What does Race owe to Religion? Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in Medieval Spain and North Africa

Today it is common to think of race and racism as originating in modernity, and especially in European colonization of the “New” world. But the word race itself was first applied to humans in medieval Spain, as a way of stigmatizing converts to Christianity from Judaism or Islam and their descendants.

And long before Christians in Spain began to imagine that Judaism and Islam were reproduced biologically, Muslims in Spain and North Africa had developed similar ways of thinking about the deficiencies of people descended from converts. This lecture will explore the medieval encounters between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism that produced these reproductive logics, and trace their influence in later Muslim and Christian systems of enslavement and racial hierarchy in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.

David Nirenberg is a historian of the Middle Ages. Among his publications are “Communities of Violence. Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages“ (1996) and „Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition“ (2013). Currently a professor at the University of Chicago, he has just been appointed as the next Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, one of the world’s preeminent centers for theoretical research in the sciences and humanities.

Eine Veranstaltung des Akademienvorhabens "Regesta Imperii - Regesten Kaiser Friedrichs III. (1440-1493)" im Mittelalterzentrum und des Lehrstuhls Europäische Geschichte des Mittelalters der HU Berlin.

Für diese Veranstaltung gilt die 2G-Plus-Regel. Der Vortrag findet in englischer Sprache statt. Zur Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung ist eine Anmeldung bis zum 30. November 2021 erforderlich.

Ort: Akademiegebäude am Gendarmenmarkt, Leibniz-Saal, Markgrafenstraße 38, 10117 Berlin