The two-day conference (28-29 June, 2022) on the subject of “Purity, Pollution, Purification and Defilement in the Premodern Mediterranean”, featured a packed schedule of lectures, workshop papers and roundtable discussions, with innovative formats to maximize fruitful discussion. Keynote lectures were by Prof. Eve Krakowski (Princeton University) on “Jewish corpse impurity and the “work of the dead” in medieval Egypt” and Prof. Holger Zellentin (Tübingen University), on “Ritual Purity and Satanic Defilement: Basic Notions from the Bible to the Qur’an”.

 

Papers spoke to a wide variety of periods, from antiquity to the early modern period, and to many areas and issues regarding purity, as well as to a wide variety of disciplines – archaeology, art history, social history, and philology.

 

The conference was organized by Dr. Moshe Blidstein of the HCMH, Dr. Naama Cohen-Hanegbi of the Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies at Tel Aviv University, in partnership with Prof. Brian Catlos (University of Colorado) and Prof. Sharon Kinoshita (University of California, Santa Cruz), both of the Mediterranean Seminar.

 

The conference was capped by a tour of archeological and religious sites in Lod and Ramle, conducted by Dr. Moshe Yagur.