Landscapes of Print: Jews, Arabs, and Judeo-Arabic in Colonial North Africa - Noam Sienna

Arabness and Jewishness are sometimes understood to be identities at odds, or even mutually exclusive, but there are many contexts in which they have overlapped. This talk explores one such time and place: the attempt in nineteenth-century North Africa to create a modern “Arab Jewish” or “Judeo-Arabic” reading public. Dr. Sienna will investigate the development of the Judeo-Arabic printing industry, and what Maghrebi Jews thought, wrote, and read about the changing linguistic and political dynamics around them, drawing on his forthcoming monograph on Maghrebi Jewish book history. Navigating between French colonial occupation, European Jewish assimilatory philanthropy, Ottoman imperialism, Arab nationalism, Zionism, and more, North African Jews strove to find their own path to forming intersectional, nuanced, and capacious modern identities. Did they succeed? Can we?

Dr. Noam Sienna is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, researching Jewish book culture in the early modern Islamic world as part of the project “Hidden Stories: New Approaches to the Local and Global History of the Book.” He received his PhD in History and Museum Studies from the University of Minnesota, and is also a Junior Fellow with the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. His first monograph, Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds, will appear with Indiana University Press in June 2025.
Book out June 3, 2025

Thursday, May 22, 2025 • 314 Royce Hall • 2 PM
Landscapes of Print: Jews, Arabs, and Judeo-Arabic in Colonial North Africa
Maurice Amado Program in Sephardic Studies

Noam Sienna (University of Toronto)
Moderator: Aomar Boum (UCLA)