Fellowship Report

During my one-year fellowship (September 2025–2026) at the Centre for Advanced Studies (MagEIA), I completed my article on the legal attitudes of Zoroastrian and Syriac Christian religious authorities towards magic in late antique Iran. The article is an extension of a section of my dissertation, in which I examined how Jewish, Armenian and Syriac religious specialists positioned themselves against illicit activities and rituals. The MagEIA colloquium gave me the opportunity to discuss, together with the other fellows, the Zoroastrian Middle Persian texts that have long been neglected in the study of magic in Iran. The careful new translations of the relevant Middle Persian passages, and the analysis that came out of them, are among the most valuable results of those sessions.

In the second half of the fellowship, I turned to Judeo-Persian medical and magical manuscripts held at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. These sources date from the early modern period, yet they draw on rabbinic tradition alongside the Islamic and Iranian culture surrounding Persian-speaking Jewish communities in greater Iran. To understand that wider context better, I organised a workshop on Magic in the Islamicate and Persianate Worlds in June 2026, generously funded by MagEIA, which brought together scholars working on very different aspects of magic in Arabic and Persian sources.

MagEIA also funded my participation in an International conference on "Jewish Literature under Muslim Rule" in April 2026, which led to a collaboration with an ERC project on the Jewish communities of Iran that began directly after the end of my fellowship in Würzburg.

I would like to thank Prof. Daniel Kölligan warmly for hosting me and for his guidance at this early stage of my academic career. I am equally grateful to the core MagEIA team, in particular Prof. Daniel Schwemer, Dr. Saverio Dalpedri and Anne Neuster, for their support throughout my stay.