Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Exile Goes Deep
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Summary
After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, an emerging new class of sages began rethinking the history and significance of exile. This process took several centuries and was exclusively textual. Things changed dramatically with the rise of Islam and the consequent transformation of global geography. It is within this context that a new “traveler” appeared in the 10th century: a man claiming to have come from the depths of Africa. As we shall see in this lecture, this man made clever use of the textual traditions concerning exile and embedded them within the new global geography that Islam created. His curious story had many implications for the future, all the way to 1973 and the 1980s.
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite teaches Chinese History, Middle Eastern and Islamic history, and sometimes Jewish history, at NYU. He is author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Harvard, 2005); The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford, 2009); He is co-editor of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Culture, and Politics (Brandeis, 2013); The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept (Columbia University Press, 2017), and Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History, (Hawaii University Press, 2023).