10, 17, 24 November & 1, 8, 15 December 2026
Each session runs from 16:00 until 18:00
Dr. Giacomo Loi - University of Haifa
Lecture series in English.
Stadscampus UAntwerpen, room R.231
Rodestraat 14, 2000 Antwerpen.
Participation is free of charge. Registration required via email: ijs@uantwerpen.be.
In his greatly influential book Hebrew Literature as European Literature (2016), famous Israeli scholar Menahem Brinker argued that, despite all its Middle eastern setting and Semitic language, Hebrew literature was and still is a European literary system. The question was, up to a point, meant to be provocative: What makes Hebrew literature European? What, instead, spills doubt on this belonging? And why a literature “at home” in the Middle East should wish to be European or, on the contrary, should reject such a link?
In this lecture series, Dr. Giacomo Loi (University of Haifa) will partly answer Brinker’s question by telling the story of the (undoubtedly) European phase of Modern Hebrew literature, from the second half of the nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth century. Loi does not mean to show only how early Modern Hebrew literature developed in Europe, but, more than that, how this literature was shaped by the European landscape, geographically and socially, by its soundscape, in between Yiddish and other competing languages, and by its intellectual panorama. In short: even if we disagree about the Europeanness of Hebrew literature today, without Europe Modern Hebrew literature would be something completely different from what it is and has been. Through six sessions, Loi will introduce some of the most important and fascinating authors of this period, from Mapu to Abramovitsch, from Berdichevsky to Agnon and Vogel, exploring their literary works and how they responded to the many challenges, linguistic and historical, that their time posed to them as Jews, as writers, and as “Hebraists”—those who chose Hebrew to tell a European story.
Session titles
- 10 November: Mapu and Abramovitsch: Finding a (literary) Jewish Language for the Present
- 17 November: Berdichevsky: European Modernity and the World of Old
- 24 November: Bialik: Writing European Jewish Life
- 1 December: Gnessin: To Be a Jew, To Be Russian, To Be an Intellectual
- 8 December: Agnon: The Decline (and Fall) of Eastern Europe
- 15 December: Vogel: To Be a European Writer
Giacomo Loi is Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa and, currently, Visiting Professor at the University of Antwerp. He also teaches Jewish literatures at Institutet Paideia - The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, Stockholm. Given his background in classical studies, his research investigates the complex entanglements between Greco-Roman antiquity, European modernity, and modern Hebrew and Jewish culture. In the past, he has worked at the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Paris, taught Classics and Jewish studies at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, as a PhD candidate, and was among the initiators and leaders of the project Gentile Antiquity: The Reception of Antiquity in Modern Italian Jewish Literature. He has received the Kingdon Award for New Perspectives in Jewish Studies from Columbia University and has lectured at several universities in North America, Europe, and Israel.