Tel Aviv University
Blessed is the Changer of Beings: Uses and Representations of Exoticism in the Jewish Enlightenment
The dissertation explores Jewish representations of otherness during a formative period in the history of racial thought. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including philosophical and scientific works, halakhic literature, and folktales, the dissertation unfolds the myriad ways in which eighteenth-century Jews imagined the “exotic Other” and how the evolving discourse of racial difference played into the construction of their own identities.
Iris Idelson-Shein is an associate professor of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She is interested in Jewish translation, Old Yiddish literature, and notions of gender, sexuality, and the body in early modern Europe. Her work has been supported by the European Research Council, the DFG, and the Israel Science Foundation, and she is an alumnus of the Israel Young Academy. She is the chief editor of the JEWTACT Database.
Selected publications:
- Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. Winner of the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
- Difference of a Different Kind: Jewish Constructions of Race During the Long Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
- “Biblical apocrypha and the in-betweenness of maskilic translation.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 25.1 (2025): 156-183.
- (with Magdaléna Jánošíková). ”New Science in Old Yiddish: Jewish Vernacular Science and Translation in Early Modern Europe.” Jewish Quarterly Review 113 no. 3 (2023): 394-423
- ”Of Wombs and Words: Migrating Misogynies in Early Modern Medical Literature in Latin and Hebrew.” AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies, vol. 46 no. 2 (2022): 243-269.
- ”Rabbis of the (Scientific) Revolution: Revealing the Hidden Corpus of Early Modern Translations Produced by Jewish Religious Thinkers.” American Historical Review 126.1 (2021): 54-82.
- “No Place Like Home: The Uses of Travel in Early Jewish Children’s Literature.” In Jews and Journeys: Travel and the Performance of Jewish Identity. Ed. Joshua and Levinson Orit Bashkin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. pp. 129-145.
- “Kill The Hen That Crows Like A Cock: Animal Encounters in Old Yiddish Literature,” Journal of Jewish Studies 71.2 (2020): 321-344.