Avner Ofrath studied history at the FU Berlin and obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2018. He was lecturer in Modern History at the University of Bremen and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan before returning to the FU Berlin in 2023 as part of the fourth cohort of the Alfred Landecker Lecturer Program.
Alongside his academic writing, Avner has published essays, translations, and commentaries on Jewish, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern history and culture in English, German, and Hebrew. He contributed a series of articles to the Israeli online magazine Alaxon and co-translated into German a history textbook on the Israel-Palestine conflict written in parallel narratives by Israeli and Palestinian teachers.
His first book, "Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship," redefines state membership and legal status in France’s key colonial territory, using a diverse array of sources in French, Arabic, and Judeo-Arabic to illustrate how Algeria shaped the French notion of citizenship and witnessed some of the most powerful struggles to retain, revive and accommodate difference within the Republic.
Between Coexistence and Conflict: Jews and Muslims amid European Might, c. 1860-1980
Avner’s current research investigates the transformation of Jewish-Muslim relations in the rapidly changing public sphere of the late-Ottoman and colonial age. At the core of this project is what he calls the coming of Judeo-Arabic political writing, a development that reshaped the nature, contours, and readership of Jewish political thought and its position in the Arab world. By exploring vernacular textual production in and between Algeria, Iraq, and Palestine, he aims to rethink the modes and frames of cross-communal relations, to reconstruct perceptions of shared pasts and visions of common futures formulated in the age of colonial domination, anti-colonialism, and nationalism.
This connected history of Judeo-Arabic political writing offers an innovative prism through which to explore the transformation of Jewish-Muslim relations over time. Situated between Arabic and Hebrew linguistics, thought, and textual production, Judeo-Arabic – the name given to Arabic dialects spoken by Jews and written in Hebrew script – allows to explore the process of Jews and Muslims growing apart in all its complexity and nuance. As a spoken Arabic dialect, Judeo-Arabic had for centuries connected Jews and Muslims. However, in its transition into a language of political writing, the Hebrew script and intertextual references of Judeo-Arabic increasingly separated the Jewish public sphere from its environment. This shift played a major role in the fragmentation of historically shared public spheres. Astonishingly, the rich textual production of Judeo-Arabic press articles, commentaries, moral stories, translations, and exegeses has hardly been explored thus far, let alone integrated into our understanding of Jewish-Muslim relations.
Writing politically in Judeo-Arabic was a radical, ambitious, and widely overlooked attempt to challenge the ‘monolingualism of the other’, to quote Jacques Derrida, an attempt to foster a cross-Mediterranean Jewish conversation on the political issues of the time.
Exploring the revival of Judeo-Arabic allows us to approach Arab-Jewish culture through its own language, to transcend the ethnic categories of the colonial age without overlooking their lasting presence in our lives and times.