COURSES
Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages
This course will study the major Jewish philosophers and schools of thought from the tenth through the fifteenth century. Emphasis will be on dominant themes such as cosmology, prophecy, providence, the nature of man, and immortality of the soul, but literary form and cultural context will also be considered. Philosophers will be studied in relation to their sources and parallel developments in Islamic and Christian philosophy.

Readings in Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed
A careful study of select passages in Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed focusing on the method of the work and its major philosophical-theological themes, including divine attributes, creation vs. eternity, prophecy, the problem of evil and divine providence, law and ethics, the final aim of human existence. There will be an extra session for students with Arabic and/or Hebrew.

Medieval Commentaries on Ecclesiastes
This course will introduce medieval Jewish biblical exegesis by focusing on a single case study: the history of commentaries on Ecclesiastes (Qohelet). Following a brief survey of modern scholarship on Ecclesiastes we will proceed chronologically from Rabbinic Midrash and Targum in late antiquity to the work of Karaites and Rabbanites, Pashtanim and Darshanim, Philosophers and Kabbalists. Commentators studied will include Yefet b. 'Eli and Salmon b. Yeruhim, Isaac Ibn Ghiyath and Abraham Ibn Ezra, Rashi, Rashbam and Joseph Qara, Maimonides and Samuel Ibn Tibbon, Nahmanides and Isaac Ibn Latif.

Abraham in History, Literature, and Thought (with Hans-Josef Klauck)
This course is the third in a three-course sequence introducing M.A. students to the three academic committees of the Divinity School. The course will use an extended case study - the figure of Abraham in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - to explore issues and methods in the historical study of religion. The three main concerns of the course are the following: (1) an examination of the Biblical text itself in light of modern critical scholarship; (2) a history of the text's reception by the "Abrahamic" religions; and (3) reflection upon the historical and exegetical approaches to both text and tradition.

The Jewish Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages
The course examines the methods of exegesis and hermeneutical theories developed by the Jews from the ninth to the fifteenth century. The various approaches - from the early achievements of Saadia Gaon, to the laconic literalism of Abraham Ibn Ezra, to the exegetical essays by Isaac Abarbanel - will be studied in relation to concurrent trends in Islam and Christianity. The use of Bible in sermons, poetry, polemics, philosophy, and Kabbalah will be considered as well.

The Jews in Medieval Spain
The course will study the Jewish community in Spain from the Muslim conquest in 711 to the expulsion in 1492. The focus will be on literary and intellectual developments, such as poetry, exegesis, law, philosophy and mysticism, and on the complex relation of the Jews to Iberian Islam and Christianity.

Interactions between Jewish Philosophy and Literature in the Middle Ages
Any study of Jewish philosophy that focuses on a small collection of systematic summas tells only half the story. In this seminar the emphasis will be shifted from canonical theologies to lesser-known works of literature. Each class will examine the way a different genre was used to defend philosophy and teach it to the community at large. Emphasis will be on literary form and style, rhetoric, methods of teaching and argumentation, all in relation to questions about reception and dissemination, progress and creativity, science and religion.

Jewish Heretics and Apostates in the Middle Ages
This course will present an alternative introduction to medieval Jewish history by focusing on Jewish heretics and apostates: converts to Christianity and Islam, freethinkers and philosophers, mystics and messiahs, critics of the Bible and rabbinic literature. It will explore the diversity of medieval Jewish culture by examining polemical literature and the way that individuals, sects, and religious minorities defined themselves in relation to their opponents.

Soul, Intellect, and Immortality in Medieval Jewish Thought
Beginning in the ninth century, the study of the soul, spirit and intellect - with their various faculties and functions - became a central theme in Jewish thought. Borrowing from and responding to philosophical and medical sources, Jews developed new and original ideas about the soul with strongly noetic eschatologies. The purpose of this course is to trace the development of these theories from the early middle ages through the fifteenth century. Emphasis will be on the different psychologies, the interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish sources, and the resulting tension - between classical Jewish ideas about communal redemption and philosophical doctrines of individual salvation.

Science and Scripture: Jewish Philosophical Exegesis in the Middle Ages
In medieval Europe, Jewish exegetes developed a four-fold approach to Scripture, designated by the acronym PaRDeS: Peshat (the literal approach), Remez (the philosophical), Derash (the Rabbinic-homiletical), and Sod (the mystical-Kabbalistic). The subject of this course is the second sense - the philosophical-scientific method of exegesis. The goal is to examine the way that medieval Jewish philosophers interpreted and reinterpreted key and problematic biblical texts in light of contemporary philosophical and scientific opinions. Turning the standard approach to the history of philosophy on its head, biblical texts - rather than systematic philosophical summas - will provide the framework for philosophical, theological, and scientific discussion.

A Medieval Menagerie: Animal Spirituality in the Middle Ages
In contemporary philosophy, ethics, and literature, a subject attracting more and more attention is animals - human animals, non-human animals, and the complex relation between these paradigmatic others. The aim of this course is to consider many of the same problems and questions raised in modern discourse from the perspective of ancient and medieval sources. Drawing from a diverse corpus of texts - Aristotelian and Neoplatonic, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic - the course will explore the richness of the medieval traditions of animal symbolism, and the complexity of medieval human beings' understanding of themselves in relationship to their - far more familiar and immanently present - confreres in the world of nature.

Medieval Jewish Thought: Philosophy, Theology, Sufism, Kabbalah
An introduction to the major trends of medieval Jewish thought from the ninth through the fifteenth century. The focus will be on central themes - such as divine attributes, cosmology, prophecy, the existence of evil, providence, the nature of human existence, the soul and the fate of the soul - but literary form, cultural context, and ritual praxis will also be considered. Thinkers will be studied in relation to their sources and parallel developments in Christianity and Islam.

Readings in Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089-1164), Twelfth-Century Renaissance Man
Close readings of select texts from the diverse corpus of Abraham Ibn Ezra - medieval poet, linguist, biblical exegete, translator, neoplatonic philosopher, mathematician, and astrologer. The emphasis will be on his biblical commentaries, but the commentaries will be read together with his philosophical, linguistic, belletristic, and astrological writings. Additionally, the student will become acquainted with the growing scholarship on Ibn Ezra's work and its influence and the history of scholarship.

The Buddha in Barcelona (with Matthew Kapstein)
During the first millenium the Indian narrative of the Buddha's renunciation and enlightenment, under the title Barlaam and Joasaph, was translated and transmitted throughout the Persian world, and thence to Byzantines and Arabs, Armenians and Georgians, and further West, reaching Iceland in about 1200. (It is the thirteenth-century Hebrew version from Spain that suggests the title for the seminar.) In the course of its varied transmissions, in Eastern and Western Christianity, Islam and Judaism, it was sometimes subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) transformed and reinterpreted. In fact, through translation and adaptation, the Buddha experienced several unusual conversions and transmigrations: from Christian saint and Jewish proselyte to Neoplatonic philosopher. In its history and variations, Barlaam and Joasaph provides an exceptional point of departure for reflection on the means, modes, and meanings of cultural transmission in the medieval world. This in turn directs us to a more general consideration of transmission and cosmopolitanism, syncretism and eclecticism, in the history of religions in all periods and geographical contexts.

Reading Hayy ibn Yaqzan, A Twelfth-Century Philosophical/Mystical Romance
This year's "Introduction to the Study of Religion" begins a new era at the Divinity School - a single required course for incoming Masters students focusing on one text, with lectures by faculty representing the diverse fields and disciplines taught in Swift Hall. The text chosen for this year's inaugural Intro course is a philosophical/mystical romance from twelfth-century Islamic Spain entitled Hayy ibn Yaqzan (=Alive son of Awake), the spiritual odyssey of a boy spontaneously generated on a desert island. The many themes and subthemes of Hayy's life-narrative - his miraculous birth, upbringing by a wild gazelle, autodidactic mastery of the sciences, mystical visions, and unsuccessful encounter with the conventional religion of a neighboring island - will provide the framework for an exploration of the different ways texts can be read in the study of religion. The lectures, along with supplementary readings, will expose the students to the various disciplinary approaches offered in the Divinity School.

Jerusalem during the Middle Ages: Conquest, Pilgrimage, and the Imaginaire
During the Middle Ages (638-1516) Jerusalem played a central role in politics, ritual practice, and religious thought. This course will explore the many facets and diverse functions of the Holy City throughout the medieval period. Class discussion will be organized around the careful reading of primary texts in translation: Crusade chronicles and historical reports; pilgrimage manuals and itineraries; and the rich speculative literature of the philosophers and the mystics, who conceived Jerusalem as ideal type, cosmic axis and gateway to the celestial realm.

Reading Other People's Scriptures (with Lucy Pick)
A common tradition of shared texts, practices, stories, or scriptures can be one of the foundations and inspirations of inter-religions dialogue. The motive can be curiosity and education, a desire to know the source of a text or idea that is shared between two religious communities. Reading other people's scriptures can also inspire fear and anxiety, and a desire to protect one's own tradition from contamination or from a kind of blurring that threatens to make indistinct its boundaries. These two movements - curious inquiry and anxious boundary-maintenance - can occur simultaneously. Moreover, the act of reading someone else's scripture can occur either across traditions, through dialogue, or in private, as it were, within the confines of one's own community. What are differences between and implications of these two kinds of ways of relating to shared scriptural and textual traditions?

Islamic and Jewish Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism made a remarkable comeback in the academy during the twentieth century. A general interest in Hellenistic Neoplatonism - from the systematic work of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus to the Neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle in Alexandria - has been stimulated by the writings of Pierre Hadot and Richard Sorabji. Concurrently there has been steady research with increasing intensity into the Islamic Arabic tradition; three professors at Chicago have been especially influential in this area: Joel Kraemer, Michael Sells, and Paul Walker. In contrast the Jewish tradition remains understudied. The purpose of this seminar is to introduce this exciting area of research. It will focus on the main trends of Neoplatonism in the Arabic-Islamic world from the translation and adaptation of Plotinus' Enneads in the ninth century to the many and diverse developments in the tenth - in Persia, Iraq, and North Africa - to the flowering of Neoplatonism in Spain. It will also point to areas that have received little attention and deserve further research, including the legacy of the Arabic tradition in later thought - in the Islamic world and Christian Europe, from the later Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

Maimonides as Mystic (A study of Guide 3:51)
Maimonides has been described as philosopher and theologian, Neoplatonist and Skeptic, Aristotelian and anti-Aristotelian, critic of religion and pious defender of the faith. This seminar will explore the mystical interpretation of his work through a careful line-by-line reading of relevant chapters in his Guide of the Perplexed, especially Guide 3:51, together with related texts from his vast corpus. Evidence from the medieval commentary tradition will also be examined, as will the recent discussion in modern scholarship.

Seminar in Comparative Scriptural Interpretation (with Margaret Mitchell)
Through selected readings in early Christian and medieval Jewish texts (in a variety of genres), the seminar will explore such issues as: what is a "text" and how is a "scripture" constituted? What is (a) "commentary"? What are the various media of scriptural interpretation? What kinds of interpretive questions do various readers and communities generate, and why? What is the relationship between "theory" and "practice" in scriptural interpretation? What types of exegetical rules are developed and employed, from where do they come and how are they justified? Do such traditional labels as "literal" and "allegorical" interpretation work? Do different religious traditions and communities develop unique interpretive perspectives or predilections, or do we see largely the same approaches in play regardless of context?

Maimonides, Eight Chapters and Commentary on Avot
A close, line-by-line reading of Maimonides' synthesis of Aristotelian ethics and Jewish law. The focus will be on Maimonides's texts, but other writings by Aristotle and al-Farabi will be brought in to provide context.

Medieval Commentaries on Psalms
An introduction to and survey of the medieval Jewish commentaries on the Book of Psalms, including Karaite and Rabbanite texts of the tenth century, the work of the Spanish grammarians of the eleventh and twelfth, and the philosophers and Kabbalists of the later Middle Ages. Exegetes to be considered will include: Saadia Gaon, Salmon b. Yeroham, Yefet b. 'Eli, Abraham ibn Ezra, Maimonides, David Kimhi, Menahem ha-Meiri, Ezra of Gerona, and Todros Abulafia. There is no language requirement; all texts will be read in translation. However, there will be an extra reading session for those with good command of Arabic and/or Hebrew.

Introduction to Judaeo-Arabic Literature and Thought
An introduction to the culture of the Jews living in the medieval Islamic world. The survey will begin with discussion of Judaeo-Arabic itself - a form of middle Arabic generally written in Hebrew characters. It will then focus on the literary corpus produced in Judaeo-Arabic: translations of the Bible and commentaries on the Bible; works of philosophy, theology, and mysticism; literary texts and legal tracts. The students will also be exposed to the vast array of documents surviving in the Cairo Genizah and other genizot.

Aristotle in the Middle Ages
An introduction to Aristotle as he was known in the Middle Ages. The course will survey the Aristotelian corpus and the commentaries on it, along with the many secondary adaptations and summaries of it. The biographical tradition about Aristotle (and his relationship with Alexander and Plato) will also be examined, as will the large pseudepigraphical literature attributed to him, especially in the occult. There will be a section for Arabists to read texts in Arabic, a section for Hebraists to read texts in Hebrew.

Jewish Sufism
During the Middle Ages the Jews in the Muslim world developed a robust synthesis of Jewish Spirituality and Islamic Sufism. Even those who did not subscribe to a Sufi pietistic Judaism nevertheless introduced Sufi language and ideas into their Jewish thought. This course will introduce several important figures in this Jewish Sufi movement, from Bahya ibn Paquda in 11th-century Spain to Maimonides and his descendants in 12th-14th century Egypt. There will be a section for Arabists to read Bahya's "Duties of the Hearts" in Arabic, and a section for Hebraists to read the twelfth-century Hebrew translation of it.

Ibn Tufayl's Hayy b. Yaqzan
A study of Ibn Tufayl's classic twelfth-century philosophical/mystical romance, the story of a boy spontaneously generated on a desert island who achieves knowledge of God through empirical study of nature. There will be a section for Arabists to read the text in Arabic, and a section for Hebraists to read the medieval Hebrew translation with Moses Narboni's unpublished commentary on it.

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