Stanford Humanities Center
Orit Bashkin is a professor at the University of Chicago who studies the intellectual, social and cultural history of the modern Middle East. She received her PhD from Princeton University (2004), and her BA (1995) and MA (1999) from Tel Aviv University. Her books, articles, and essays explore Iraqi history, the history of Iraqi Jews, Arab cultural revival movements, Jewish history, memory studies, and the connections between modern history and literature.
SHC Project
Historical Wonders: Jewish Jihads and Jewish Miracles in the Ottoman Empire
Bashkin's project studies how religious minorities understand the politics, histories, and religions of the majority community and how they make political and military victories of the empires and states in which they reside their own. Exploring the history of Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, she argues that Jews not only favored Ottoman rule, in its imperial and local forms, for geopolitical reasons, but also perceived Ottoman military victories and Ottoman politics as components of a Divine plan. Based on Hebrew, Arabic, and Judeo-Arabic texts from the 16th century to the 20th, such as liturgical poems, travel accounts, chronicles, and works of narrative prose, that were rarely, if at all, discussed in Western languages, I reconstruct local, often subaltern, perceptions of imperial subjectivity, told not from the vantage point of politicians, writers and scribes in the imperial center, but of a minority community who lived in the Empire. These texts reflect ecumenical and pan-Ottoman traditions circulating in different Muslim, Jewish and Christian spheres, on the one hand, and functioned as vernacular histories that challenge the ways in which the imperial center conceptualized the relations between Jews and Muslims, on the other.
Books:
Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel
New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq
The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq
Edited Volumes:
Jews and Journeys: Travel and the Performance of Jewish Identity, co-edited with Joshua Levinson
Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe, co-edited with Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim, et al.
Recent Articles and essays:
“The Return of Modernity: Postcolonialism and the New Historiography of Jews from the Levant and Egypt.” In Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Studies and the Historiography of Zionism, edited by Stefan Vogt, Derek J. Penslar, and Arieh Saposnik, 187–214. Brandeis University Press, 2023.
"Arab Jews: History, Memory, and Literary Identities in the Nahḍah." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Retrieved 17 May. 2023.
"The Fruit of the Arts and the Mob: Global Minorities during the Dreyfus Affair." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 41, no. 3 (2021): 404-412.
“UNFORGETTABLE RADICALISM: AL-ITTIHAD’S WORDS IN HEBREW NOVELS.” In The Arab Lefts: Histories and Legacies, 1950s–1970s, edited by Laure Guirguis, 18–38. Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
“On Eastern Cultures: Transregionalism and Multilingualism in Iraq, 1910–38.” In Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean, edited by Marilyn Booth, 122–48. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
