The Marrakesh Dialogues

In sixteenth-century Marrakesh, a Flemish merchant converts to Judaism and takes his Catholic brother on a subversive reading of the Gospels and an exploration of the Jewish faith. Their vivid Spanish dialogue, composed by an anonym in 1583, has until now escaped scholarly attention in spite of its success in anti-Christian clandestine literature until the Enlightenment. Based on all nine available manuscripts, this critical edition rediscovers a pioneering work of Jewish self-expression in European languages. The introductory study identifies the author, Estêvão Dias, locates him in insurgent Antwerp at the beginning of the Western Sephardi diaspora, and describes his hybrid culture shaped by the Iberian Renaissance, Portuguese crypto-Judaism, Mediterranean Jewish learning, Protestant theology, and European diplomacy in Africa. "The Marrakesh Dialogues has been mentioned only rarely in the scholarly literature, and Wilke’s edition and extended discussion constitute the first attempt at editing the text based upon all the textual evidence, placing it into its historical context, identifying the author and the dramatis personae of the text, analysing the treatise’s contents, and presenting it to a wide audience. He is successful because of his broad knowledge of the political and religious trends in early modern Europe, coupled with close familiarity with converso life and literature." - Daniel L. Lasker, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in: Journal of Jewish Studies Vol. LXVII No. 2, pp. 428-35

This book is the result of two scientific encounters hosted by the University of Évora in 2012, with the theme “Muslims and Jews in Portugal and the Diaspora. Identities and Memories (16th–17th centuries)”, and co-financed by the Foundation for Science and Technology, and by FEDER, through “Eixo I” of the “Programa Operacional Fatores de Competitividade” (POFC) of QREN (COMPETE). Beginning with an analysis of the forced conversion of Iberian Jews and Muslims, this volume examines the effects of this on their respective diasporas, focusing on a variety of approaches, from language and culture to identity discourses and interchanges between those communities.

Over the last thirty years, governments across the globe have formalized new relationships with religious communities through their domestic and foreign policies and have variously sought to manage, support, marginalize, and coopt religious forces through them. Many scholars view these policies as evidence of the "return of religion" to global politics although there is little consensus about the exact meaning, shape, or future of this political turn. In The Global Politics of Interreligious Dialogue, Michael D. Driessen examines the growth of state-sponsored interreligious dialogue initiatives in the Middle East and their use as a policy instrument for engaging with religious communities and ideas. Using a novel theoretical framework and drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Driessen explores both the history of interreligious dialogue and the evolution of theological approaches to religious pluralism in the traditions of Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam. He analyzes state-centric accounts of interreligious dialogue and conceptualizes new ideas and practices of citizenship, religious pluralism, and social solidarity that characterize dialogue initiatives in the region. To make his case, Driessen presents four studies of dialogue in the Middle East--the Focolare Community in Algeria, the Adyan Foundation in Lebanon, KAICIID of Saudi Arabia, and DICID of Qatar--and highlights key interreligious dialogue declarations produced in the broader Middle East over the last two decades. Compelling and nuanced, The Global Politics of Interreligious Dialogue illustrates how religion operates in contemporary global politics, offering important lessons about the development of alternative models of democracy, citizenship, and modernity.

This collection takes a new approach to understanding religious plurality in the Iberian Peninsula and its Mediterranean and northern European contexts. Focusing on polemics—works that attack or refute the beliefs of religious Others—this volume aims to challenge the problematic characterization of Iberian Jews, Muslims, and Christians as homogeneous groups. From the high Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, Christian efforts to convert groups of Jews and Muslims, Muslim efforts to convert Christians and Jews, and the defensive efforts of these communities to keep their members within the faiths led to the production of numerous polemics. This volume brings together a wide variety of case studies that expose how the current historiographical focus on the three religious communities as allegedly homogeneous groups obscures the diversity within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities as well as the growing ranks of skeptics and outright unbelievers. Featuring contributions from a range of academic disciplines, this paradigm-shifting book sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual dynamics of the conflicts that marked relations among these religious communities in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Antoni Biosca i Bas, Thomas E. Burman, Mònica Colominas Aparicio, John Dagenais, Óscar de la Cruz, Borja Franco Llopis, Linda G. Jones, Daniel J. Lasker, Davide Scotto, Teresa Soto, Ryan Szpiech, Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld, and Carsten Wilke.

The series Studies and Texts in Scepticism contains monographs, translations, and collected essays exploring scepticism in its dual manifestation as a purely philosophical tradition and as a set of sceptical strategies, concepts, and attitudes in the cultural field - especially in religions, perhaps most notably in Judaism. In such cultural contexts scepticism manifests as a critical attitude towards different dimensions and systems of secular or revealed knowledge and towards religious and political authorities. It is not merely an intellectual or theoretical worldview, but a critical form of life that expresses itself in such diverse phenomena as religion, literature, and society. Further book series of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies are Jewish Thought, Philosophy, and Religion and the Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advances Studies.

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture introduces the intellectual and artistic breadth of early modern Spain from a range of disciplinary and critical perspectives. Spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a period traditionally known as the Golden Age), the volume examines topics including political and scientific culture, literary and artistic innovations, and religious and social identities and institutions in transformation. The 36 chapters of the volume include both expert overviews of key topics and figures from the period as well as new approaches to understudied questions and materials. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in Hispanic studies, as well as Renaissance and early modern studies more generally.

Provides insightful discussions of the exegetic and discursive process begun by the open letter A Common Word Between Us and You.

College-level ethnography focusing on Morocco. Dialogues provide interesting approach to the study of fieldwork.