Please join us for our upcoming seminar on: "More Historical than Oracle: Why Did Abbasid-Era Jews Fundamentally Change the Way They Read the Bible?" by Dr. Yonatan Moss (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

Monday, June 21, 2021, from 17:30 to 19:00 (Israel time) via Zoom.

To receive the Zoom link, please subscribe by contacting Alon Ben Yehuda on alon.ben-yehuda@mail.huji.ac.il.

ABSTRACT

Scholarship has long noted the fundamental shifts in the ways in which Jews, both Rabbanite and Karaite, beginning in the early Abbasid era, read the Bible. Radically departing from many of the hermeneutical assumptions they had inherited from late antiquity, which may be characterized as non-contextual and non-historical, Jews in the Muslim world of the 8th-10th centuries warmly embraced contextual and historical approaches to their most sacred texts. This presentation focuses on one, somewhat neglected, aspect of the problem, dealing with the notion of the circumstances of revelation. We will look at the various roles this notion and its correlates played in Muslim, Christian and Jewish hermeneutics, and at the possible connections between them.

Dr. Yonatan Moss is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Author of Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society and Authority in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2016), he works on late ancient and early Medieval Christianity and Judaism and the interactions between them, primarily in the Eastern Mediterranean.