AFHU News Winter 2023

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AMERICAN FRIENDS OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY
AFHU NEWS VOL. 31 PAGE 15
What Does it Mean to be Human?
Humanities at the Hebrew University
Curiosity is the foundation for all research and the
impetus behind all education. Through our study
of the humanities, we turn away from the objects
found in our world and shift our gaze inwards to
understand what it means to be human.
The variety of courses offered at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem’s Faculty of the
Humanities is vast, covering many fields of
knowledge. Since its founding in 1928, the faculty
has been Israel’s leader in the humanities and the
world leader in Jewish studies. In recent years,
the Faculty of the Humanities has explored new
modes of teaching, including integrating digital
humanities into its programs and adding tours
in Israel and abroad and courses that include
hands-on educational opportunities.
Here is a sampling of the fascinating studies in
the humanities that can be found at the Hebrew
University:
Avigail Manekin-Bamberger is a member of the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Martin Buber
Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social
Sciences and a professor in the University’s
Department of Jewish History and Contemporary
Jewry. A historian of Jews in antiquity, focusing
on social and cultural history and on the study of
ancient Jewish magic, Prof. Manekin-Bamberger
integrates rabbinic sources, non-Jewish sources,
and material evidence in her reconstruction of the
lives of early Jews.
Archaeological findings of Jewish magical texts
and artifacts from antiquity are an important
source for her research. Previously, many
scholars disregarded Jewish magical sources,
preferring to paint ancient Judaism as rational
and non-superstitious. They viewed magical acts
as a marginal practice limited to the uneducated.
As more texts and artifacts have been discovered
however, scholars have come to recognize the
central role that magic played in the ancient
Jewish world. For example, a discovery of
hundreds of magical texts from the time of the
Babylonian Talmud demonstrates how Jews
protected their households from demons, curses,
and malice. Jewish scribes wrote incantations,
divine names, curses, and spells in ink, on the
surface of an earthenware bowl, usually in a
spiral fashion. The bowl was later buried. In her
research, Manekin-Bamberger demonstrates
how careful study of these bowl texts, alongside
rabbinic literature, and non-Jewish sources, can
reshape our understanding of the daily lives of
ancient Jewish men and women.
Slaves and the demonic as depicted in magical sources
Uri Gabbay is an Associate Professor of
Assyriology and the Ancient Near East in the
Institute of Archaeology.
Prof. Gabbay’s research focuses on the liturgy,
ritual, and intellectual history of ancient
Mesopotamia, especially in the first millennium
B.C.E. His research is based on an analysis of
cuneiform tablets in Sumerian and Akkadian,
with a special interest in the Sumerian ritual
laments that were an important part of the
temple liturgies of ancient Mesopotamia. In
addition to deciphering and reconstructing the
texts, Prof. Gabbay integrates other cultural and
archaeological sources to reconstruct the ritual
and music of these ancient temples.
Prof. Gabbay also hopes to gain insights from the
Mesopotamians themselves. Using translations of
texts from Sumerian into Akkadian, and Akkadian
commentaries on different religious texts, he
seeks to discover the ways Mesopotamian
scholars viewed and interpreted their own texts
and culture. In a recent project funded by the
European Research Council, his team of Ph.D.
students and post-doctoral researchers worked to
combine the study of ritual and the study of the
ancient interpretations, remembering that temple
priest-scholars are the source for both.
An example of Assyrian and Sumerian writing carved on clay or stone
Oded Erez is a Professor in the Musicology
Department. Prof. Erez specializes in the study
of popular music, including music used in films
and other media. With a focus on Israel and
the Eastern Mediterranean, his research seeks
to provide an understanding of popular music
cultures, highlighting the interplay of the music’s
aesthetics and its social/political meaning. Much
of his work focuses on the politics of “East” and
“West” in Israel at a time when social hierarchies
and ethnic identities are being contested.
One of his studies focused on the extraordinary
popularity of Greek music in Israel since the late
1950s and its use as a means of negotiating and
subverting the Jew/Arab dichotomy, a dichotomy
that was central to the organization of the new
state’s national culture and instrumental to the
marginalization of Mizrahi Jews. Prof. Erez also
studied the role of music in Arab public schools
during Israel’s early decades, viewing the music
as a unique window into the dynamics of inclusion
and exclusion that underline the encounter
between the Jewish State and its Arab citizens.
In other research, he has explored the resurgence
of Arabic in the contemporary popular music
of Israeli Jews, looking at the different ways in
which Arabic is performed as a “post-vernacular”
language (a heritage language that no longer
serves primarily for everyday communication),
and has written about the status of Mizrahiyut
(the “Eastern”) in contemporary Israeli “sonic
economies.”
Prof. Erez’s latest project, Mixing Rituals, provides
the first major study of Israeli wedding music,
focusing on wedding DJs and their audiences.
Supported by an ISF grant, the study is the first
ethnomusicological study anywhere to investigate
the central role of wedding DJs as cultural
brokers, at once heirs to the traditional functions
of the professional wedding musician, mediators
of elements from club culture into the realm of
familial and communal celebration, and actors in
the commercial field of the wedding industry.
Sharon Krishek is a Professor in the Department of
Philosophy. Her area of research is the philosophy