Fürth celebrates diversity!
BaFID is delighted to be able to support the newly launched festival ‘Fürth celebrates diversity!’ with lectures in order to contribute to strengthening social cohesion in the Nuremberg metropolitan region.
What kind of world do we want to live in? – This central question of the festival and achieving the associated goals of raising awareness and educating society, promoting cultural diversity and mutual understanding, and strengthening social cohesion are the core tasks of BaFID.
We are participating in this event with three lectures together with our cooperation partner, the Jewish Museum of Franconia. You can find the entire festival program here.
The perception of the ‘religious other’: Christianity and Islam from the perspective of Judaism
Date: 29 April 2025
Time: 16:00–17:00
Location: Jüdisches Museum Franken Königstraße 89, 90762 Fürth
Dr. Nathanael Riemer, research associate with a focus on Judaism at the Bavarian Research Centre for Interreligious Discourse (BaFID), will give a lecture on the topic of the perception of the ‘religious other.’
The lecture will place the perspectives of Jewish traditional literature in a hall of mirrors of the monotheistic religions. Cabinets of mirrors offer opportunities and risks: they harbor the dangers of self-absorption and representation. However, cabinets of mirrors also offer opportunities for critical navel-gazing, in which surprising things can be discovered that were not previously suspected in the reflection. The lecture ‘The perception of the “religious other”: Christianity and Judaism from the perception of Judaism’ traces the topic from the Babylonian exile through the rabbinical period and the Middle Ages to the 19th century.
Religion and Social Cohesion
Date: 3 May 2025
Time: 16:00–17:00
Location: Jüdisches Museum Franken Königstraße 89, 90762 Fürth
As part of the ‘Fürth celebrates diversity’ festival (26 April to 11 May), the director of the Bavarian Research Centre for Interreligious Discourse (BaFID), Prof. Dr. Georges Tamer, will give a lecture on the topic of religion and integration.
Religion can play an important role in the integration of migrants, as many immigrants come from religiously characterized societies. Integration efforts should therefore take migrants’ religious values into account in order to promote a sense of belonging to the new home country and strengthen social cohesion. Successful integration that accepts and values religious and cultural differences is crucial for the continued existence of democracy. The lecture will deal with various aspects of the topic and examine how religious values can be harmonized with the principles of a secular society.
All interested parties are cordially invited to attend this lecture and to discuss with Prof. Tamer afterwards.
Jonah with a difference? A biblical narrative and its interreligious reception in antiquity
Date: 8 May 2025
Time: 16:00–17:00
Location: Jüdisches Museum Franken Königstraße 89, 90762 Fürth
The deputy director of the Bavarian Research Centre for Interreligious Discourse (BaFID), PD Dr. Christian Lange, will give a lecture on the topic of the prophet Jonah, who had to spend three days in the belly of a whale.
In the German-speaking world, Jonah is primarily known as the ‘man with the fish’ or the ‘man with the whale,’ who was swallowed by a fish and spent three days inside it, just as Jesus spent three days in Sheol, the realm of the dead. However, there is also a second interpretation: the interpretation of Jonah as the prophet to the nations, who, as a Hebrew, after some reluctance, goes to the non-Hebrew city of Nineveh on God’s instructions to proclaim its doom. However, its population accepts the Hebrew prophet’s sermon of repentance and is thus spared by God. It is precisely in this second interpretation of the prophet Jonah that an interesting discourse arose in late antiquity between Jewish and Christian writings and the Koran. This article aims to analyze selected aspects of the late antique interpretation of the biblical Jonah narrative.