Sherman Conversation 2026:

Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College) and Roy Bar Sadeh (University of Manchester) 

Centre for Jewish Studies Sherman Conversation
Wednesday 18 February 2026
Graduate School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester

The question of modernity has been a site of intense debate for Muslim and Jewish thinkers across Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. For some, modern Europe—imagined as the home of rationality and progress—offered the promise of a new “Golden Age,” a modern al-Andalus to be achieved through Bildung and adab, the cultivation of the self through learning. Their embrace of Europe often drew on strikingly similar languages and tropes, even as they criticized European philological methods and their claims to objectivity. By the late nineteenth century, however, this promise was increasingly experienced as a betrayal. Pogroms in the Russian Empire, the Dreyfus Affair, and the expanding violence of European colonialism exposed the fragility—and hypocrisy—of Europe’s professed commitments to liberty, equality, and universal rights. For many Muslim modernists, the persecution of Jews became a searing symbol of Europe’s failure to uphold a universal ethic of protecting the vulnerable. For a number of German Jewish scholars, meanwhile, the study of Islamic history and thought opened up the possibility of an alternative intellectual and moral horizon amid rising antisemitism. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the caliphate, together with the rise of Zionist settlement in Palestine, introduced new fractures into these earlier solidarities and imaginaries, placing Jewish and Muslim modernists on increasingly competing visions of world order. How should we understand this entangled history? How might reading Jewish and Muslim modernisms together—rather than as parallel but separate stories—reshape our understanding of modernity itself? This conversation brings together Roy Bar Sadeh (University of Manchester) and Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College) to explore the convoluted, co-constitutive entanglements of Jewish and Muslim modernisms, a field still underexplored and newly urgent in the current moment.