Thursday 18 December 2025 at 20h CET
Prof. Em. David Ruderman | University of Pennsylvania
Asst. Prof. Francesca Bregoli | Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center
Prof. François Guesnet | University College London
Asst. Prof. Theodor Dunkelgrün | University of Antwerp
Online lecture in English.
To register, email to ijs@uantwerpen.be.
This book is a study of the life and thought of the Polish Jew Solomon Yom Tov Bennett (1767-1838), who immigrated to London, where he spent the last forty years of his life. In focusing on Bennett’s learned life, it underscores the significance of this singular writer, artist, and public figure, especially his remarkable dual interests in art and thought, his biblical scholarship, his social and intellectual connections with some of the most famous and accomplished Christian intellectuals of London, and his self-determination to complete his life-long ambition of serving Western civilization by correcting and rewriting the entire standard edition of the English Old Testament.
Bennett’s Christian associates respected his learning and were willing to accept him as a Jew in their ranks. His integration into the upper echelons of the Christian literary establishment - dukes, jurists, theologians, and other scholars - did not impede his loyalty to his faith. On the contrary, Bennett’s Christian friends made him more Jewish, more convinced of Judaism’s moral force, and more secure in his own skin as a member of a proud minority among Christian elites supposedly liberated, so he hoped, from the dark hostility of the Christian past. His supreme act of translating the Bible constituted the ultimate payback he could offer the altruistic Christians he had met, open to welcoming him not despite his Jewishness but because of it. Bennett’s transformation from a Polish Jewish immigrant to a proud Anglo-Jew exemplifies a unique path of modern Jewish life and self-reflection, one ultimately shaped by the particular ambiance of his newly adopted country.
David B. Ruderman is the Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History, Emeritus, and served for twenty years (1994–2014) as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Ruderman has held endowed chairs at Yale University and the University of Maryland, where he was instrumental in establishing Judaic studies programs. One of the world’s foremost scholars of Early Modern Jewish History, Ruderman’s numerous books include Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key (Princeton, 2000) which won the 2001 Koret Award for the best book in Jewish History, and The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham B. Mordecai Farissol (1981), which received the National Book Award in Jewish History. A fellow and past president of the American Academy for Jewish Research, Ruderman’s work as a scholar and teacher have been recognized among others by a lifetime achievement award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award, an Honorary Doctorate from Hebrew Union College, and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award.
Francesca Bregoli holds the Joseph and Oro Halegua chair in Greek and Sephardic Jewish Studies and is Associate Professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century Italian and Sephardic Jewish history. She is the author of Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform (2014), and co-editor of Italian Jewish Networks from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries: Bridging Europe and the Mediterranean (2018) and Connecting Histories: Jews and their Others in Early Modern Europe (2019). Her current project, influenced by the history of the family and the history of emotions, looks at the creation and preservation of affective and business ties in transregional Jewish merchant families, and at overlaps between family, commerce, and Judaism. Francesca directs the Center for Jewish Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.
François Guesnet is Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. He holds a PhD in Modern History from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau, and specializes in the early modern and 19th century history of Eastern European, and more specifically, Polish Jews. Guesnet is co-chair of the editorial board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, chairman of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies (IPJS) and serves on the Executive Committee of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS). He held research fellowships and visiting teaching positions at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, Leipzig University, the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Potsdam University, the University of Oxford, and at Dartmouth College, and had short-term teaching engagements at the Jagiellonian University and Vilnius University.
Theodor Dunkelgrün is assistant professor of Jewish History at the University of Antwerp. He was educated at Leiden University and the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. He has held several research fellowships, at the University of Oxford, the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of Cambridge, where he taught for the faculties of History, Divinity, and Classics, and co-founded the Seminar in Early Modern Scholarship and Religion. He is the author of The Multiplicity of Scripture: The Making of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (Toronto: PIMS, 2025) and the co-editor of five volumes, including The Jewish Bookshop of the World: Aspects of Print and Manuscript Culture in Early Modern Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2020), a special issue of Studia Rosenthaliana, and (with Pawel Maciejko), Bastards and Believers: Jewish Converts and Conversion from the Bible to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.