R Ricci
Biographic Data
| ID | 14189 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Ricci |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Ricci |
| SIGNATURE | RICCI R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8055-7746 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Arab and Non-Arab on the Manuscript Page: Thoughts on Annette Damayanti Lienau’s Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference
The article engages with Annette Damayanti Lienau’s Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference. Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures, a book that explores the role of Arabic in novel and suggestive ways. Lienau considers Arabic, long viewed outside the Middle East primarily as a language of devotion and theology, as a counter-imperial language in both African and Southeast Asian contexts. Viewing these so-called peripheries of the “Muslim W…
Interlinear Translation Across the Muslim World: A Comparative Perspective [complete themed section]
Complete themed section
Interlinear Translation Across the Muslim World: A Comparative Perspective
This special issue arises from the international workshop “Interlinear Translation Across the Muslim World: A Comparative Perspective,” held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in November 2024 within the framework of the ERC-funded project Textual Microcosms: A New Approach in Translation Studies. The project examines interlinear translation in the Indonesian–Malay world between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, viewing such texts as key …
Interlinear Texts from Indonesia: Preliminary Thoughts on Their Study
Interlinear translations have been known in Indonesia’s Islamic communities since at least the late 16th century with extant evidence in the form of manuscripts pointing to their ongoing popularity in the following centuries. Such translations encompass important works composed in Arabic and rendered in the languages of the archipelago, and they touch upon key fields of knowledge, among them Islamic law, theology and grammar. But has this textual…
Implicit Comparisons: Visuality and the Interlinear Manuscript Page
A central question for European philology, informed by various agendas and ideologies, concerned comparison and the positing of hierarchies among languages. With this "traditional" question of philology in mind, but hoping to think in less traditional ways, this article asks how comparative understandings of Arabic and local languages of the Indonesian archipelago may have been reflected in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Islamic manuscripts th…
Monsoon Asia: A reader on South and Southeast Asia
Mediating the maulid: Interlinear translations of the Maulid Syaraf al-Anām across the Indonesian-Malay world
lt;div>\n The article explores five Maulid Syaraf al-Anām (‘The birth of the best of mankind’) manuscripts produced in the Indonesian-Malay world. The five manuscripts all include the Arabic text of this well known and highly popular panegyric recited on the anniversary of the Prophet’s birthday as well as on other auspicious occasions, with the Arabic translation into either Malay or Javanese written between the lines. Each manuscript was inscri…
Telling Stories of Seas, Islands, and Ships
This article considers the crossings, modes of mobility, and affiliations that have shaped forms and contexts of storytelling within a small yet culturally resilient diasporic community: the Sri Lankan Malays, whose forefathers were sent from across the Indonesian archipelago to colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka), beginning in the late seventeenth century, as exiles, slaves, and soldiers. Two storytelling contexts set in mid-to late nineteenth-century B…
Prophets, "pegon", and piety; The Javanese "Layang Ambiya
The tales of the prophets are among the most popular textual traditions across the Islamic world and Java proves no exception. Beginning with the first human and first prophet Nabi Adam, these often-vast collections recount the biographies of all those viewed as prophets in Islam, ultimately leading up to the “seal of the prophets”, Muhammad. Many manuscripts of this genre were composed and copied in Javanese, in different periods, locales, and m…
Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon
1 Mataram was the central Javanese dynasty that rose to power in the sixteenth century. It reached its heyday under Sultan Agung (r. 1613-1646), who established hegemony over central and east Java. Although in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Mataram kingdom increasingly lost power and territory to the Dutch East India Company and split gradually into several smaller courts, their rulers were all descended from a single family. O…
Java in Jerusalem: New Directions in the Study of Javanese Literature and Culture
Introduction Although the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University on principle welcomes any interesting topic of research, Javanese literature must have been quite out of the ordinary even for this open-minded Institute. Nevertheless, it accepted the proposal that was submitted by Ronit Ricci under the title “New Directions in the Study of Javanese Literature.” And so it came about that a group of seven Javanists from aroun…
Jawa, Melayu, Malay or otherwise: The shifting nomenclature of the Sri Lankan Malays
The community known today as the Sri Lankan Malays traces its roots to political exiles, convicts, servants and soldiers sent to colonial Ceylon by the Dutch East India Company from the late 17th to the late 18th century and by the British after their takeover of the island in 1796. These ancestors of today’s community came from diverse linguistic, cultural and class backgrounds across the Indonesian archipelago and, to a lesser extent, the Malay…
Reading a History of Writing: Heritage, religion and script change in Java
Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, the particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory, and attachments to community, place, and particular literary cultures. In my essay I explore the history of writing in Java, including the story …
Sites of Asian Interaction: Ideas, Networks and Mobility
A focus on the sites of Asian interaction enables this volume to shed new light on the growing field of diaspora studies. Research on Asia's many diasporas has enriched the older literature on migration to illuminate the links of kinship, affect, trade, and information that connect locations across Asia, and beyond. But where many recent works on particular diasporas have tended to look inwards - at how distinctive diasporic cultures maintained a…
Asian and Islamic crossings: Malay writing in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka
This essay explores how a small diasporic Muslim community in the colonial era – known today as the Sri Lankan Malays – maintained its culture through the preservation of language, the transmission of literary and religious texts, the cultivation of genres and of a script. Beginning in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) used the island of Ceylon as a site of banishment for those c…
The Malay World, Expanded: The world's first Malay newspaper, Colombo, 1869
Sri Lanka is a land of Asian crossings and contacts, epitomised in the history of the country's Malay community. Within that history the year 1869 was especially momentous. This was when the Suez Canal opened, significantly easing the hajj pilgrimage route from Southeast Asia and resulting in many a pilgrim ship docking at Sri Lanka's shores en route to Mecca. On another, no less revolutionary front, 1869 saw the publication in Colombo of the wor…
Perfect wedding, penniless life: Ali and Fatima in a Sri Lankan Malay text
Literary depictions of central figures in Muslim history offer telling glimpses of gender roles and expectations, however ideal. Fatima, the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, and her pious and courageous husband and fourth Caliph Ali are among the most beloved
Thresholds of Interpretation on the Threshold of Change: Paratexts in Late 19th-century Javanese Manuscripts
Gerard Genette’s notion of the paratext as ‘a threshold of interpretation’ is employed in this article to explore a host of paratexts in late nineteenth century Javanese manuscripts from the Pura Pakualaman court library in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Although paratexts were used in earlier years, especially in the form of illuminated opening pages, verse and metrical markers and some (often very brief ) information about authors and scribes, the fina…
The discovery of Javanese writing in a Sri Lankan Malay manuscript
Beyond the boundaries of what is typically considered the Indonesian-Malay world, a small community known today as the Sri Lanka Malays continued to employ the Malay language in writing and speech long after its ancestors left the Indonesian archipelago and Malay peninsula for their new home. Although it is reasonable to assume that the ancestors of the Malays spoke a variety of languages, at least initially, no traces of writing in another Indon…
Citing as a Site: Translation and circulation in Muslim South and Southeast Asia
Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as central to understanding interactions among Muslims across South and Southeast Asia. In this paper I suggest that we consider language and literature as an additional type of network, one that provided a powerful site of contact and exchange facilitated by, and drawing on, citation. I draw on textual sources written in Javanese, Malay, and Tamil between the sixteenth and early twentieth centu…
Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia
Introduction: Jews in Indonesia: perceptions and histories
The Ambiguous Figure of the Jew in Javanese Literature
Despite the almost complete absence of Jews from Java throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Jewish characters figured consistently, and sometimes prominently, in Javanese manuscript literature produced and circulated during this period. In this article I discuss the portrayal of Jewish protagonists in Javanese literature, with special attention paid to their appearance in two 18th-century manuscripts: Samud (MS. LOr. 4001) and Serat Pandhita Ra…
Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia
Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as pivotal to understanding interactions among Muslims in various regions of South and Southeast Asia. What if we thought of language and literature as an additional network, one that crisscrossed these
Conversion to Islam on Java and the Book of One Thousand Questions
If numbers tell a story, the conversion to Islam of the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago can be counted as a great success. It is clear that Islam has taken strong root in the region and has influenced many facets of life - from politics and language to the economy and education - over several centuries, as it continues to do today. The protracted process of the region's large-scale Islamization has given rise to various explanations and int…
The necropolis of Vallerano (Rome, 2nd-3rd century AD): An anthropological perspective on the ancient Romans in the Suburbium
The present study investigates the skeletal remains of individuals who were part of a Roman suburban community, in order to assess lifestyle and living conditions in the town's outskirts during the Roman Imperial age. The existence of the community was linked to the functioning of one of the many villas that surrounded the town of Rome at that time. In order to assess health, several indicators were explored, including mortality, oral pathologies…
Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia
Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as pivotal to understanding interactions among Muslims in various regions of South and Southeast Asia. What if we thought of language and literature as an additional network, one that crisscrossed these
The discovery of Javanese writing in a Sri Lankan Malay manuscript
Beyond the boundaries of what is typically considered the Indonesian-Malay world, a small community known today as the Sri Lanka Malays continued to employ the Malay language in writing and speech long after its ancestors left the Indonesian archipelago and Malay peninsula for their new home. Although it is reasonable to assume that the ancestors of the Malays spoke a variety of languages, at least initially, no traces of writing in another Indon…
Citing as a Site: Translation and circulation in Muslim South and Southeast Asia
Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as central to understanding interactions among Muslims across South and Southeast Asia. In this paper I suggest that we consider language and literature as an additional type of network, one that provided a powerful site of contact and exchange facilitated by, and drawing on, citation. I draw on textual sources written in Javanese, Malay, and Tamil between the sixteenth and early twentieth centu…
Asian and Islamic crossings: Malay writing in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka
This essay explores how a small diasporic Muslim community in the colonial era – known today as the Sri Lankan Malays – maintained its culture through the preservation of language, the transmission of literary and religious texts, the cultivation of genres and of a script. Beginning in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) used the island of Ceylon as a site of banishment for those c…
Reading a History of Writing: Heritage, religion and script change in Java
Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, the particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory, and attachments to community, place, and particular literary cultures. In my essay I explore the history of writing in Java, including the story …
Perfect wedding, penniless life: Ali and Fatima in a Sri Lankan Malay text
Literary depictions of central figures in Muslim history offer telling glimpses of gender roles and expectations, however ideal. Fatima, the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, and her pious and courageous husband and fourth Caliph Ali are among the most beloved
Conversion to Islam on Java and the Book of One Thousand Questions
If numbers tell a story, the conversion to Islam of the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago can be counted as a great success. It is clear that Islam has taken strong root in the region and has influenced many facets of life - from politics and language to the economy and education - over several centuries, as it continues to do today. The protracted process of the region's large-scale Islamization has given rise to various explanations and int…
A Jew on Java, a Model Malay Rabbi and a Tamil Torah Scholar: Representations of Abdullah Ibnu Salam in the Book of One Thousand Questions
In contrast to many regions of the Middle East, where Jewish communities existed at the time of the Prophet and throughout the centuries following his death, the Tamil region of south India and the Indonesian-Malay world lacked such populations. The absence of Jewish communities did not, however, imply a complete unfamiliarity with Jews and Judaism. Rather, their image emerged from a variety of textual sources in lieu of direct encounters. In add…
Telling Stories of Seas, Islands, and Ships
This article considers the crossings, modes of mobility, and affiliations that have shaped forms and contexts of storytelling within a small yet culturally resilient diasporic community: the Sri Lankan Malays, whose forefathers were sent from across the Indonesian archipelago to colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka), beginning in the late seventeenth century, as exiles, slaves, and soldiers. Two storytelling contexts set in mid-to late nineteenth-century B…
Thresholds of Interpretation on the Threshold of Change: Paratexts in Late 19th-century Javanese Manuscripts
Gerard Genette’s notion of the paratext as ‘a threshold of interpretation’ is employed in this article to explore a host of paratexts in late nineteenth century Javanese manuscripts from the Pura Pakualaman court library in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Although paratexts were used in earlier years, especially in the form of illuminated opening pages, verse and metrical markers and some (often very brief ) information about authors and scribes, the fina…
The necropolis of Vallerano (Rome, 2nd-3rd century AD): An anthropological perspective on the ancient Romans in the Suburbium
The present study investigates the skeletal remains of individuals who were part of a Roman suburban community, in order to assess lifestyle and living conditions in the town's outskirts during the Roman Imperial age. The existence of the community was linked to the functioning of one of the many villas that surrounded the town of Rome at that time. In order to assess health, several indicators were explored, including mortality, oral pathologies…
A Jew on Java, a Model Malay Rabbi and a Tamil Torah Scholar: Representations of Abdullah Ibnu Salam in the Book of One Thousand Questions
In contrast to many regions of the Middle East, where Jewish communities existed at the time of the Prophet and throughout the centuries following his death, the Tamil region of south India and the Indonesian-Malay world lacked such populations. The absence of Jewish communities did not, however, imply a complete unfamiliarity with Jews and Judaism. Rather, their image emerged from a variety of textual sources in lieu of direct encounters. In add…
Conversion to Islam on Java and the Book of One Thousand Questions
If numbers tell a story, the conversion to Islam of the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago can be counted as a great success. It is clear that Islam has taken strong root in the region and has influenced many facets of life - from politics and language to the economy and education - over several centuries, as it continues to do today. The protracted process of the region's large-scale Islamization has given rise to various explanations and int…
Introduction: Jews in Indonesia: perceptions and histories
The Ambiguous Figure of the Jew in Javanese Literature
Despite the almost complete absence of Jews from Java throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Jewish characters figured consistently, and sometimes prominently, in Javanese manuscript literature produced and circulated during this period. In this article I discuss the portrayal of Jewish protagonists in Javanese literature, with special attention paid to their appearance in two 18th-century manuscripts: Samud (MS. LOr. 4001) and Serat Pandhita Ra…
Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia
Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as pivotal to understanding interactions among Muslims in various regions of South and Southeast Asia. What if we thought of language and literature as an additional network, one that crisscrossed these
Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia
Thresholds of Interpretation on the Threshold of Change: Paratexts in Late 19th-century Javanese Manuscripts
Gerard Genette’s notion of the paratext as ‘a threshold of interpretation’ is employed in this article to explore a host of paratexts in late nineteenth century Javanese manuscripts from the Pura Pakualaman court library in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Although paratexts were used in earlier years, especially in the form of illuminated opening pages, verse and metrical markers and some (often very brief ) information about authors and scribes, the fina…
The discovery of Javanese writing in a Sri Lankan Malay manuscript
Beyond the boundaries of what is typically considered the Indonesian-Malay world, a small community known today as the Sri Lanka Malays continued to employ the Malay language in writing and speech long after its ancestors left the Indonesian archipelago and Malay peninsula for their new home. Although it is reasonable to assume that the ancestors of the Malays spoke a variety of languages, at least initially, no traces of writing in another Indon…
Citing as a Site: Translation and circulation in Muslim South and Southeast Asia
Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as central to understanding interactions among Muslims across South and Southeast Asia. In this paper I suggest that we consider language and literature as an additional type of network, one that provided a powerful site of contact and exchange facilitated by, and drawing on, citation. I draw on textual sources written in Javanese, Malay, and Tamil between the sixteenth and early twentieth centu…
The Malay World, Expanded: The world's first Malay newspaper, Colombo, 1869
Sri Lanka is a land of Asian crossings and contacts, epitomised in the history of the country's Malay community. Within that history the year 1869 was especially momentous. This was when the Suez Canal opened, significantly easing the hajj pilgrimage route from Southeast Asia and resulting in many a pilgrim ship docking at Sri Lanka's shores en route to Mecca. On another, no less revolutionary front, 1869 saw the publication in Colombo of the wor…
Perfect wedding, penniless life: Ali and Fatima in a Sri Lankan Malay text
Literary depictions of central figures in Muslim history offer telling glimpses of gender roles and expectations, however ideal. Fatima, the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, and her pious and courageous husband and fourth Caliph Ali are among the most beloved
Sites of Asian Interaction: Ideas, Networks and Mobility
A focus on the sites of Asian interaction enables this volume to shed new light on the growing field of diaspora studies. Research on Asia's many diasporas has enriched the older literature on migration to illuminate the links of kinship, affect, trade, and information that connect locations across Asia, and beyond. But where many recent works on particular diasporas have tended to look inwards - at how distinctive diasporic cultures maintained a…
Asian and Islamic crossings: Malay writing in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka
This essay explores how a small diasporic Muslim community in the colonial era – known today as the Sri Lankan Malays – maintained its culture through the preservation of language, the transmission of literary and religious texts, the cultivation of genres and of a script. Beginning in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) used the island of Ceylon as a site of banishment for those c…
Reading a History of Writing: Heritage, religion and script change in Java
Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, the particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory, and attachments to community, place, and particular literary cultures. In my essay I explore the history of writing in Java, including the story …
Jawa, Melayu, Malay or otherwise: The shifting nomenclature of the Sri Lankan Malays
The community known today as the Sri Lankan Malays traces its roots to political exiles, convicts, servants and soldiers sent to colonial Ceylon by the Dutch East India Company from the late 17th to the late 18th century and by the British after their takeover of the island in 1796. These ancestors of today’s community came from diverse linguistic, cultural and class backgrounds across the Indonesian archipelago and, to a lesser extent, the Malay…
Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon
1 Mataram was the central Javanese dynasty that rose to power in the sixteenth century. It reached its heyday under Sultan Agung (r. 1613-1646), who established hegemony over central and east Java. Although in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Mataram kingdom increasingly lost power and territory to the Dutch East India Company and split gradually into several smaller courts, their rulers were all descended from a single family. O…
Java in Jerusalem: New Directions in the Study of Javanese Literature and Culture
Introduction Although the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University on principle welcomes any interesting topic of research, Javanese literature must have been quite out of the ordinary even for this open-minded Institute. Nevertheless, it accepted the proposal that was submitted by Ronit Ricci under the title “New Directions in the Study of Javanese Literature.” And so it came about that a group of seven Javanists from aroun…
Telling Stories of Seas, Islands, and Ships
This article considers the crossings, modes of mobility, and affiliations that have shaped forms and contexts of storytelling within a small yet culturally resilient diasporic community: the Sri Lankan Malays, whose forefathers were sent from across the Indonesian archipelago to colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka), beginning in the late seventeenth century, as exiles, slaves, and soldiers. Two storytelling contexts set in mid-to late nineteenth-century B…
Prophets, "pegon", and piety; The Javanese "Layang Ambiya
The tales of the prophets are among the most popular textual traditions across the Islamic world and Java proves no exception. Beginning with the first human and first prophet Nabi Adam, these often-vast collections recount the biographies of all those viewed as prophets in Islam, ultimately leading up to the “seal of the prophets”, Muhammad. Many manuscripts of this genre were composed and copied in Javanese, in different periods, locales, and m…
Monsoon Asia: A reader on South and Southeast Asia
Mediating the maulid: Interlinear translations of the Maulid Syaraf al-Anām across the Indonesian-Malay world
lt;div>\n The article explores five Maulid Syaraf al-Anām (‘The birth of the best of mankind’) manuscripts produced in the Indonesian-Malay world. The five manuscripts all include the Arabic text of this well known and highly popular panegyric recited on the anniversary of the Prophet’s birthday as well as on other auspicious occasions, with the Arabic translation into either Malay or Javanese written between the lines. Each manuscript was inscri…
Interlinear Translation Across the Muslim World: A Comparative Perspective [complete themed section]
Complete themed section
Interlinear Translation Across the Muslim World: A Comparative Perspective
This special issue arises from the international workshop “Interlinear Translation Across the Muslim World: A Comparative Perspective,” held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in November 2024 within the framework of the ERC-funded project Textual Microcosms: A New Approach in Translation Studies. The project examines interlinear translation in the Indonesian–Malay world between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, viewing such texts as key …
Interlinear Texts from Indonesia: Preliminary Thoughts on Their Study
Interlinear translations have been known in Indonesia’s Islamic communities since at least the late 16th century with extant evidence in the form of manuscripts pointing to their ongoing popularity in the following centuries. Such translations encompass important works composed in Arabic and rendered in the languages of the archipelago, and they touch upon key fields of knowledge, among them Islamic law, theology and grammar. But has this textual…
Asian Studies and History (19 works) · History (18 works) · Art (13 works) · Literature (13 works) · Archaeology (12 works) · History (12 works) · Linguistics (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Malay (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works)