Source in the Spotlight
The Alba Bible: A Medieval Spanish Co-Production by a Rabbi and the Friars of Toledo
Religious co-production may take many forms, arising from interactions that may be physical or purely imaginary, and processes of transference and adaption which may be candidly admitted or carefully concealed. The Alba Bible is comparatively rare in advertising itself as the result of a deliberate collaboration between members of different religious communities. It is a late-medieval Bible, translated into medieval Castilian for a Christian patron by a rabbi, working under the supervision of several Christian friars, and illustrated by a team of artists in Toledo. The result was a remarkable interreligious coproduction created during a period in which Jewish life in medieval Spain was particularly precarious. After many centuries of obscurity, the Bible has been embraced in recent decades as a symbol of the deep roots of Sephardi Jewish culture in Spain and as an example of tolerant interfaith collaboration. For all that, the story of its origins makes it an ambivalent emblem for the cooperation across the assymetries of power between religious majority and minority.
Latest Case Study
Translating, Adapting, Co-Producing. Anna’s Quadrilingual Tombstone in Norman Palermo
In 1149, Grisandus, a Christian priest attached to the court of Roger II in Palermo, commemorated his mother Anna with a marble slab bearing four inscriptions – in Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Judaeo-Arabic – that record her death and burial. The four texts recount the same sequence of events, but they are not literal translations: each employs a different calendar, vocabulary, and way of conceptualising religious and political authority. Anna’s tombstone provides a revealing window onto how the communities of Norman Palermo communicated across religious boundaries, without erasing their differences or displacing the Christian framework within which the monument was conceived.
Event: International Conference
"Rethinking Post-War Christianity" - in collaboration with the ERC-project "Christosemitism"
Co-organized with Prof. Karma Ben-Johanan (HU Jerusalem) and Prof. Daniel Herskowitz (Duke University)
Event: International Conference
Stratified Memories: The Co-production of Religion and Urban Space in Rome (2nd to 20th cent.)
A collaboration between Caroline Bridel and Katharina Heyden (CORE CoG Bern) & Mariachiara Giorda and Andrea Vanni (Roma Tre)
Latest Publication
When Theology and History Think Together about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
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Who we are
The project is coordinated by Katharina Heyden, Professor for Ancient History of Christianity and Interreligious Encounters at the University of Bern (Switzerland), and David Nirenberg, Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (U.S.), and includes a network of collaborators across North America, Europe, and the Middle East.