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Research Group | Israel Institute for Advanced Studies

Research Group

Asymptotic Group Theory

[RG #79] Asymptotic Group Theory

February 15 - August 15, 2000

Organizers:

Avinoam Mann (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Aner Shalev (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

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This research group will explore the following topics:

Infinite groups:
- Branch groups and automata groups, their subgroups, representations, presentations, and subgroup growth
- Zeta functions of nilpotent groups
- Rigid groups
- Redidual properties of the modular group

Finite groups:
- Asymptotic aspects of finite simple groups, and probabilistic aspects in particular
- Generation, and random generation, of finite simple groups
- Algorithms for matrix groups

 

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Guy Stroumsa

FELLOW
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Guy is a professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Hagith Sivan

FELLOW
University of Kansas
Hagith is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Kansas. Her research interests are: Roman history; Late Antiquity; Ancient Judaism; legal history; Bible.
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Andrew Plaks

FELLOW
Princeton University
Andrew is a professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. His research interests are: classical Chinese literature; Chinese narrative theory; comparative literature; early Chinese thought; Japanese literature.
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Robert Lamberton

FELLOW
Washington University, St. Louis
Robert is a professor in the Department of Classics at Washington University, St. Louis. His research interests are: Greek epic and the history of its interpretation; ancient hermeneutics; literary criticism and theory, ancient and modern; ancient education; late antiquity.
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Moshe Halbertal

FELLOW
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Moshe is a professor in the Department of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests are: rabbinical and medieval Jewish thought; political theory and hermeneutics.
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Margalit Finkelberg

FELLOW
Tel Aviv University
Margalit is a professor in the Department of Classics at Tel Aviv University. Her research interests are: Homer and tragedy; poetics ancient and modern; Greek popular morality and religion; Aegen prehistory and linear scripts.

Mechanisms of Canon-Making in Ancient Societies

[RG #78] Mechanisms of Canon-Making in Ancient Societies

August 1999 - January 2000

Organizers:

Margalit Finkelberg (Tel Aviv University)
Guy G. Stroumsa (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

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Our group will examine the mechanisms by which cultural and religious canons were formed, functioned and went through radical transformations in various societies of the ancient world. We hope that a better understanding of these processes, arising from such juxtaposing of diverse cultural models of canonization, has shed a new light upon the fundamental structures of religious and cultural canons adopted in different civilizations.

Odd as it may appear, there seems to have been no single comparative study of canons. This was not what could be expected at the dawn of the historical scholarship two hundred years ago. When Friedrich August Wolf, with his Prolegomena ad Homerum, opened the era of Homeric scholarship in 1795, he used a model which was being developed at the time for the study of the Old Testament. The fact that the two main constituents of the Western Canon, the ancient Israelite canonical text as represented by the Hebrew Bible, and the ancient Greek canonical text as represented by the Homeric poems, were being studied side by side was seen as only too natural at the time. This fruitful collaboration was interrupted, never to be revived again, in the first half of the 19th century, when the “discovery” of Sanskrit, instead of stimulating a pluralistic approach to the widening spectrum of ancient civilizations, gave rise to the idea of an Indo-European cultural unity exclusive to the world of the Old Testament and if the ancient Near East in general. To resume the process at the point where it stopped, and thus to supersede the mutual isolation between civilizations of the ancient world which was artificially created thereby, is one of our objectives.

Similarly, the study of the other canonization processes in the ancient world, and in particular in late antiquity, seems to be in need of fresh approaches. While in the last fifty years, since the discoveries of Qumran and Nag Hammadi, dramatic new insights into the canonization processes of these texts have been provided, relatively little has been done in terms of comparison. Moreover, and perhaps

more importantly, very little attention has been paid to the fact that various canonization processes in late antiquity did not develop independently of one another, but are linked in dialectical relationships. The canonization of the Mishna, for instance, should be seen in parallel to that of the contemporary canonization of the New Testament: both were meant to provide a key to the correct understanding of the Old Testament, which both the Jewish and Christian communities claimed as their own.

The main question which brought about the establishment of the research group was the perceived chasm between the “Greek” (and the Latin) and the “Hebrew” (i.e. the Jewish-Christian) traditions. The first is usually perceived to be more “literary” by nature, while the second would be essentially “religious”. We will attempt to develop a coherent and precise language that will permit us to use the same tools in order to analyse together these rather different traditions.

 

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Miklos Muranyi

FELLOW
Bonn University
Miklos is a professor in the Institute for Oriental Languages at Bonn University. His research interests are: the history of Islam; Qurʾānic exegesis and tradition; history of Islamic law in North Africa and Islamic Spain; manuscript studies and collection of early materials on Mālikī law.
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Nimrod Hurvitz

FELLOW
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Nimrod is a professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. His research interests are: the mutual influence between intellectual trends and social context; role of the Hanbali school of law in early Abbasid society.
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Yohanan Friedmann

FELLOW
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yohanan is a professor in the Department of Arabic and Literature at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Jonathan Brockopp

FELLOW
Bard College
Jonathan is a professor in the Department of Religion at Bard College. His research interests are: early Islamic legal texts; Islamic law of slavery; Islamic ethics; comparative religious law; Egypt and North Africa in the eighth and ninth centuries CE.
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Nurit Tsafrir

FELLOW
Tel Aviv University
Nurit is a professor in the Department of Arabic Language at Tel Aviv University. Her research interests are: the Muslim legal system in its formative period; Muslim schools of law; legal scholars and the state in medieval Islam; Muslim jurisprudence and legal literature.