Mahnaz Yousefzadeh presents the only known Judeo-Persian Old Testament book of Tobit acquired by Giambattista Vecchietti during his his second journey to Persia and India (1600-1608). The diplomat-scholar’s interest in Tobit is situated within an early-modern post-Trentine Florentine encounter with the Persianate world. By re-naming the manuscript Tobi and Persian Jewry, Vecchietti posits an original hermeneutic built on a poetics of uncoerced exile not rooted in the Septuagint or the Vulgate. Vecchietti’s Persianate reading offers a new history of biblical exile and art that prefigures Vico’s humanism and further explains the popularity of Tobias iconography in the Mughal courts of Akbar and Jahangir.

Speaker
Mahnaz Yousefzadeh, Affiliate Professor, Art History, NYUAD; Professor, Global Liberal Studies, NYU

Moderated by
Maurice Pomerantz, Program Head of ACS; Associate Professor of Literature, NYUAD

In collaboration with the Arab Crossroads Studies program at NYUAD