Arnhold Lecture 2022 - Ariella Aïsha Azoulay - Dresden, 27.4.2022

Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold Lecture 2022
In Cooperation with the American Academy in Berlin
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Professor of Modern Culture & Media and Comparative Literature, Brown University, Providence)
„Algeria. The Jews are still there, in every bracelet“
In 1870, Arab Jews and Berber Jews who lived in Algeria for centuries were separated from the rest of the indigenous population and proclaimed by their colonizers as French citizens. As a consequence of this imposed citizenship, they had to renounce much of their pre-colonial ways of life. Almost a century later, with the demise of French rule in Algeria in 1962, this citizenship doomed Arab and Berber Jews to expulsion from their homeland. In this lecture, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay questions the double disappearance of the Jews - from North Africa and from the history of the French colonization of Algeria - and the role this erasure plays in rendering a Jewish-Muslim world unimaginable. Her argument stresses the role of jewelers in this the lost world, thereby reconstructing the place of Jews as the jewelers of the ummah (nation). In so doing, Azoulay traces their centuries long presence in the Maghreb, invokes the “unruliness” of the jewels they created, and proposes a potential history of a Jewish-Muslim world.
With Words of Welcome by Stephanie Buck (Vice Director General, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden) and by Berit Ebert (Vice President of Programs, American Academy Berlin)
With an introduction by Doreen Mende (Head of Research Department, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden)

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Discovering Ariella Aisha's work this year, I immediately identified with her book "potential history", as I have also always questioned objects in museums, for example, when I went to the Natural History Museum in Washington DC and New York and saw several stones treasures of my country, Brazil. And also when I questioned several times the imposition of one culture over another, even though this culture being crushed seemed violent for their own people in the eyes of outsiders.