Source in the Spotlight
The Alba Bible: A Medieval Spanish Co-Production by a Rabbi and the Friars of Toledo
Religious co-production may take many forms, arising from interactions that may be physical or purely imaginary, and processes of transference and adaption which may be candidly admitted or carefully concealed. The Alba Bible is comparatively rare in advertising itself as the result of a deliberate collaboration between members of different religious communities. It is a late-medieval Bible, translated into medieval Castilian for a Christian patron by a rabbi, working under the supervision of several Christian friars, and illustrated by a team of artists in Toledo. The result was a remarkable interreligious coproduction created during a period in which Jewish life in medieval Spain was particularly precarious. After many centuries of obscurity, the Bible has been embraced in recent decades as a symbol of the deep roots of Sephardi Jewish culture in Spain and as an example of tolerant interfaith collaboration. For all that, the story of its origins makes it an ambivalent emblem for the cooperation across the assymetries of power between religious majority and minority.
Latest Case Study
Co-Producing Love and Paradise: The Sicilian School of Poets
The idea of a sensual paradise might seem foreign to medieval Christian devotion. But it was an important motif in the love poetry of the Sicilian School, and likely emerged from interactions between Christian and Muslim poetic traditions in the island’s Norman and Swabian courts. This article explores these hybrid origins – and how nationalist accounts have historically silenced them in favour of exclusively domestic narratives.
Event: Workshop
"Judaism and Islam: Co-produced Religions"?
with Miriam Frenkel, Katharina Heyden, David Nirenberg, Sarah Stroumsa, Guy Stroumsa, and Shlomo Zuckier
Event: International Conference and Workshop
Insular Entanglements: Malta, 300-1700
International Conference in Valetta, June 16-19th, 2026
Organizers: Mohamad Ballan (Stonybrook University) and Katharina Heyden (University of Bern)
Our upcoming conference "Insular Entanglements: Malta, 300-1700" examines Malta as a case-study of Mediterranean entanglement from Late Antiquity through the Early Modern period. The notion of entanglement that we propose is quite capacious, encompassing not only (nor even primarily) quotidian interreligious interactions but ideas of connections, polemics, memory, histories, and texts more broadly. This will include intellectual networks, economic and political connections, language, cultural encounters, religious thought and polemics, as well as the relationship between the local (Malta) and regional (Mediterranean). The idea of frontiers and borderlands will constitute an important theme of the conference, but we will also explore questions of materiality and material culture in early Christianity, the complex (and ever-changing) relationship between religious and cultural traditions, and the larger political transformations taking place across the medieval and early modern Mediterranean world.
Latest Publication
Co-produced Religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Harvard Theological Review 118 (2025), 159-180.
About
Who we are
The project is coordinated by Katharina Heyden, Professor for Ancient History of Christianity and Interreligious Encounters at the University of Bern (Switzerland), and David Nirenberg, Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (U.S.), and includes a network of collaborators across North America, Europe, and the Middle East.