Joshua Picard
Joshua is the postdoctoral fellow for the Evolution of the Jewish Family in Islamic North Africa working group with the Department of History and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. His research focuses on the colonial encounter between France and the countries of North Africa, especially Tunisia, with particular focus on the roles and experiences of Jewish communities on both sides of the Mediterranean. His current book project concerns the origins and ratification of the 'Ahd al-Aman, the 1857 Tunisian reform edict that liberalized commercial law and formally recognized limited civil rights in Tunisia. His current research also includes Judaeo-Arabic satirical verse as a vehicle of social criticism, philanthropy and education reforms among North African Jews, and the place of the colony in nineteenth and twentieth-century conceptions of Jews as a distinct racial category.
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Research Area:
Modern North African history; Modern Jewish History; Modern France and French Empire; Enlightenment and emancipation; Imperialism and colonialism.
Among the Jews of the Islamic world, both Jewish and Islamic authorities frequently asserted that, when it came to matters such as betrothal, marriage, divorce, inheritance, reproduction, custody, household labor, modesty, and menstrual impurity, the Jews were subject only to their own religious law as developed by previous generations of male, Jewish authorities. Yet both documentary and literary evidence shows that the thoughts and practices of Jews in the areas of family law continued to develop and change in conversation with surrounding ideas. This “conversation” was sometimes quite literal. New scholarship has begun to explore the extent to which everyday, non-expert Jews, including women, had opportunities to interact with Muslims in intimate settings and to integrate aspects of Muslims’ culture into their own family dynamics.
