Donderdag 29 oktober 2026 om 18.00 uur
Dr. Giacomo Loi - University of Haifa
Lezing in het Engels.
Lezing in lokaal R.012, Rodestraat 14,
2000 Antwerpen.
Deelname is gratis. Inschrijven via e-mail: ijs@uantwerpen.be.
Since the nineteenth century, Hebrew writers integrated Greco-Roman culture into their literary works as a way to address various topics, ranging from literary aesthetics to issues of collective relevance. In contrast to previous studies organized around the “Hellenism and Hebraism” or “Athens and Jerusalem” dichotomy, this talk offers a new, “four cities” model to expand and better examine the picture of the reception of classical culture in Modern Hebrew literature. Following this model, this talk argues that Jewish nationalism served as the essential framework for classical reception at the beginning of Modern Hebrew literature (1890s-1910s). In fact, Jewish nationalism inherited from Jewish tradition the religious opposition with the classical world —but restructured it into an ethno-national one at the turn of the twentieth century. This talk focuses on that moment, reading Shaul Tchernichowsky’s famous “In Front of the Statue of Apollo,” by putting it into its broader Jewish, German- and Hebrew-language context, exploring authors as fundamental for Jewish nationalism as Ahad Ha‘Am, Max Nordau, and Theodor Herzl.
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.