Lecture
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Tuesday 18.11.2025
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
How Did Jews See and Understand Living under Muslim Rule?
Tuesday 18.11.2025
How to watch
This lecture starts on 18 November at 5:00pm (UK).
Summary
In this lecture we discuss this question through examining four cases: 1. Maimonides’s Epistle to Yemen will allow us to see how one Jewish leader discussed this question in the Middle Ages; 2. David Reubeni’s story of espionage will tell us how things were seen right after the Ottoman conquest of the Holy Land; 3. Sabbatai Zevi’s work will offer a glimpse into the same question during the 17th century; 4. Juda Alkalai’s writings on the Ottoman Tanzimat will offer a vista into the same question in 1840, just before the rise of Zionism.
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite teaches Chinese History, Middle Eastern and Islamic history, and sometimes Jewish history, at New York University. He is author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Harvard, 2005); The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford, 2009); co-editor of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Culture, and Politics (Brandeis, 2013); The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept (Columbia University Press, 2017); and Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History (Hawaii University Press, 2023).