The extant sources of the Maimonidean controversies demonstrate that medieval
Jewish intellectual culture was fundamentally sited in actual encounters and interactions.
Such interactions often took place around the practices of writing, conveying,
receiving, and discussing letters, social activities governed by communal norms.
Whether in the…[Read more]

Covering the period from the close of the rabbinic canon to the present day, Classics of the Jewish Tradition will introduce students to the most influential texts that have shaped Jewish culture, in a variety of genres and languages representative of the diversity of Jewish creativity. Through close reading of selected primary sources and a…[Read more]

Levi b. Abraham b. Ḥayim, a popularizer of rationalist philosophy active around 1300 in Occitania, was identified as a transgressor by proponents of a ban on the study of philosophy. The nature of Levi’s transgressive activities and the reasons why he was targeted have remained elusive, though a consensus view suggests that his socioeconomic s…[Read more]

The Jewish communities of Occitania, known by medieval Jews as “Provence,” were unusually involved in the repeated outbreaks of public controversy over the integration of Greco-Islamic philosophy into Jewish intellectual culture. By the time of the early fourteenth-century controversy, Maimonideanism was a dominant cultural movement in the Med…[Read more]