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Paper short abstract

Engaging with Marcus and Myers’s vision of entanglement, the intergenerational Maimonides from Scratch (MfS) workshops in Manchester and Marseille on the meanings of medieval polymath Maimonides, demonstrate how artistic-anthropological work using animation can activate intercommunal imaginaries.

Paper long abstract

Three decades after Marcus and Myers re-theorized the traffic between art and anthropology—that anthropology is critically entangled in art worlds—from our fractured present Maimonides from Scratch (MfS) attempts to harness the function of artistic-anthropological intersections anew as not merely a means to a mode of deeper description but a process with potentiality for intervention into intercommunal polarization. Emerging from a decade of engaged ethnographic fieldwork on Islamo-Jewish or Judeo-Muslim intercommunal relations across urban European contexts, MfS is an experiment in co-creation and being together through animation workshops with primary school students and elderly museum volunteers in Manchester and Marseille. The MfS methodology enables an encounter with the multiple meanings of Maimonides, the medieval polymath, through material engagement with textiles and documents from the multilingual Cairo Genizah, lending deep historical and material context.

MfS reveals the reclamative potentiality of art-anthropology, and its capacity to generate reciprocity in cross-cultural encounter. Rather than representing intercommunal harmony however, the project seeks to (re)activate it, inviting people to inhabit historical moments of intellectual synthesis across religious boundaries, offering tangible evidence that coexistence was and is not inevitable but actively constituted through linguistic and cultural translation. This approach embodies art’s prefigurative potential in community contexts. By treating historical materials alongside and in tandem with aesthetic resources for storytelling both then and now, MfS highlights how critical creative practice can intervene in the affective and epistemological conditions of polarized publics, generating spaces where different communities across generations reimagine alternative relations, political possibilities, and non-standard ontologies.