On Wednesday, February 7, IIJS hosted an in-person lecture with Giacomo Loi (University of Haifa), a recipient of the IIJS’ Kingdon New Voices in Israel and Jewish Studies Award for 2023-2024.
Since the nineteenth century, Hebrew writers integrated Greco-Roman culture as a non-Jewish sub-system within Hebrew culture to address various topics, ranging from literary aesthetics to issues of collective relevance. In contrast to previous studies organized around the “Hellenism and Hebraism” or “Athens and Jerusalem” dichotomy, Dr. Loi offers a new, “four cities” model to expand and better examine the picture of the reception of classical culture in Modern Hebrew literature. Following this model, this lecture demonstrates how Zionism, as a form of Jewish nationalism, serves as an essential backdrop for contextualizing classical reception throughout the history of Modern Hebrew literature. In fact, Zionism inherited the religious opposition with the classical world from Jewish tradition—but restructured it into an ethno-national one at the turn of the twentieth century, as Dr. Loi shows through a selection of political and literary texts.
Dr. Loi’s lecture, and the Q&A session that followed, are available to view in full below.
Giacomo Loi is an Azrieli Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. He earned his BA and MA in Classics at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, and obtained his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 2023 with the dissertation “‘Our Quarrel Is Of Old’: Classical Reception in Modern Hebrew Literature,” where he explores the presences, uses, and shifting meanings of Greco-Roman culture in modern Jewish Hebrew culture (1890s-2010s). As a 2021/22 doctoral fellow at the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Paris, he developed his project There Is No Analogy Within History: Classical Myth and Holocaust Literature, and initiated the project “Gentile” Antiquity: The Reception of Antiquity in Modern Italian Jewish Culture. He has published articles, online essays, and reviews on classical reception in Italian, European, and Jewish culture.
This event was made possible by the generosity of Mark Kingdon and Anla Cheng Kingdon, as well as the Radov and Kaye families.
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