Professor David Ohana studies modern European and Jewish history. His affiliations have included Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Sorbonne, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He is a full professor of History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Ohana earned his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1989. He is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and has been a senior Fellow at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, where he founded and directed the Forum for Mediterranean Cultures.

Since 2000, he has been a Fellow at the Ben-Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism. Ohana’s research areas include the intellectual and cultural history of modern Europe, political philosophy, comparative study of national myths, Mediterranean studies, Zionist ideology, and Israeli identity.
His many books include: Political Theologies in the Holy Land: Israeli Messianism and its Critics (Routledge, 2009), Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Modernism and Zionism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), The Origins of Israeli Mythology (Cambridge, 2014), The Nihilist Order: The Intellectual Roots of Totalitarianism (Sussex Academic Press, 2016), Albert Camus and the Critique of violence (Sussex Academic Press, 2017), Nationalizing Judaism (Lexington, 2017).

Mediterranean Intellectuals in the 20th century: An Egyptian Lighthouse; Taha Hussein, Najib Mahfouz, Edmond Jabes and Jacqueline Kahanoff

The talk surveys a unique group of intellectuals who exemplify what I called elsewhere “Mediterranean Humanism.” Taha Hussein, Najib Mahfouz, Edmond Jabes and Jacqueline Kahanoff were at once the moral and intellectual seismographs of the Mediterranean humanist current; the first two were native muslim Egyptians, the letter, Jewish writers who emigrated to France and Israel (respectively). Still, all were modernists who artistically foresaw the problem of modern Egypt.