2027-2028 Rethinking Jewish Peoplehood

Who is a Jew? What makes something Jewish? Is Judaism a religion or ethnicity, or both? What is Jewish peoplehood and (if such a phenomenon even exists) how is it constituted? These issues have been interrogated in great depth by scholars of modern Judaism(s). But we often write as if such questions only emerged with the complications of early modernity—as if premodern Jewishness were an organic and self-explanatory category uncomplicated by questions of how, why, and with whom to be Jewish.

The theme year Rethinking Jewish Peoplehood: Towards a New Archive seeks to move beyond the horizon of modernity to interrogate the ways Jewishness was constructed among a diverse set of premodern Jewish communities and thinkers—uncovering forgotten historical models of Jewish belonging and reshaping our sense of what it meant to be a Jew in the premodern world.

Research on premodern Judaism(s) has, of course, considered the question of Jewish identity and how it was constituted. But scholars who have ventured to interrogate these questions have largely focused (albeit critically) on those strains of premodern thought that gave birth to currently hegemonic conceptions of Jewishness. This theme year proposes to (re)visit the premodern past in a different register. We will gather scholars working to complicate our understanding of how concepts such as Jewishness, ethno-religion, peoplehood, Jewish racial and ethnic diversity, conversion, Jewish-adjacent
practitioners, and Jewish belonging have been constructed and utilized in premodern Jewish communities and literatures.

While our research will remain firmly rooted within our individual expertise in late antique or medieval Judaism(s), this theme year will also push participants to consider the ways in which we can begin to integrate research of different periods on these questions—acknowledging that the construction of Jewishness has always been complicated, contested, and diverse. Specifically, we will consider how different historical models of imagining Jewish belonging might offer affordances for thinking about present phenomena. Our historical research will be premised on the principle that the archive is not static. Perceptions of the Jewish past are constantly remade as texts and histories are suppressed and forgotten—through uneven patterns of preservation, publication, translation, and pedagogy. But we work in a moment where more of the archive than ever is available to be reexamined, and Rethinking Jewish Peoplehood invites researchers to engage with the archive in ways that expand and even transform
our conceptual frameworks for understanding what it means to be Jewish.

We invite scholars, experts, and practitioners from an array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to join us in this multidisciplinary exploration. We encourage applicants to consider questions of
diversity, inclusion, and the voices that are amplified or marginalized in different media contexts.

Applications due November 2, 2026