Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah(86 Études sur le judaïsme médiéval)

Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism explores the discursive formation of the commandments as a generative matrix of Jewish thought and life in the posttalmudic period. Each study sheds light on how medieval Jews crafted the commandments out of theretofore underdetermined material. By systematizing, representing, or interrogating the amorphous category of commandment, medieval Jewish authors across both the Islamic and Christian spheres of influence sought to explain, justify, and characterize Israel’s legal system, divine revelation, the cosmos, and even the divine order. This volume correlates bodies of knowledge—such as jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics, pietism, and kabbalah—that are normally treated in isolation into a single conversation about a shared constitutional concern.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction 1 The Commandments as a Discursive Nexus of Medieval Judaism  Marc Herman and Jeremy P. Brown Case Studies in Individual Commandments 2 Dê Maḥsoro as the Key to Jewish Almsgiving: A Maimonidean Interpretive Innovation and Its Legal Afterlife to the Fifteenth Century  Alyssa M. Gray 3 The Taqqanah of the Moredet in the Middle Ages  Judith R. Baskin 4 An Early Kabbalistic Explanation of Temple Sacrifice: Text and Study  Jonathan Dauber The Ramifications of Maimonides 5 Early Evaluation of Maimonides’s Enumeration of the Commandments against the Background of the Eastern Maimonidean Controversy  Marc Herman 6 Maimonides’s Long Journey from Greek to Jewish Ethics  Albert Dov Friedberg 7 The Reasons for the Commandments in Isaac Ibn Laṭīf’s The Gate of Heaven (1238)  Guadalupe González Diéguez Accounting for the Decalogue 8 The Ten Commandments Are Implanted in Human Minds: Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Rational Approach to the Decalogue  Mariano Gómez Aranda 9 Decoding the Decalogue: Theosophical Re-engraving of the Ten Commandments in Thirteenth-Century Kabbalah  Avishai Bar-Asher Discourses of Ṭaʿame ha-miṣvot: Tosafism, Rhineland Pietism, Egyptian Pietism, Kabbalah, Sabbatianism 10 Ṭaʿame ha-miṣvot in Medieval Ashkenaz  Ephraim Kanarfogel 11 Pietism in the Law and the Law of Pietism: From Moses to Abraham Maimonides  Elisha Russ-Fishbane 12 A Castilian Debate about the Aims and Limits of Theurgic Practice: Rationalizing Incest Taboos in the Zohar, Moses de León, and Joseph of Hamadan  Leore Sachs-Shmueli 13 Ascesis, Hypernomianism, and the Excess of Lack: Semiotic Transfiguration of the Somatic  Elliot R. Wolfson Select Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Jeremy P. Brown, Ph.D. (2015), New York University, is Assistant Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He has served as Simon and Ethel Flegg Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University. His research and teaching focus on kabbalah and medieval Judaism. Marc Herman, Ph.D. (2016), University of Pennsylvania, is a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He has held fellowships at Columbia University, Fordham University, the University of Michigan, and Yale Law School. He researches and teaches medieval Judaeo-Arabic and Arabic legal thought.