Lunch Seminar with Karen Stern: "Enthralling Devotion: Multi-Sensory Worship Inside the Dura Europos Synagogue"

Scholars rarely study the multi-sensory and affective dimensions of Jewish life in premodernity, even if histories of ancient Jews remain only partial without their consideration. This talk takes a different approach to ancient Jewish life and, particularly, inside spaces built for Jewish worship. It focuses on one the most famous synagogues ever discovered, from the ancient town of Dura Europos, once situated along the banks of the Euphrates River in Syria. This improbably preserved synagogue, constructed in the third century C.E. and uncovered in the 1930s, has been endlessly scrutinized by scholars of the ancient world. Yet shifted attention to multi-sensory and affective atmospheres sustained within the synagogue, as documented by several of its archaeologically attested features, including its wall paintings, graffiti, and ceiling tiles, yield otherwise unrecognized information about its original use. By adopting distinctive approaches from several fields, including the history and archaeology of the senses, this talk promises novel and otherwise unprecedented insights into experiential dimensions of Jewish worship and holiness in Syria and in other areas of the Mediterranean throughout late antiquity.

Karen B. Stern is Professor of History at Brooklyn College of City University of New York, Professor of Classics at CUNY Graduate Center, and current director of the Roberta S. Matthews Center for Teaching and Learning at Brooklyn College. She is author of Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (Princeton University Press 2018; paperback ed. 2020), winner of a 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award through the Association for Jewish Studies (category: Jews and the Arts), and Finalist for the Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion, American Academy of Religion; Inscribing Devotion and Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations of North Africa (Brill 2007); and co-editor of With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan (SBL Press, 2021). 

This seminar is a collaboration between the Yale Religious Studies Seminar, within the Religious Studies Department, and the Yale Program in Jewish Studies. Lunch will be served. All are welcome!