Segev, Ran
Senior Fellow: mid-January–mid-June 2023
Research Project: Scepticism, the Animal Soul, and Human Perfection in the Early Modern Sephardic World
This research project reveals the multiple reasonings by which thinkers envisioned human uniqueness vis-à-vis other animals between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a period in which previously held biblically inspired beliefs came into question. It intends to examine the question of the border between humans and animals through a specifically Jewish context. The objective is to investigate the debates among Sephardi scholars, mostly in Amsterdam, regarding the animal soul and its perceived ontological difference from the individual soul of human beings. Studying the place of the human-animal boundary in the theology of Sephardic Amsterdam offers us a unique vantage point from which to examine the existential fragility of an ex-converso community at a time when its members were confronting what was perceived to be a threat to the integrity of their religious heritage. Such a project has implications for sceptical debates about the strategies that Jewish thinkers pursued in order to defend God’s providence and scriptural interpretive tradition from critical thoughts; in so doing, the same thinkers demarcated boundaries between faith and doubt in the Jewish oral tradition. This perspective on religious scepticism and its relationship to the boundaries between humans and animals adds an uncharted dimension to the well-documented intellectual disputes that stirred seventeenth-century Jewish Amsterdam, a narrative that has thus far been ignored, despite its continued relevance for contemporary Jewish theology.
Before coming to MCAS, Ran Segev was a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow at Universität Hamburg.