Gabriele Boccaccinixvin
In this perspective the 2007 Camaldoli meeting has marked a funda
mental step in the life of the Enoch Seminar with the decision by the partici
pants to provide more structured governance and a consistent plan for the
development of the field of Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins
in the years to come. Hanan Eshel (Bar-Ilan University) and Loren
Stuckenbruck (Durham University) have joined the founding director
Gabriele Boccaccini (University of Michigan) as the vice-directors of the
Enoch Seminar. Future meetings are now planned four years in advance un
der the responsibility of a chair (Andrei Orlov in 2009; Matthias Henze in
- ..), and a parallel series of biennial graduate conferences has been suc
cessfully launched (the Enoch Graduate Seminars — Ann Arbor 2006;
Princeton 2008; Budapest 2010; Notre Dame 2012.. .). Far from being a
gathering of Enoch specialists or "believers" in Enochic Judaism, the group
is now expanding its activities to the entire field of Second Temple Judaism
and Christian Origins.
The best piece of evidence of the coming of age of the Enoch Seminar is
the creation of the new Web site (www.enochseminar.org), beautifully de
signed by Pierpaolo Bertalotto (University of Michigan). As a synthesis of our
past accomplishments and future plans, the Web site provides not only de
tailed information about the meetings of the Enoch Seminar and of the
Enoch Graduate Seminar, but also a general picture of the status of studies in
Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins. The "International Scholar
ship" page includes a comprehensive directory of specialists who are cur
rently working in the field, country by country. Secondly, it gives biographical
and bibliographical information on the history of research in the field from
the time of the invention of the press (late fifteenth century) to the present.
Thirdly, it offers a selection, decade by decade, of the most influential books
published in the field, with special emphasis on the latest titles. Finally, it
gives a list of the major works of art (paintings, dramas, operas, novels, mov
ies, and the like) that offer a fictionalized account of characters and events
from the second temple period. All this information is not available anywhere
else, yet this is the historical memory that is the foundation, the rock, on
which alone a solid house can be built. The Web site has effectively opened a
third "space" besides the Enoch Seminar and the Enoch Graduate Seminar —
a virtual space in comparison to that offered by the meetings, yet no less real,
where all specialists and students of the field can meet and share their work
and learn of each other, breaking national and specialization boundaries
without abandoning or betraying those boundaries.
At Camaldoli (and with this volume) we scholars of the period might