On March 26, 2024, the Institute hosted a lecture with Rachel Smith, the Mark and Anla Cheng Kingdon Postdoctoral Fellow in Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. Dr. Smith shared some of her ongoing research in a presentation titled “Superstition and the Haunting of Sephardic Modernity.”
This talk examines ethnographic writing about superstition among Sephardic communities of the late Ottoman Empire. Dr. Smith demonstrates how Sephardic reformers deployed the category of superstition in efforts to draw new social and intellectual boundaries that condoned various social groups—including women, the elderly, and traditional rabbis—and the knowledge they held as superstitious. She shows how this was part of a larger political project to assert their newfound authority as an intellectual class at a time of great social, cultural, and political upheaval across the empire.
Rachel Smith is the Mark and Anla Cheng Kingdon Postdoctoral Fellow in Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. Her research examines the history, politics, and ethics of knowledge production and representation among Ottoman Sephardic communities. Against the backdrop of expanding empires, the rise of anthropology, and shifting notions of race, she explores how travelers and teachers, rabbis and journalists produced, circulated, and mobilized ethnographic and racialized knowledge in service of different visions of reform. She earned her PhD in History from the University of California Los Angeles, and holds a BA/MA in Linguistic Anthropology from New York University and a dual-MA in Jewish History and Education from the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Dr. Smith’s talk is available to view in full below.
This event was made possible by the generosity of Mark and Anla Cheng Kingdon and the Kaye family.
Keep up with the IIJS on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or join our mailing list for updates!