Professor to Speak on the Jews of India in UA’s Aronov Lecture

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Dr. Nathan Katz, professor and chair in the department of religious studies at Florida International University, where he also directs the Program in the Study of Spirituality, will give The University of Alabama department of religious studies’ 2009-2010 Aaron Aronov Lecture.

His lecture, “Religious Practices and Communal Identity of Cochin Jews: Models, Metaphors, and Methods of Diasporic Religious Acculturation,” will take place at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 17, in Gorgas Library, room 205.  The lecture is free and open to the public.

Katz’s lecture will address how the Jews in Cochin, India, developed a seamless identity, simultaneously fully Jewish and fully Indian. In his talk, he will describe how they evolved models, methods and metaphors for religious acculturation.  From there, he will speculate about the applicability of this specific case of a microscopic minority in South India to general questions about the development and maintenance of “hyphenated” identities anywhere.

His groundbreaking work about Indian Jewish communities is based on extensive field work and scrutiny of primary documents, and it is richly informed by theoretical issues in religious studies, anthropology, history and diaspora studies. His 1993 book, “The Last Jews of Cochin,” helped to put that expiring community into the mainstream of modern scholarship, and his 2000 work, “Who Are the Jews of India?,” was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and garnered the Vak Devi Saraswati Saman Award from India.

More recently, his 2009 memoir, “Spiritual Journey Home,” has been acclaimed in popular media. He is co-founder and co-editor of The Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies. For decades, he has been in the forefront of Hindu/Buddhist — Jewish dialogue.

The Aaron Aronov Lecture Series, established in 2002, is named after the late Aaron Aronov, after whom the department of religious studies’s endowed chair in Judaic Studies is also named. Its aim is to introduce to The University of Alabama community a nationally recognized scholar of religion who is capable of reflecting on issues of wide relevance to scholars from across the humanities and social sciences.

In addition to the department of religious studies, the 2009-2010 Aronov Lecture is cosponsored by anthropology, Asian studies, English, history, Honors College, New College and University Libraries.

For more information, visit http://web.as.ua.edu/rel/events.html or contact Dr. Steven Ramey at sramey@as.ua.edu or 205/348-4218.

The department of religious studies is part of The College of Arts and Sciences, the University’s largest division and the largest liberal arts college in the state. Students from the College have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships, Goldwater Scholarships and memberships on the USA Today Academic All-American Teams.