Beyond Tolerance: Artistic Windows into Spanish Jewish-Muslim-Christian Relations
with Dr. Jerrilynn D. Dodds
Medieval Spain has long been seen through warring lenses: as an idyllic, tolerant society where Christians, Jews and Muslims coexisted in harmony — or as a world of unceasing antagonism based on religious animosity. Recently, however, scholars have limned a more complex picture that reflects the diverse political and social contexts in which Jews lived and interacted with Christians and Muslims over seven centuries.
That complexity is revealed in the art of and about Spanish Jews. This evening we will explore how it is manifested in the decorative carpet pages of Hebrew Bibles, remarkable Haggadot — some with figural paintings, in the grand synagogues of Toledo and Cordoba, as well as in newly discovered and excavated synagogue buildings.
Jerrilynn D. Dodds is a scholar focused on how religious groups form their identities through art and architecture. Former dean and chief academic officer of Sarah Lawrence College, she now teaches art history there and has curated exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Alhambra. Her full biography can be found here.
ABOUT THE SPANISH JEWISH EXPERIENCE SERIES
For two millennia, Spanish Jewry swung on a pendulum from the heights of tolerance during the “Golden Age” — when Jews flourished as philosophers and poets, physicians, mathematicians and traders — to the depths and degradations of forced conversion, the Inquisition and expulsion.
The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center is proud to present a five-part lecture series illuminating the complexities of Sepharad, as Iberia is called in Hebrew, and to discover the rich legacy of Jewish Spain through the lenses of art, architecture, music and the modern diasporic experience.
We will meet ordinary Spanish Jews who struggled with the ever-changing realties, as well as some of Judaism’s most revered thinkers and writers: the physician/rabbi Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides or Rambam; the virtuosic poet Yehuda Halevi; and the biblical scholar and philosopher Abraham Ibn Ezra.
Delivered by leading professors of Sephardic studies from across the US and the Atlantic, each lecture stands on its own. You are welcome and encouraged to attend any or all.