Speaker: Jordan Katz, Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst - Academia.edu

Abstract: »Saidiya Hartman’s theory of “critical fabulations,” as explicated in “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), has significantly influenced how we understand the intersection of history, power, and the violence of the archive. However, within scholarship on the Jewish past, Hartman’s theory has yet to significantly impact how historians conceptualize the Jewish archive, particularly regarding its erasure of women’s lives. Focusing on early modern Jewish women, this paper explores the way in which events of sexual violence appear in Jewish records. I show how women’s experiences of physical violence are suppressed beneath other legal and communal concerns and are frequently mentioned only in passing. For those who produced archives, outrage over sexual assault was usually secondary to other motivations. Instead, documentary evidence of these encounters was generated by other concerns. Such instances lay bare the blank spaces in the historical record, and the way in which we must strain “against the limits of the archive,” as Hartman proposes, in order to write histories of Jewish women. While Hartman’s theory of critical fabulations can offer a glimpse into women’s interiority, it also throws into focus the problems inherent in Jewish archives, and the impossibility of fully representing Jewish women’s lives.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Europe | Sex and the law: Sexual assault