Symposium: "Archives of/in Ancient Judaism"

For a millennium, ancient Jewish communities lived under a succession of foreign empires, each with its own bureaucracy, languages, and ways of keeping records. Rather than simply being documented by these powers, Jews engaged creatively with their administrative cultures, curating – and sometimes inventing – archives of their own. Yet the archive of ancient Judaism that survives today is a strange one: documents are usually stripped of their original context, embedded instead within narrative, and often of uncertain authenticity.

This symposium brings together scholars working from the Iron Age to late antiquity, and across sources from the Hebrew Bible to the Talmud and from seals to scrolls, to ask how Jewish communities produced, preserved, forged, and lost documents under imperial rule – and what those practices reveal about power, memory, and identity.

Drawing on comparative work in archive studies and the documentary cultures of the wider ancient world, the symposium will include sessions on evidence from across Jewish antiquity, a panel on archival research and historiography today, and a public event on Judaism’s archives in the arts.

The symposium is organized by Rotem Avneri Meir and Sarit Kattan Gribetz and hosted by the Yale Program in Jewish Studies.