Antiquitopia

For my exams a couple years ago now, I developed a syllabus for a course that I would have loved to take but have never seen offered: "Jews in Ancient Egypt." If anyone is interested in this subject, I would highly recommend Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, T he Jews of Egypt: From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995) [ Les Juifs d’Egypte, de Ramsès II à Hadrien (Paris: Editions Armand Colin, 1992)]. This is perhaps the most comprehensive and readable guide. Modrzejewski bases his observations in papyrological and evidence, but uses other types of documents to fill in the overall picture. He covers everything from biblical stories, the military colony of Elephantine, and Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt to reminiscences of Egyptian Judaism in late antique Egyptian papyrological documents, Rabbinic Judaism, and Christianity. Perhaps his most interesting chapter is on the LXX. One of my interests in the subject was, especially...

"We were German, English, Hungarian, African--all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states." Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient , 138. Speaking of which, has anyone read Spivak and Butler's co-written book, Who Sings the Nation-State? If so, how is it?

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education , current students and alumni from Barnard College as well as Columbia are drafting an online petition to deny tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj, assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard. They claim that her research, particularly her book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society , distorts the evidence and is skewed against Israel. According to the Chronicle, "The petition, which has drawn just over 1,000 signatures, accuses Ms. Abu El-Haj of ignoring or mischaracterizing large parts of the archaeological record, of not being able to speak Hebrew, and of treating Israeli archaeologists unfairly in her work." If true, I think not being able to speak Hebrew would be particularly damning if that is the primary language of the work she is examining. I have not read her book, but I have heard quite a bit about it, always in a very charged context. In any case, I refrain fro...