Please join us for our upcoming seminar on: "The Migration of Arabic Knowledge to Medieval (Christian and Jewish) Europe 1100-1300" by Prof. Yossef Schwartz (Tel Aviv University)

Monday, December 21, 2020, from 17:30 to 19:00 (Israel time) via zoom.

Please contact Alon Ben Yehuda, the Research Group assistant, to receive the Zoom link: alon.ben-yehuda@mail.huji.ac.il

ABSTRACT

Unlike most of the research done in this group’s framework, my talk will concentrate not on Islamic thought but its different and intertwined reception paths in the medieval Latinized western territories. The migration of Arabic knowledge to the West is crucial in medieval European intellectual institutions’ history and no less in the shape of modern historiographic perspective on Arabic pre-modern philosophy. In my talk, I shall concentrate on the interactions and tensions between different brokers, Jews, and Christians that were active in the process of migration, emphasizing especially the differences between those who still possess direct access to Arabic sources and those who read the same Arabic sources only in (Latin, Hebrew or Vernacular) translation.

Prof. Yossef Schwartz is a Professor of medieval and early modern intellectual history at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, which he directed from 2009 until 2015. He was the head of the School of Philosophy, Linguistics and Science Studies at Tel Aviv University in 2015 - 2020. His Research Interests include Social history of Knowledge; Medieval science (cosmology, psychology, medicine); Medieval Institutions of Knowledge; Translations and Migration of Knowledge; Medieval and Early Modern Christian Hebraism, and Christian Kabbala; Jewish Hebrew reception of Scholastic ideas; Mysticism and Vernacular Theolog. Since 2008 he took part in an ERC project dedicated to the study of the translation of “Latin philosophy into Hebrew” (together with Alexander Fidora and Harvey Hames), an ISF Research Grant dedicated to Christian Hebraism and Christian Cabbala, and a GIF project (together with Andreas Speer and Diana Di Segni) concentrate on the medieval Latin Translation of Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. Within the recent GIF project framework, he organized a series of workshops at IIAS and TAU dedicated to critical editions of scientific texts in translation.