This interdisciplinary workshop focused on memories of the not-so-long-ago presence of Jews in the Arab/Muslim world, i.e., the massive demographic and cultural presence of those invariably called Sephardim or Arab-Jews and the vacuum left in the wake of their departure in the post-1948 era.

Today it is common to hear claims, in everyday conversation and in the media, suggesting that Jews and Muslims have been perennial enemies, eternally locked in intractable conflict. However, the myriad memories of inter-communal conviviality suggest that this idea of an implacable enmity is a relatively recent invention.

This workshop brings together scholars researching Jewish-Muslim relations, shedding light on complex cultures of belonging usually buried under the grand nostrums of present-day political discourse. The workshop sets out to examine the ways in which the intertwined Muslim and Jewish past has become a source of nostalgia for a cosmopolitan Arab world that has disappeared but which has also come to embody dreams for a more peaceful future.

The topic of Muslim and Jewish shared quotidian existence has in recent years become visible as the subject of public conversation. This interest in a shared past suggests that a once taboo subject has come to form part of an exploration of a religiously and ethnically multifaceted cultural syncretism. Transcending Orientalist narratives of the Muslim versus the Jew, this workshop addressed fresh understandings of Jewish and Muslim cultural memory.