Books by Marc Herman
Under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press
Introduction: Tradition in Nontradition... more Under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press
Introduction: Tradition in Nontraditional Garb
1 Saadia Gaon and the Birth of Rabbanism
2 From Sinai to Baghdad
3 Rewriting the Oral Torah in al-Andalus
4 Maimonides between the Mālikīs and the Almohads
Conclusion: Islamic Worlds
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Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism, 2021
Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism explores the discursive formation of the comm... more Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism explores the discursive formation of the commandments as a generative matrix of Jewish thought and life in the posttalmudic period. Each study sheds light on how medieval Jews crafted the commandments out of theretofore underdetermined material. By systematizing, representing, or interrogating the amorphous category of commandment, medieval Jewish authors across both the Islamic and Christian spheres of influence sought to explain, justify, and characterize Israel’s legal system, divine revelation, the cosmos, and even the divine order. This volume correlates bodies of knowledge—such as jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics, pietism, and kabbalah—that are normally treated in isolation into a single conversation about a shared constitutional concern.
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Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism explores
the discursive formation of the comm... more Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism explores
the discursive formation of the commandments as a generative
matrix of Jewish thought and life in the posttalmudic period. Each
study sheds light on how medieval Jews crafted the
commandments out of theretofore underdetermined material. By
systematizing, representing, or interrogating the amorphous
category of commandment, medieval Jewish authors across both
the Islamic and Christian spheres of inuence sought to explain,
justify, and characterize Israel’s legal system, divine revelation, the
cosmos, and even the divine order. This volume correlates bodies
of knowledge—such as jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics, pietism,
and kabbalah—that are normally treated in isolation into a single
conversation about a shared constitutional concern.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
What is a religion? How do we discern the boundaries between religions, or religious communities?... more What is a religion? How do we discern the boundaries between religions, or religious communities? When does Judaism become Judaism, Christianity become Christianity, Islam become Islam? Scholars have increasingly called into question the standard narratives created by the various orthodoxies, narratives of steadfastness and consistency, of long and courageous maintenance of true doctrine and right practice over the centuries, in the face of opposition (and at times persecution) at the hands of infidels or heretics.
The 11 chapters in this book, Geneses: A Comparative Study of the Historiographies of the Rise of Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism and Islam, written by an international group of specialists the languages, religions, laws and cultures of early Judaism, Christianity and Islam, tackle these questions through a comparative study of these narratives: their formation over time, and their use today. They explore three key aspects of the field: (1) the construction (and scholarly deconstruction) of the narratives of triumph (and defeat) of religions, (2) how legal imperatives are constructed from religious narratives and sacred texts, and (3) contemporary ramifications of these issues. In doing so, they tap into the significant body of research over the last 30 years, which has shown the fluidity and malleability of these religious traditions in relation to each other and to more traditional "pagan" and Zoroastrian religions and philosophical traditions.
This book represents an important contribution to, and a valuable resource for, the burgeoning field of comparative history of the Abrahamic religions.
Table of Contents
Introduction (John Tolan)
I. Narratives of Triumph and defeat
The Contours of Abrahamic Identity: A Zoroastrian Perspective (Yishai Kiel)
The Twilight of the Ancient Gods (Danuta Shanzer)
Simon the God: Imagining the Other in Second-Century Christianity (Duncan MacRae)
Contested Ground in Gaza: Hagiography and the Narrative of Triumphalist Christianity (Claudia Rapp)
Between Jerome and Augustine of Hippo: Some Intellectual Preoccupations of Late Antiquity (Mohamed-Arbi Nsiri)
II. Forging legal paradigms
What is ‘Islamic’ about Geonic Depictions of the Oral Torah? (Marc Herman)
Reevaluating the Role of the Epigones (tabiʿun) in the Formation of Islamic Ritual and Jurisprudence (Mohammed Hocine Benkheira)
Recording Debts in Sufyanid Fusṭāṭ: A Re-examination of the Procedures and Calendar in Use in the 1st/7th century (Naïm Vanthieghem)
Marriage and Sexual Ethics: Divergence and Change in Classical Islamic Legal Texts (Karen Moukheiber)
III. Contemporary Echoes
Teaching Early Islam: The Gap Between School and the Internet in British Schooling (Philip Wood)
The Shahada and the Creation of an Islamic Identity (Suleiman A. Mourad)
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Theses by Marc Herman
This study examines the jurisprudential writings of medieval Rabbanites, Jews in the Islamic worl... more This study examines the jurisprudential writings of medieval Rabbanites, Jews in the Islamic world who saw themselves as heirs to the talmudic tradition. Rabbanite Jews were the first to author systematic accounts of talmudic law, which they attempted to transform from an amorphous, dialectical, and discursive corpus into a structured, elegant, and logical system. In so doing, they sought to impose a coherent structure on their legal traditions that would be compatible with larger theological, philosophical, and epistemological ideas. By subjecting Rabbanite legal theory to diachronic and synchronic analysis, this dissertation demonstrates that Rabbanites were involved in a multilayered conversation that engaged their talmudic past, Rabbanite and non-Rabbanite coreligionists, and elements of the Islamic intellectual tradition that were most helpful for the explanation and reconsideration of their own tradition. While Rabbanite legal theory drew heavily on talmudic ideas, it was, at its core, profoundly contemporary, spurred by both Qaraite and Islamic legal theory, among many other factors. This study concentrates on Rabbanite thinking about two, frequently intertwined, topics: the nature and scope of extra-scriptural traditions, known as Oral Torah, and the methodology to be used in enumerating the 613 commandments, which, talmudic legend claims, were given to Moses at Sinai. Acknowledging earlier scholarship on these topics, this study presents a more holistic picture of Rabbanite legal theory. Particular attention is paid to the Judeo-Arabic writings of Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), the Rabbanite author who appears to have been most explicitly concerned with problems of legal theory. Other central figures include Saʿadya ben Joseph Gaon (882-942), Daniel ben Saʿadya ha-Bavli (fl. early thirteenth c.), and Abraham ben Moses Maimonides (1186-1237).
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Peer-reviewed journals by Marc Herman
Diné Israel, 2024
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Intellectual History of the Islamicate World
Send DM for a copy.
Sarah Stroumsa’s 2009 Maimonides in his World spurred much reconsideration... more Send DM for a copy.
Sarah Stroumsa’s 2009 Maimonides in his World spurred much reconsideration of Almohad influence on medieval Jewish thought. Many now accept that Almohad ideology was at least one crucible in which Moses Maimonides’s thought was forged. This paper broadens exploration of Almohad influences to include Maimonides’s understudied contemporary Joseph ben Judah Ibn ʿAqnīn. It focuses on the jurisprudential theories propounded by these two thinkers in order to evaluate the extent to which their views can be considered distinctively Almohad. Assessment of medieval Jewish legal theory in light of earlier Andalusian and developing Almohad thought allows for a fine-grained level of analysis, pinpointing when Jews endorsed Almohad ideas and when they ratified claims of other schools of Islamic law. In the end, at least on questions of jurisprudence, Maimonides and Ibn ʿAqnīn must be understood within several overlapping and mutually reinforcing traditions, namely, Andalusian Rabbanism, reformed Mālikism, and early Almohadism.
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Association for Jewish Studies Review, 2020
Among Maimonides’s many statements about extrascriptural laws in rabbinic literature, none has at... more Among Maimonides’s many statements about extrascriptural laws in rabbinic literature, none has attracted as much attention as principle 2 in his Book of the Commandments. Modern scholars have largely understood this text to claim that very few of the laws found in rabbinic literature are Sinaitic in origin and of biblical status. Yet, until the twentieth century, principle 2 was primarily read as distinguishing between revealed laws that constitute enumerated commandments and revealed laws that do not. In fact, neither reading is consistent with other Maimonidean statements. By contextualizing principle 2 within the Book of the Commandments, this essay reconsiders Maimonides’s enumeration of the commandments and argues that many of the problems that principle 2 was designed to address, and that it also generated, resulted from the incongruity of his project of enumerating precisely 613 commandments alongside his understanding of revelation as a corpus that included not only the Written Torah but innumerable extrascriptural traditions as well. An appendix evaluates pertinent aspects of the most recent monograph dedicated to Maimonides’s scriptural hermeneutics.
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Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2019
The survival of Maimonides’s personal copy of Commentary on the Mishnah, an early work that the a... more The survival of Maimonides’s personal copy of Commentary on the Mishnah, an early work that the author revised throughout his life, provides an unparalleled window into the ways that Maimonides (1138–1204) continually reconsidered legal and conceptual questions. This manuscript covers five of the six orders of the Mishnah and contains countless corrections and emendations, the vast majority in the author’s own hand. This article argues that Maimonides’s intense interest in solving problems related to the enumeration of the commandments, which he addresses at length in Book of the Commandments and, to a lesser extent, Mishneh Torah, led him to make a number of emendations to his Commentary and to rethink other aspects of this work. That is, when writing Book of the Commandments and Mishneh Torah in the decade after completing his Commentary, Maimonides tackled, and sometimes even concocted, questions that he had no reason to consider in the latter work. This study traces two ways that Maimonides’s later works diverges from his earlier in the meaning of Hebrew and Arabic technical terms and in increased attention to scripture in determing Jewish law, revealing a great medieval mind “in perpetual motion.”
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Jewish Quarterly Review, 2018
Building on medieval claims, modern scholars have long asserted that Saadia ben Joseph Gaon depic... more Building on medieval claims, modern scholars have long asserted that Saadia ben Joseph Gaon depicted the Oral Torah and extra-biblical institutions as rooted in divine authority primarily, if not exclusively, in order to parry Karaite claims. This essay argues that focus on Karaism obscures a cross-cultural factor that helped shape Saadia’s claims, namely, that Muslim jurists prior to and contemporaneous with Saadia likewise jettisoned non-prophetic elements of religious law and attempted to root Islamic law solely in prophetic dictates. This article traces Saadia’s emphasis on prophetic authority in his claims about the scope of revelation, his depiction of the role of the rabbis, and his portrayal of extra-biblical institutions. It underscores that contemporary Islamic depictions of religious law were decisive in Saadia’s presentations of the sources of Jewish law Full text at http://muse.jhu.edu/article/703673.
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Jewish History, 2017
Maimonides’s readers have long recognized that his presentation of the Oral Torah differed marked... more Maimonides’s readers have long recognized that his presentation of the Oral Torah differed markedly from that of the Baghdadi geonim, particularly Sa‘adya Gaon. Maimonides did not cite any precedent for his disagreements with the geonim. Recent studies, however, have called attention to Andalusian sources that prefigure and parallel Maimonidean claims, suggesting that his views, at least in part, drew on earlier Andalusian thought. This article argues that a uniquely Andalusian understanding of the talmudic adage “A sage is superior to a prophet,” first found in the writings of Isaac Ibn Ghiyāth, demonstrates that Andalusian Rabbanite culture had long approached the Oral Torah differently than did the geonim of Baghdad. After identifying a number of Andalusian antecedents for Maimonides’s approach to the Oral Torah, this article explores possible motives for the divergent pictures of revelation put forward by Rabbanites in Baghdad and Andalusia. It is suggested that the impact of Andalusian Maliki jurists helps explain the divergent positions of Baghdadi and Andalusian Rabbanites.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10835-017-9278-9
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Generally, in the Jewish tradition, a mitzvah is understood to be an obligation imposed upon, and... more Generally, in the Jewish tradition, a mitzvah is understood to be an obligation imposed upon, and carried out by, individuals. But some mitzvot operate differently. These mitzvot are not individual obligations; there is no one person responsible for carrying them out, and no one person can fulfill them. Instead, the community bears the burden of these responsibilities. These communal obligations are distinct from individual obligations to serve the community (e.g., paying taxes). They are also distinct from individual obligations that, when fulfilled, contribute to developing a certain kind of community. Instead, in these cases, Jewish legal authorities declare that the obligations themselves are communal, calling them Ḥovot ha-Tzibbur (" Obligations of the Community ") or Mitzvot ha-Mutalot 'al ha-Tzibbur (" Commandments that Devolve on the Community "). This article names this category, identifies the relevant classical sources, discusses the central conundrum of the operationalization of communal obligations (i.e., who fulfills the obligation in practice?), and then—to promote the idea that communal obligations may serve as a resource for imagining Jewish community—distinguishes three modes in which these mitzvot function. An appendix presents the full dataset of over fifty communal mitzvot.
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Other papers by Marc Herman
Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah, 2021
The adoption and adaptation of Maimonidean ideas by a staggering array of Jewish thinkers, especi... more The adoption and adaptation of Maimonidean ideas by a staggering array of Jewish thinkers, especially those who opposed his philosophical and legal positions, testifies to Maimonides’s success in reframing Jewish thought. This essay focuses on an exchange between Daniel ben Saadia ha-Bavli (fl. early thirteenth century) and Abraham Maimonides (1186–1237), which occurred in the shadow of twelfth-century institutional opposition to Maimonides (1138–1204), a period in which Maimonides’s reputation began to take shape. Despite the staunch opposition of Daniel’s teacher, Samuel ben ʿElī Ibn al-Dastūr (d. 1194/1197), to Maimonides, as well as Daniel’s own disagreements with Maimonidean theology, Daniel assimilated many Maimonidean legal doctrines, integrating them into his jurisprudential thought. Their exchange shows that both Abraham and Daniel, to different degrees, evaluated Maimonides’s writings with a certain degree of distance, absent much of the rancor of earlier and later Maimonidean controversies. Daniel’s critical engagement with Maimonides underscores that even those educated in the heart of the opposition to the Great Eagle derived much from his writings. Much like those who rejected Maimonidean philosophy, later talmudists who spurned aspects of Maimonides’s halakhah benefited profoundly from his efforts at categorization, organization, and systematization.
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Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah, 2021
This chapter provides a general overview of approaches to the commandments in medieval Judaism, p... more This chapter provides a general overview of approaches to the commandments in medieval Judaism, particularly among Jews who embraced the authority of the ancient rabbis. It focuses on the intertwined development of two discourses: commandment enumeration and commandment rationalization. And it highlights the decisive roles played by Saadia Gaon and Maimonides in framing these two subjects, charting these topics from the intellectually fertile period of the tenth century, at the height of Judaeo-Islamic acculturation, to the wave of kabbalistic creativity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This chapter proposes that the commandments—whether enumerated, contemplated, rendered symbolic, or embodied—functioned as vessels into which medieval Jewish thinkers of all stripes poured a variety of competing and contradictory ideas. However ramified, multiple, and internally debated, the chapter theorizes medieval treatments of the commandments as a single generative matrix of Jewish thought and life in the posttalmudic period.
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Beit Aharon V’Israel בית אהרן וישראל, 2021
הפרסום של קטע שזיהיתי עם ספר הגלוי לפני שנה וחצי, המסתיים בעיסוק בניתוח לוגי של סתירות במקרא ושמו... more הפרסום של קטע שזיהיתי עם ספר הגלוי לפני שנה וחצי, המסתיים בעיסוק בניתוח לוגי של סתירות במקרא ושמונה אופנים כיצד ליישב אותן, הביא את מארק הרמן לזהות את המשכו המסיים של הקטע - המצוטט בספרו של יהודה אבן בלעם. שני גילויים נוספים, מחיבור פולמוסי של תלמיד רס"ג ומפירוש למקרא של רבי אברהם בן שלמה התימני, משלימים את הזיהוי, ומביאים לחלקו הראשון של המאמר - מהדורה מלאה של דברי רס"ג בספר הגלוי, ההופכים אותו ככל הנראה ללוגיקן היהודי הראשון.
בחלק השני מוהדרים לראשונה שני קטעי גניזה נוספים מספר הגלוי, המשלימים חוסרים נוספים לכל אורכו, ובהם עיסוק, בין היתר, ב"מגמת" יהודה, בנו של ראש הגולה.
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Qoveṣ Bet Aharon ve-Yisraʾel , 2021
This brief note identifies a new fragment of Saadia's Sefer ha-Galuy, preserved in the writings o... more This brief note identifies a new fragment of Saadia's Sefer ha-Galuy, preserved in the writings of Judah Ibn Balʿam.
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Frankel Institute Annual, 2019
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11879367.2019.006
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Geneses: A Comparative Study of the Historiographies of the Rise of Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and Islam, 2019
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Reviews (selected) by Marc Herman
Tradition, 2025
Review of Maimonides and the Cairo Genizah [in Hebrew], edited by Mordechai Akiva Friedman and Al... more Review of Maimonides and the Cairo Genizah [in Hebrew], edited by Mordechai Akiva Friedman and Al Kanfei Nesharim: Mehkarim be-sifrut ha-hilkhatit shel ha-Rambam by Aaron Adler
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Books by Marc Herman
Introduction: Tradition in Nontraditional Garb
1 Saadia Gaon and the Birth of Rabbanism
2 From Sinai to Baghdad
3 Rewriting the Oral Torah in al-Andalus
4 Maimonides between the Mālikīs and the Almohads
Conclusion: Islamic Worlds
the discursive formation of the commandments as a generative
matrix of Jewish thought and life in the posttalmudic period. Each
study sheds light on how medieval Jews crafted the
commandments out of theretofore underdetermined material. By
systematizing, representing, or interrogating the amorphous
category of commandment, medieval Jewish authors across both
the Islamic and Christian spheres of inuence sought to explain,
justify, and characterize Israel’s legal system, divine revelation, the
cosmos, and even the divine order. This volume correlates bodies
of knowledge—such as jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics, pietism,
and kabbalah—that are normally treated in isolation into a single
conversation about a shared constitutional concern.
The 11 chapters in this book, Geneses: A Comparative Study of the Historiographies of the Rise of Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism and Islam, written by an international group of specialists the languages, religions, laws and cultures of early Judaism, Christianity and Islam, tackle these questions through a comparative study of these narratives: their formation over time, and their use today. They explore three key aspects of the field: (1) the construction (and scholarly deconstruction) of the narratives of triumph (and defeat) of religions, (2) how legal imperatives are constructed from religious narratives and sacred texts, and (3) contemporary ramifications of these issues. In doing so, they tap into the significant body of research over the last 30 years, which has shown the fluidity and malleability of these religious traditions in relation to each other and to more traditional "pagan" and Zoroastrian religions and philosophical traditions.
This book represents an important contribution to, and a valuable resource for, the burgeoning field of comparative history of the Abrahamic religions.
Table of Contents
Introduction (John Tolan)
I. Narratives of Triumph and defeat
The Contours of Abrahamic Identity: A Zoroastrian Perspective (Yishai Kiel)
The Twilight of the Ancient Gods (Danuta Shanzer)
Simon the God: Imagining the Other in Second-Century Christianity (Duncan MacRae)
Contested Ground in Gaza: Hagiography and the Narrative of Triumphalist Christianity (Claudia Rapp)
Between Jerome and Augustine of Hippo: Some Intellectual Preoccupations of Late Antiquity (Mohamed-Arbi Nsiri)
II. Forging legal paradigms
What is ‘Islamic’ about Geonic Depictions of the Oral Torah? (Marc Herman)
Reevaluating the Role of the Epigones (tabiʿun) in the Formation of Islamic Ritual and Jurisprudence (Mohammed Hocine Benkheira)
Recording Debts in Sufyanid Fusṭāṭ: A Re-examination of the Procedures and Calendar in Use in the 1st/7th century (Naïm Vanthieghem)
Marriage and Sexual Ethics: Divergence and Change in Classical Islamic Legal Texts (Karen Moukheiber)
III. Contemporary Echoes
Teaching Early Islam: The Gap Between School and the Internet in British Schooling (Philip Wood)
The Shahada and the Creation of an Islamic Identity (Suleiman A. Mourad)
Theses by Marc Herman
Peer-reviewed journals by Marc Herman
Sarah Stroumsa’s 2009 Maimonides in his World spurred much reconsideration of Almohad influence on medieval Jewish thought. Many now accept that Almohad ideology was at least one crucible in which Moses Maimonides’s thought was forged. This paper broadens exploration of Almohad influences to include Maimonides’s understudied contemporary Joseph ben Judah Ibn ʿAqnīn. It focuses on the jurisprudential theories propounded by these two thinkers in order to evaluate the extent to which their views can be considered distinctively Almohad. Assessment of medieval Jewish legal theory in light of earlier Andalusian and developing Almohad thought allows for a fine-grained level of analysis, pinpointing when Jews endorsed Almohad ideas and when they ratified claims of other schools of Islamic law. In the end, at least on questions of jurisprudence, Maimonides and Ibn ʿAqnīn must be understood within several overlapping and mutually reinforcing traditions, namely, Andalusian Rabbanism, reformed Mālikism, and early Almohadism.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10835-017-9278-9
Other papers by Marc Herman
בחלק השני מוהדרים לראשונה שני קטעי גניזה נוספים מספר הגלוי, המשלימים חוסרים נוספים לכל אורכו, ובהם עיסוק, בין היתר, ב"מגמת" יהודה, בנו של ראש הגולה.
Reviews (selected) by Marc Herman
Introduction: Tradition in Nontraditional Garb
1 Saadia Gaon and the Birth of Rabbanism
2 From Sinai to Baghdad
3 Rewriting the Oral Torah in al-Andalus
4 Maimonides between the Mālikīs and the Almohads
Conclusion: Islamic Worlds
the discursive formation of the commandments as a generative
matrix of Jewish thought and life in the posttalmudic period. Each
study sheds light on how medieval Jews crafted the
commandments out of theretofore underdetermined material. By
systematizing, representing, or interrogating the amorphous
category of commandment, medieval Jewish authors across both
the Islamic and Christian spheres of inuence sought to explain,
justify, and characterize Israel’s legal system, divine revelation, the
cosmos, and even the divine order. This volume correlates bodies
of knowledge—such as jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics, pietism,
and kabbalah—that are normally treated in isolation into a single
conversation about a shared constitutional concern.
The 11 chapters in this book, Geneses: A Comparative Study of the Historiographies of the Rise of Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism and Islam, written by an international group of specialists the languages, religions, laws and cultures of early Judaism, Christianity and Islam, tackle these questions through a comparative study of these narratives: their formation over time, and their use today. They explore three key aspects of the field: (1) the construction (and scholarly deconstruction) of the narratives of triumph (and defeat) of religions, (2) how legal imperatives are constructed from religious narratives and sacred texts, and (3) contemporary ramifications of these issues. In doing so, they tap into the significant body of research over the last 30 years, which has shown the fluidity and malleability of these religious traditions in relation to each other and to more traditional "pagan" and Zoroastrian religions and philosophical traditions.
This book represents an important contribution to, and a valuable resource for, the burgeoning field of comparative history of the Abrahamic religions.
Table of Contents
Introduction (John Tolan)
I. Narratives of Triumph and defeat
The Contours of Abrahamic Identity: A Zoroastrian Perspective (Yishai Kiel)
The Twilight of the Ancient Gods (Danuta Shanzer)
Simon the God: Imagining the Other in Second-Century Christianity (Duncan MacRae)
Contested Ground in Gaza: Hagiography and the Narrative of Triumphalist Christianity (Claudia Rapp)
Between Jerome and Augustine of Hippo: Some Intellectual Preoccupations of Late Antiquity (Mohamed-Arbi Nsiri)
II. Forging legal paradigms
What is ‘Islamic’ about Geonic Depictions of the Oral Torah? (Marc Herman)
Reevaluating the Role of the Epigones (tabiʿun) in the Formation of Islamic Ritual and Jurisprudence (Mohammed Hocine Benkheira)
Recording Debts in Sufyanid Fusṭāṭ: A Re-examination of the Procedures and Calendar in Use in the 1st/7th century (Naïm Vanthieghem)
Marriage and Sexual Ethics: Divergence and Change in Classical Islamic Legal Texts (Karen Moukheiber)
III. Contemporary Echoes
Teaching Early Islam: The Gap Between School and the Internet in British Schooling (Philip Wood)
The Shahada and the Creation of an Islamic Identity (Suleiman A. Mourad)
Sarah Stroumsa’s 2009 Maimonides in his World spurred much reconsideration of Almohad influence on medieval Jewish thought. Many now accept that Almohad ideology was at least one crucible in which Moses Maimonides’s thought was forged. This paper broadens exploration of Almohad influences to include Maimonides’s understudied contemporary Joseph ben Judah Ibn ʿAqnīn. It focuses on the jurisprudential theories propounded by these two thinkers in order to evaluate the extent to which their views can be considered distinctively Almohad. Assessment of medieval Jewish legal theory in light of earlier Andalusian and developing Almohad thought allows for a fine-grained level of analysis, pinpointing when Jews endorsed Almohad ideas and when they ratified claims of other schools of Islamic law. In the end, at least on questions of jurisprudence, Maimonides and Ibn ʿAqnīn must be understood within several overlapping and mutually reinforcing traditions, namely, Andalusian Rabbanism, reformed Mālikism, and early Almohadism.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10835-017-9278-9
בחלק השני מוהדרים לראשונה שני קטעי גניזה נוספים מספר הגלוי, המשלימים חוסרים נוספים לכל אורכו, ובהם עיסוק, בין היתר, ב"מגמת" יהודה, בנו של ראש הגולה.
For a video, see here: http://youtu.be/mOiLlZed1zw
https://seforimchatter.com/2023/06/21/spanish-jewry-through-the-ages-episode-4-with-prof-marc-herman-the-great-talmudic-and-halachic-scholars-of-al-andalus-muslim-spain/
May 10: Entering the Geonic World
May 17: Saadia Gaon: Traditionalist and Revolutionary
May 24: Sherira Gaon and Hayya Gaon: Father and Son Shape the Talmud
May 31: Samuel ben Hofni Gaon: Looking Outward
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGQrWlI7O--46oLSCQEOyIvUAHcKPkmM9
https://www.thetorah.com/article/is-logic-enough-to-prohibit-father-daughter-incest
https://traditiononline.org/putting-the-seder-in-order/
Despite the centrality of the Oral Torah in rabbinic literature, the Rabbis of the Talmudic period offered only scattered methodological comments about the nature of their scriptural interpretation and extra-scriptural traditions. Medieval Talmudists in the Islamic world took up the task of systematizing and theorizing rabbinic Judaism from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. They did so both to lend coherence to their religious law and to respond to criticisms of rabbinic Judaism leveled by both Jews and non-Jews.
https://soundcloud.com/user-780716487/marc-herman-andalusian-independence-from-geonic-authority-in-its-maliki-and-almohad-contexts
Medieval Jews in the Islamic world were the first to pen systematic accounts of revelation and the rabbinic tradition. This lecture explores two competing accounts of Sinaitic revelation authored by two of the outstanding jurists and philosophers of the Jewish middle ages, Seʿadya ben Joseph Gaon and Moses Maimonides. While both thinkers implicitly asserted the timelessness of their ideas, this lecture situates these two narratives of revelation and presentations of the role of the talmudic rabbis within contemporaneous developments and trends in the Islamic legal tradition. Though cloaked in rabbinic garb, these dueling attempts to theorize revelation were both innovative and profoundly contemporary.
From TheTorah.com