Call for Papers: From Baghdad to the Wider World

From Baghdad to the Wider World

Jewish Modernities and Nineteenth-Century Networks through Ha-Dover

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Sde Boqer Campus)  · Tel Aviv University

23–25 February 2027

About

Ha-Dover (also known as Dover Meysharim), published in Baghdad between 1863 and 1871, holds a landmark place in the history of Middle Eastern print culture. It was the first newspaper to appear in Iraq and the first Hebrew newspaper published anywhere in the Middle East and North Africa. Ha-Dover was produced by a non-Muslim minority — an important reminder that, as with some of the earliest Arabic newspapers published in Lebanon and Egypt, minority communities played a formative role in the emergence of modern journalism in the region.

For many years, Ha-Dover was considered lost, and only a handful of issues were known to survive in private collections. The recent discovery of an almost complete run of the newspaper, preserved in the Hamburg University Library, has altered this picture. Now transcribed and digitized, Ha-Dover opens a new chapter in the study of nineteenth-century Iraq, Iraqi Jewry, and the wider history of print, communication, and communal self-articulation across the Middle East and North Africa.

Ha-Dover opens a rare window onto Baghdadi Jewish life at a formative moment marked by the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms, accelerating regional and global connectivity (steam travel, telegraphy, expanding trade routes), and the reconfiguration of Jewish communal and proto-national solidarities through education, philanthropy, and new print publics. As a newspaper written from within the community, often addressing a Jewish readership that did not necessarily share a single spoken vernacular (Judeo-Arabic, Persian, Ladino, etc.), it also invites us to rethink Hebrew (and Judeo-Arabic) as media of networking, authority, and communal imagination.

Taking Ha-Dover as its point of departure rather than its sole subject, the conference uses this singular print record to open a much broader set of questions: It serves as a platform for comparative analysis across Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa and across broader nineteenth-century histories of print, mobility, diaspora networks, and modernity. We particularly welcome papers that explore how newspapers shaped new forms of collective imagination and public authority, and how local presses mapped geographies and connections across overlapping regional and imperial spaces (e.g., Persia, India, Ottoman provincial circuits, and oceanic corridors). We also invite work on how debates over language, governance, education, gender, philanthropy, and everyday moral economies unfolded within these emerging publics.

Keynote:  Orit Bashkin

Opening:  23 February — The Alliance Center for Iranian Studies, Tel Aviv University

24-25 February – The Azrieli Center for Israel Studies (MALI), Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the study of Israel and Zionism, Sde Boqer campus, Ben-Gurion University in the Negev

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Support:  We will cover accommodation for participants during the second night in Sde Boqer Campus; a limited number of travel grants will be available to assist with flights, with priority given to scholars without institutional support for travel.Suggested Topics

We welcome relevant proposals that engage the following themes, though the list is by no means exhaustive:

• Print culture, lithography, authorship, editorship, and the newspaper as “ego-document” and cultural archive
• Hebrew / Judeo-Arabic, multilingualism, readerships, and Hebrew as a transregional medium
• Ottoman reforms (Tanzimat) and the press: how newspapers reported, mediated, and contested reform in law, courts, taxation, and minority governance, and its role in translating imperial modernity to a Jewish readership
• Jewish–Muslim relations in everyday life (class, neighbourhood, mediation, conflict, coexistence)
• Education, the AIU, philanthropy, and local agency in projects of “improvement” and communal modernisation
• Migration and transregional connections (Persia–Iraq, India, and wider Baghdadi diasporic circuits)
• Gender, family, childhood, lifecycle, and the social production of norms through print
• Popular religion (pilgrimage, saints, miracles), ritual life, and the boundaries of religious authority
• Economy, markets, and material life — leisure spaces and urban sociability in nineteenth-century Baghdad
• Methods: transcription / annotation as interpretation; corpus approaches; digital humanities and critical editions of the press
• Moderate Haskalah and alternative forms of modernity in the Jewish-Muslim sphere of the nineteenth century

How to Submit

Please submit a title and abstract (200–300 words) together with a short bio (100–150 words), in English or Hebrew. Please indicate your preferred language of presentation.

Deadline for proposals                14 September 2026

Notification                8 November 2026

Send to tomfogel@gmail.com

Depending on the range of contributions, selected papers will be considered for inclusion in a special journal issue and/or an edited volume on Ha-Dover and the Jewish communities of Iraq in comparative Middle Eastern and North African contexts.

The Academic Committee

Esther Meir-Glitzenstein  ·  Aviad Moreno  ·  Ami Ayalon  ·  Noga Efrati  ·  Meir Litvak