Event details
Mar
25
E. Franklin Robbins/UJA-Federation Lecture – Cooperation, Care, and Suspicion: Jewish Encounters with Early Modern Disease
The Program in Judaic Studies invites you to this year's E. Franklin Robbins/UJA-Federation Lecture, featuring Joshua Teplitsky, on Wednesday, March 25.
Conventional narratives of premodern Jewish life during epidemic crises imagine automatic acts of scapegoating and persecution of Jews by the dominant society in Christian Europe. Yet a fuller investigation yields a far more textured, and interesting, reality. In this talk, Joshua Teplitsky explores the relationship between medical and religious authorities in early modern Habsburg lands to understand the dilemmas Jews faced in responding to plague. How did Jews negotiate their place during a public health crisis, while preserving distinctive practices? By delving into a rich range of sources from a terrifying outbreak of bubonic plague in eighteenth-century Prague, this talk examines the delicate lines between cooperation and coercion in a time of crisis.
Open to the public. Kosher refreshments will be available.
More about Joshua Teplitsky
Joshua Teplitsky is an associate professor and the Joseph Meyerhoff Chair in Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves as the Ruth Meltzer Director of the Program in Jewish Studies. He has held fellowships at the University of Oxford, the National Library of Israel, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. His book, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History's Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library, was published by Yale University Press in 2019 and was named the winner of the Salo Baron Prize of the AAJR for best first book in Jewish Studies in 2019, the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is the editor, with Warren Klein and Sharon Liberman Mintz, of Be Fruitful! The Etrog in Jewish Art, Culture, and History (Mineged, 2022), and with Leora Ausland and Federica Francesconi, of Domestic Diaspora: Jewish Experiences of Home (University of Pennsylvania, 2026). He is an associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Jewish Book Cultures. He also co-leads a digital humanities project called Footprints: Jewish Books through time and place, which tracks the movement of Jewish books since the inception of print. He is currently at work on a book reconstructing a plague epidemic in eighteenth-century Prague and its impact on Jewish social and cultural life in the city.
Conventional narratives of premodern Jewish life during epidemic crises imagine automatic acts of scapegoating and persecution of Jews by the dominant society in Christian Europe. Yet a fuller investigation yields a far more textured, and interesting, reality. In this talk, Joshua Teplitsky explores the relationship between medical and religious authorities in early modern Habsburg lands to understand the dilemmas Jews faced in responding to plague. How did Jews negotiate their place during a public health crisis, while preserving distinctive practices? By delving into a rich range of sources from a terrifying outbreak of bubonic plague in eighteenth-century Prague, this talk examines the delicate lines between cooperation and coercion in a time of crisis.
Open to the public. Kosher refreshments will be available.
More about Joshua Teplitsky
Joshua Teplitsky is an associate professor and the Joseph Meyerhoff Chair in Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves as the Ruth Meltzer Director of the Program in Jewish Studies. He has held fellowships at the University of Oxford, the National Library of Israel, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. His book, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History's Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library, was published by Yale University Press in 2019 and was named the winner of the Salo Baron Prize of the AAJR for best first book in Jewish Studies in 2019, the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is the editor, with Warren Klein and Sharon Liberman Mintz, of Be Fruitful! The Etrog in Jewish Art, Culture, and History (Mineged, 2022), and with Leora Ausland and Federica Francesconi, of Domestic Diaspora: Jewish Experiences of Home (University of Pennsylvania, 2026). He is an associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Jewish Book Cultures. He also co-leads a digital humanities project called Footprints: Jewish Books through time and place, which tracks the movement of Jewish books since the inception of print. He is currently at work on a book reconstructing a plague epidemic in eighteenth-century Prague and its impact on Jewish social and cultural life in the city.
Speakers
Joshua Teplitsky
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Date
March 25, 2026Time
4:30 p.m.Location
Robertson Hall, 016Audience
University Sponsors
Program in Judaic Studies