Fellows 2020

David Sclar

Research Fellow, Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

June–August 2020

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»Inventing Tradition and (Re)Forming Identity: Books and Western Sephardic Jewishness in Early Modern Europe«

Research partner:

David Sclar follows an invitation of Rebekka Voß (Professor for the History of German and European Judaism at the Goethe University) and the University's research center »Religiöse Positionierung. Modalitäten und Konstellationen in jüdischen, christlichen und islamischen Kontexten« (»Religious Positioning: Modalities and Constellations in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Contexts«).

Scholarly profile of David Sclar

David Sclar studies Jewish history and culture in the early modern period. He earned his doctorate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has held fellowships at Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Oxford, the University of Toronto, New York University, and the Center for Jewish History. He has published articles in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Book History, AJS Review, and elsewhere, and is the editor of Treasures of the Valmadonna Trust Library: a Catalogue of 15th-Century Books and Five Centuries of Deluxe Hebrew Printing.

Website:
More information about David Sclar can be found here.

Main areas of research:

Early modern Jewish History, Jewish intellectual, social, and religious currents in northern Italy and the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Selected publications:

»Perfecting Community as ›One Man‹: Moses Hayim Luzzatto’s Pietistic Confraternity in Eighteenth-Century Padua«, In: Journal of the History of Ideas (forthcoming).
»A Communal Tree of Life: Western Sephardic Jewry and the Library of the Ets Haim Yesiba in Early Modern Amsterdam«, In: Book History, 22, 2019, pp.43–65.
»An Exercise in Civic Kabbalah: The Establishment of an Eruv and Its Socio-religious Context in 18th-Century Padua«, In: Jewish Studies Quarterly, 24:1, 2017, pp.39–65.
»Books in the Ets Haim Yeshiva: Acquisition, Publishing, and a Community of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam«, In: Jewish History, 30:3, 2016, pp.207–232.
»Adaptation and Acceptance: Moses Ḥayim Luzzatto’s Sojourn in Amsterdam among Portuguese Jews«, In: Association for Jewish Studies Review, 40:2, 2016, pp.335–358.