms a basis for the programs and justifications of each. This paper also examines differences between Zunz's and al-Tahtawi's depictions and uses of science, connected with their different contexts, i.e. one is Jewish, one Muslim; one was raised in Europe and one outside of it. Thus it is not surprising that their writings exhibit differing relationships to Europe, to European imperialism, to universality and to Christianity. For example, Zunz argues for the integration of Jews within Europe (and Jewish science into universal science), while al-Tahtawi maintains a distinction between the sciences of the Franks and those of the Islamic lands, critiquing the Franks’ worldview as partial while advocating for the incorporation of many of their sciences into the lands of Islam. Through focusing on science and its connection with certain shared themes across the early writings of these two figures, this paper aims to suggests new ways in which to think about modernity (and Europe).

In this 2004 Arabic-language novel, "Shlomo Al-Kurdi, Myself and Time," Israeli-Iraqi author Samir Naqqash crafts the narrative of protagonist Shlomo Kattani as a death-bed retrospective on a lifetime punctuated by multiple traumas of dislocation. One one level, Shlomo experiences physical dislocations as the great political upheavals of the 20th century push and pull him from his village of Sablakh in Western Iran, to and from Baghdad, to and from Mumbai, and eventually to his ultimate destination and resting place in Ramat Gan, Israel. The narration of these dislocations is replete with signs of traumatic experience, namely repeated flashbacks to the site of trauma, and an appeal to a witness to listen to the victim's story so that he may depart from trauma's site. Indeed, by unearthing the subtle clues of traumatic experience, it becomes apparent that the novel-as-testimony reading is a highly productive one for this text. In addition to physical dislocations, however, Shlomo also experiences cultural dislocations, as he is pushed and pulled among linguistic and cultural spheres. That Shlomo employs a rich array of both Islamicate and Jewish cultural references as he narrates his story, in Arabic, from a Hebrew-speaking city in Israel suggests mourning for the loss of the world where these two now-distinct forms of cultural memory once freely intermingled. That is, the individual traumas of Shlomo's life, each one wrenching on the personal level, add up in sum total to the complete and final uprooting from a multiethnic, Islamicate cultural sphere. In this way, Shlomo mourns his personal losses and the loss of an entire cultural world at one and the same time. Thus, this paper seeks to examine the language of loss in Samir Naqqash's "Shlomo Al-Kurdi, Myself and Time" from the lens of personal, traumatic memory on one hand, and the lens of communal, cultural memory on the other. In so doing, this paper seeks to shed light on the relationship between personal and communal loss in the case of one Arab Jewish writer. To properly set up the historical-linguistic framework for this thesis, the paper will draw on the works of scholars of the newly-developed field of Arab Jewish literary history. For a theoretical framework via which to unravel the interwoven strands of trauma and witnessing, it will draw on Cathy Caruth and other theorists of trauma in literature.

Lev Nussimbaum situated the eponymous hero and heroine of his 1937 novel, Ali and Nino, at linguistic, geographic, national, religious, and cultural crossroads in early-nineteenth century Azerbaijan and North-Eastern Persia. In an attempt to understand themselves, each other, and their intersecting positions, Ali and Nino must respond to and assess their constantly shifting and opposing environments. One’s understanding of the characters becomes more entangled still upon realization that their story was penned in German by a Jewish Azeri and convert to Islam, under the pseudonym of Kurban Said, who himself fled Baku in 1917. Such complexity defies attempts to settle on a definitive interpretation while demanding exchange as a prerequisite to deeper understanding: exchange between the text, its readers, and a wide range of other sources. This insistence makes Ali and Nino an ideal text for the twenty-first century classroom, the demographic of which has been radically reconstituted by migration and globalization. This talk is part of a larger project, conducted in partnership with our department’s Associate Professor of German Studies, Lisabeth Hock, that interrogates the intersections of gender, ethnicity and religion in Ali and Nino, and outlines teaching strategies that help students 1) explore identity formations as articulated in the novel, and 2) engage with a broad range of source material and interpretive communities. Here, I will focus on the teaching opportunities presented by the opposing and intersecting identities of Ali, an Azerbaijani Muslim, and Nino, a Georgian Christian. Although on the surface they no doubt satisfy typical Orientalist characteristics, this paper will explore the ways in which these characters push the boundaries of their literary status quo as they navigate through intersections of religions, cultures, and geographies to assert agency. While intersectionality remains a necessary component of colonial literary studies, after the publication of Orientalism, the Orientalist imaginary and discourse in “western” literature of the colonized has become an exceptionally common frame of reference. A close reading of Ali and Nino, however, can be used to demonstrate the limitations inherent in frames of reference and suggest strategies for moving beyond those boundaries. Combining our different linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds we have articulated activities that encourage students to engage with--and interrogate the authority of—varied information sources: themselves, their communities, communities different from their own, and scholarly sources from Gender Studies, Near East studies and German studies.

Narratives of return, in which exiled Palestinians visit the people and places in Israel/Palestine that they fled years or even decades earlier, have proliferated in literary representations in recent years. In many of these works, the Israeli border checkpoint – the site of access to Palestine – occupies a central position in the narrative. Though these narratives have garnered scholarly interest, little attention has been given to the border as a mechanism that permits and mediates the return. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau conceptualizes the border as a space that is paradoxically both a void and a point of contact. The act of crossing the frontier is a transgressive act that creates exteriority and opens the self to the other. In this paper I draw on de Certeau’s work to stage a reading of two narratives of exile and return, Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s autobiographical I Saw Ramallah (1997) and Rabih al-Madhoun’s semi-autobiographical The Woman from Tel Aviv (2009), in which the returning exile is an author whose own novel is included within the larger text. I argue that in these narratives, the act of crossing the border necessitates a reconfiguration of the exile’s intertwined conceptions of self and of Palestine, both past and present. In Barghouti’s narrative, the abstract Palestine of resistance poetry and political slogans that defines the exile’s conception of nation disintegrates in the face of the physical land of Palestine, which the author encounters as he crosses the Jordan River into the West Bank. In The Woman From Tel Aviv, the exile relies on memories of his youth in Gaza to define his conception of both himself and Palestine, yet his encounter on his return journey with an Israeli woman disrupts these notions by calling the memories upon which they rely into question. The exile’s encounter with the border checkpoint prompts further disruption at the moment of arrival, at which point the narrative abruptly switches from the main character’s voice to that of the novel he wrote; crossing the border brings about the loss of voice and of self that is only recovered through recourse to fiction. In both works, crossing the border functions as an act of displacement that necessitates a transgression of carefully constructed notions of the self and the nation. Based on this reading I theorize the border checkpoint as a literary device that textually recreates the original displacement of exile.