Judeo-Greek across the Centuries: Tracing Greek-speaking Jews, session at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 8-10, 2025

Papers are sought for the session, Judeo-Greek across the Centuries: Tracing Greek-speaking Jews, to be proposed for the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, May 8-10, 2025), organized by Michail Kitsos (Tel Aviv University).

From the Septuagint and the Jewish inscriptions found in the Helladic area and the broader Hellenic world to the Jewish Apocrypha composed in Greek and the Judeo-Greek fragments from the Cairo Geniza, Judeo-Greek language shows prominence and endurance. Yet, the language of these written sources is hardly acknowledged as Judeo-Greek, rather only as Greek. The two sessions aim to demonstrate the need to acknowledge Judeo-Greek as a linguistic medium that defined the literary production of Greek-speaking Jews and to scrutinize it as a Jewish phenomenon that expressed Greek Jewishness and Jewishness in the Greek language.

How could our perception of Jewish literature written in Greek change if we acknowledge the linguistic medium as Judeo-Greek? Or, what can we say about the Greek of Jews and their literatures vis-à-vis the Greek of Christians and their respective works? The session aims to explore these questions as well as questions pertaining to the production of Jewish literature in Judeo-Greek from the third century BCE to the fifteenth century CE and the literary and linguistic associations between the Judeo-Greek in the works of the Greek-speaking Jews and the Greek in the works of Greek-speaking Christians.

To submit a paper proposal, you are kindly requested to do so no later than September 15, 2024, via Confex.

Session organizer
Michail Kitsos, Tel Aviv University