Lecture
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Thursday 16.10.2025
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
The Golden Age of Spain
Thursday 16.10.2025
How to watch
This lecture starts on 16 October at 7:00pm (UK).
Summary
Moving from the Geonites of Babylonia (the Abbasid Caliphate), we trace the transition of the center of the Jewish world from Baghdad to Cordoba and the rise of Iberian Jewry, also under Islam, to its own moment of a Golden Age. We begin this lecture by discussing the correspondence between Rav Sherira Gaon and the Jewish community in Qayrawan (Tunis).
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).