Wednesday, March 26, 2025
1:00–2:15 p.m.
The Tananbaum Conference Room (10th Floor) at JTS and Livestream via Zoom

In 1846, the Bene Yisrael community in India published its first Haggadah in Mumbai, followed by a second edition printed in 1874 in Pune. Translating the ancient Hebrew text into Marathi was another step in integrating the community into Rabbinical Judaism—a project that brought together actants from different provenances. The editor of the Haggadah was from Kochin, the printer hailed from Yemen, and the illustrations were copied from the second edition of the renowned Amsterdam Haggadah (1712), likely by a local artist.

This talk with Menashe Anzi and Achia Anzi will examine the knowledge exchange between these diverse Jewish communities, highlighting how their interactions made such projects possible. It will also explore the transformation of the images as they travelled from Europe to India and consider the Haggadah as an alternative medium for engaging with the past.

Menashe Anzi is a Senior Lecturer in the Jewish History department at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. His areas of specialization include the history of Yemenite Jews, the relationship between Jews and Muslims in Islamic cities, and the trade networks and Jewish migration along the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.  His book The Ṣan’ānis: Jews in Muslim Yemen, 1872–1950 (2021, Zalman Shazar Center, in Hebrew), has won him the Ben-Zvi Institute prize for 2022.

Achia Anzi is an Israeli artist and researcher based in New Delhi. Anzi is an associate professor of visual arts and the BFA program director at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat (India). Anzi’s translation of the short stories of Urdu author Saadat Hassan Manto was published in Hebrew by Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House (2018). Anzi is currently a visiting scholar at the Taub Centre for Israeli Studies (NYU) and teaches Hebrew at  the Jewish Theological Seminary.