Prof. Dr. Irene Zwiep

After reading Classics and Semitic Languages in Amsterdam and Jerusalem, Irene Zwiep (1962) received her PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 1995 with a thesis on medieval Jewish philosophy of language (Aristotle, Galen, God. A short history of Hebrew linguistic thought). After two years as a Frances Yates fellow at the London Warburg Institute, she was appointed chair in Hebrew and Jewish studies at her alma mater, the University of Amsterdam, in 1997. Here she has taught a broad range of courses on Jewish history and literature, ranging from traditional midrash and targum, via Jewish historiography, to early modern scepticism and Haskalah. Over the past years she has served as director of the Institute of Culture and History, the largest research institute of the UvA-Faculty of Humanities. She is chair of, inter alia, the Amsterdam Menasseh ben Israel Institute for Jewish social and cultural studies, and of the Academic Committee of the Levisson Institute, the rabbinical training programme of Dutch Progressive Judaism. She is co-editor of the Studia Rosenthaliana Yearbook (Louvain: Peeters) and of Zutot, Perspectives on Jewish Culture (Leiden/Boston: Brill). In 2008 she was elected member of the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij voor Wetenschappen.

Irene Zwiep’s main research interest is Jewish intellectual history of the early modern and modern periods, with a particular focus on Jewish Enlightenment and Wissenschaft des Judentums, supplemented by occasional forays into the field of Hebrew linguistic thinking. An important constant in her studies is the attempt to productively combine rigorous conceptual history with a fascination for the politics of Jewish scholarship at the interface with non-Jewish learning. Recent publications in this field include:

• ‘The haskamah of history, or: why did the Dutch Wissenschaft des Judentums spurn Zunz’s writings’, European Journal of Jewish Studies 7.2 (2013), 131-150.
• ‘Nation and translation. Steinschneider’s Hebräische Überetzungen and the end of Jewish cultural nationalism’, in R. Fontaine, G. Freudenthal, eds, Latin into Hebrew Volume 1: Studies (Leiden/Boston: Brill 2013), 419-443
• ‘Jewish Enlightenment (almost) without Haskalah. The Dutch Example’, Jewish History and Culture 13.2-3 (2012), 220-234
• ‘The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual’, Jewish Culture and History 12.3, special issue: Image Conscious. Jewish Visuals and Visualising Jews through the Ages (2012), 411-425
• ‘From Dialektik to Comparative Literature: Steinschneider’s Orientalism’, Peamim. Studies in Oriental Jewry 129 (2011), 82-96 [Hebrew]

Contact

Mail: i.e.zwiep[at]uva.nl

Lehrveranstaltungen im Rahmen der Sigi Feigel-Gastprofessur im FS 2014

Vorlesung:
Und jetzt wird gegessen. 2000 Jahre jüdische Stereotypen in Kontext
Mo 10:15-12:00

Seminar:
Ghetto or Cosmopolis: the Jewish community through the ages
Mo 14:00-15:45

Tagung (zusammen mit Christoph Uehlinger und Brigitta Rotach Schmid):
Judentum und Säkularismus
16.6-17.6.2014