Please join us at 5pm on Monday, April 15th in Swift 201 for a presentation by:

Rachel Katz

PhD, Divinity School, History of Judaism

Arama As Intervention: Anti-(Intellectual) Elitism and Jews as a Separate Species

Despite professed departures from the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, most contemporary scholars of medieval Jewish thought continue to deploy their object of study as political shield and remain invested in constructing/imagining medieval Jewish thought as compatible with meritocratic liberalism. They do so even as they know the data suggest otherwise and even as material and political circumstances of both academic Jewish Studies and Jews across the globe have changed drastically. In this article, I attempt to render this political investment apparent in two parts. In the first part, I look at trends in contemporary scholarship in the field: how it talks about its object of study, what sorts of material it tends to focus on, and what material it has not focused on. I argue that contemporary scholarship on medieval Jewish thought aims to depict its object as simultaneously universalist and intellectually elitist. In the second part, I present a (systematically?) neglected yet canonical medieval text, Isaac Arama’s Aqedat Yishaq, as foil to this prevailing scholarly image of medieval Jewish thought. Against the idea(l) of medieval Jewish thought as universalist-cum-intellectualist, Arama couples a critique of intellectual elitism with a comprehensive theory of Jews as separate and superior species.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, is available here (password: arama):Katz_Prooftexts