Segal final entangled

Since 2014 the Sangalli Institute for the religious history and cultures is actively engaged in supporting the activities of young researchers, especially in the field of the religious studies, with particular attention to history and humanities. We are convinced that, only through the pooling of scientific cross-sectional and generational experiences, the study of the past can effectively foster social and cultural progress. That is the reason why the Sangalli Institute intend to dedicate its annual workshop for young researchers, between 2nd and 4th of October 2019, to the following topic "Entangled Knowledges. Education and Culture in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, XIVth-XIXth centuries". The workshop is scientifically coordinated by Massimo Campanini (Ambrosian Academy, Milan-IUSS, Pavia), Massimo Carlo Giannini (University of Teramo), Maurizio Sangalli (University for foreigners of Siena) and Myriam Silvera (University of Roma Tor Vergata), with the collaboration of Marco Ricca (Protestant Cultural Center 'Pietro Martire Vermigli', Florence) and Letizia Tomassone (Waldensian Church, Florence), and it will take place at the Sangalli Institute (Piazza di San Firenze 3, Firenze-Italy). The workshop aims to deepen the contacts and the differences which, between the end of Middle Ages and the beginning of the Contemporary Era, have characterized the transmission of knowledges and culture within the three monotheistic religions. The workshop will focus on the processes of the formal and informal channels of cultural dissemination in the religious perspective, in order to establish comparisons among them.

Parergon, 2019

2017

This article explores how the process of religious individualization, which focuses on agency and entrepreneurship, is a viable theoretical tool to be applied to early modern Judaism. Instead of interpreting early modern Judaism as a coherent and stable religious system, or emphasizing a particular current of religious thought that might be influential in supporting individual agency, the article aims to offer an overview of how a diaspora religion such as Judaism was characterized by a wealth of different religious choices. This perspective is combined with a methodological approach linked to ‘entangled history,’ which highlights plausible and potential relationships among different religious groups. This perspective aims to unearth dynamism instead of identity or coherence. Keywords: religious individualization, Judaism, entangled history, conversion, early modern period, selfhood. This article is part of a research paper and a book proposal linked to the research project “Religious individualization in historical perspective” financed by the DFG at the Max Weber Kolleg of the University of Erfurt.

Radovi Zavoda Za hrvatsku povijest FFZG, 2020

Since this issue of the journal is dedicated to the discussion of entangled history from as many perspectives as possible, I will try to give a brief review of the development of scholarship in the historiographical and social sciences on this topic, and will intersperse some of my reflections and experience; these mostly concern the history of emotions and transfer history. Although I am not bound by any genre constraints, I will nevertheless try to stick to a small set of concepts such as: identities, entanglements, the epistemological unicity of knowledge. I favour cross-disciplinary entanglements and therefore strongly support also all historiographical approaches that analyse complex transfers without regard for national boundaries. The focus of my research was primarily Southeast Europe as a contact zone of the Mediterranean and Eurasian steppe worlds in a longue durée perspective. During millennial cross-cultural contacts, the exchange of people, goods, ideas, technologies, and emotions has shaped in parallel all the worlds involved in the process.

This paper includes an extended review of Moshe Idel’s Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth (New York: Peter Lang, 2014) through a triple analysis of Eliade’s early literary, epistolary, and academic texts. The paper examines Idel’s analysis of some important themes in Eliade’s research, such as his shift from understanding religion as magic to its interpretation as myth; the conception of the camouflage of sacred; the notions of androgyny and restoration; and also young Eliade’s theories of death. The paper also discusses Idel’s evaluation of Eliade’s programatic misunderstanding of Judaism and Kabbalah, and also of Eliade’s moral and professional abdication regarding the political and religious aspect of the Iron Guard, a Romanian nationalist extremist and anti-Semitic group he was affiliated with in 1930s.