Fellows and Research Projects: 2015–16

Junior Fellow: October 2015–December 2016

Research Project: Yeshayahu Leibowitz—Strict Orthodox Practice and Unbound Scepticism

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–94) was an Israeli scientist and religious thinker who exerted a con­siderable influence on the views of intellectuals as well as the wider public regarding religious, moral, and political issues. Amongst other publications, he has written a book on Maimonides’ faith. Roi Benbassat will explore Leibowitz’s sceptical approach to four interrelated themes: the legitimacy of scepticism in the Jewish religion, the conflict between reli­gion and science, the moral status of Judaism, and Judaism and the ‘Jew­ish state.’ Leibowitz’s challenging insights regarding ‘religious knowl­edge’ has granted him the title of ‘a destroyer of idols.’ In his view, the Jewish religion is defined by the institution of Halakha alone, namely by its system of duties, whereas any other feature of Judaism (beliefs in particular) is dismissible. Thus, Judaism is conceived as a normative system, and faith in it as a commitment to a legal system. Lei­bowitz’s sceptical attitude is drawn in various depictions of his concept of Judaism. He argues that Jewish faith is a volitional decision that does not rely on any belief or reasoning. He also claims that Jewish faith is essentially in conflict with humanism and other moral standpoints. His sceptical attitude goes as far as claiming that God’s existence cannot be as­sumed or justified by our cognitive capacities, but only by willingly accepting the authority of the Jewish law (Halakhah). The Torah, as he puts it, is ‘data preceding recognition of the Giver of the Torah.’

Roi Benbassat earned his PhD at Université de Paris 1 and Tel Aviv University. Before coming to Hamburg, he held a Minerva Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Free University Berlin.

Senior Fellow: October 2015–February 2016

Research Project: Jacob ben Amran, Porta Veritatis (1621). Towards a Critical Edition of a Clandestine and Sceptical Unpublished Latin Treatise

Paolo Bernardini will prepare a critical edition of the Porta Veritatis, a seventeenth-century Latin manuscript with quotations in Hebrew. There is no printed version of this text, and the authorship of Jacob ben Amran still has yet to be established. The work might have been written in Venice between 1621 and 1634. It is contemporary with the writings of Rabbi Simone Luzzatto, who worked in a context where sceptical ideas were circulating, influencing Jews and Christians alike. Since the manuscript appeared and was passed on in the United Provinces before and during Spinoza’s time, Spinoza may have been aware of it. Some sceptical elements in the Porta Veritatis can be found in its textual criticism: there are empirical and rational arguments against the ‘evidence’ of the Gospel narrative, there is methodological doubt about a large number of ordinary as well as miraculous performances by Christ, and there are attacks on logical fallacies of some episodes in the Gospels.

Paolo Bernardini is professor of early modern European history at the Università degli Studi dell’Insubria.

Junior Fellow: July 2016

Research Project: Gender and Modes of Scepticism in and out of the Venetian Ghetto. Sara Copio Sullam and the Accademia degli Incogniti

The research project of Evelien Chayes investigates early seventeenth-century debates between Venetian Jews and members of the Accademia degli Incogniti on the immortality of the soul and body-soul dualism, debates which have been held for millenia. While they each pursued this theme along their own lines, their texts are highly conscious of ancient traditions (Greek and Latin, Jewish, Christian), with special attention to Aristotelian as well as Pythagorean principles and to Jewish learning. The soul was the central topic par excellence of the Italian academies since 1550, and in the Incogniti’s 1635 Discorsi, this core matter experienced an epistemological shift, strongly influenced by an increasingly sceptical approach. We can directly connect this ori­entation to contemporary sources, notably Jewish ones, concerning immortality and the transmigration of the soul. This re­search will uncover intellectual efforts and exchanges on the part of hitherto obscure or unstudied rabbis and Christians in the Veneto in the first half of the seven­teenth century.

Evelien Chayes teaches at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne. Her PhD (received from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2007) treated the early modern reception and reworking of the ancient book-lore on precious stones.

Senior Fellow: July–September 2016 and July–September 2017

Research Project: Don Isaac Abravanel and the Role of Sceptical Arguments in the Delimitation of Religion

Cedric Cohen-Skalli’s research project will focus on the new delimitation of the realms of religion and science suggested by Isaac Abravanel in his philosophical and exegetical works written in the historical context of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas in the fifteenth century. Cohen-Skalli believes that this new delimitation of religion and science, shared by many Jewish philosophers of the fifteenth century, can be best studied in the works of Isaac Abravanel, since they display their Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Greco-Roman background more explicitly than most other works of fifteenth-century Jewish philosophers. Cohen-Skalli’s intention is to show how this new delimitation of religion and science is grounded on sceptical claims on the limitation of human knowledge and on the uncertainty of scien­tific models. These sceptical claims play an essential role in the de­limitation of the realm of religion and its distinction from scientific epistemological models. The sceptical argumentation often func­tions as a discursive justification and prepara­tion for a more fideistic or literal approach to religious events like miracles or prophe-cy in Abravanel’s work. The sceptical ar­guments used by Abravanel are not meant to invalidate either science or philosophy, but to justify the possi­bility of religious events defined as ‘supernatural.’ The sceptical argumen­tation that Abravanel developed has of­ten been approached by modern scholar­ship as marking the end of medieval Jewish philosophy (Leo Strauss) or as a sign of Jewish backwardness vis-à-vis early modern rationalism (Benzion Netanyahu). Cedric Cohen-Skalli’s hopes to demonstrate that Isaac Abravanel’s disjunction of the realms of religion and science participated in the re-definition of religion, philosophy, and science in the Early Modern period.

Cedric Cohen-Skalli teaches early modern and modern Jewish philosophy at the University of Haifa.

Senior Fellow: July–August 2016, July–August 2017, and July–August 2019

Research Project: Dream Enquiry: Theory and Praxis of Dreaming in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism

Yuval Harari will work on a chapter of his planned book about a branch of Jewish magic dealing with practices for manipulating dreams. The primary sources for his research are Jewish manuscripts of magic and practical Kabbalah, in which practices of dream magic are ex­plicit and abundant. He will also consider and include Halakhic, Kabbalistic, and narrative sources. Both dreams and magic undermine the borderlines of nature and society and are in conflict with ‘rational’ interpretations of the human expe­rience. Despite engendering scepticism and ridicule, they re­tained a strong hold on Jewish communities, both East and West. ‘Dream enquiry,’ which seems to have been a prevalent practice in the medieval and early modern periods, is an especially interesting test case for this debate. Dream request, or better, dream enquiry, is the most common pattern of magic dream divination in Jewish cul­ture. The most significant source for understanding this practice, the worldview in which it was anchored, and the criticism and disdain it raised, are the dozens of recipes for dream enquiry scattered in the broad and yet unexplored corpus of Jewish manuscripts of magic and practical Kabbalah from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Yuval Harari’s research will focus first and foremost on this corpus, aiming at a comprehen­sive survey of the phenomenon and its place in Jewish thought and action.

Yuval Harari teaches Jewish thought and folklore at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Senior Fellow: April 2016–August 2016

Research Project: Public Discourse About "What One Deserves" in the Roman Imperial Period

The current research of Marietta Horster is part of a larger project (monograph and articles) concerning fairness in ancient societies: "Distributive Justice and Equity in Greek and Roman Societies." During her stay at the Centre, she will focus on narrative traditions in the Roman Imperial period. Accordingly she will investigate the intellectual culture of the Roman world and its discussion of the necessity, organisation, quality and consequences of distributive justice in society from an ideological point of view. The practical aspect of the project resides in the enquiry into the behavioral norms and patterns of various groups in the Roman world. Aristotle explored the nature of particularistic justice which pertained to just distribution and retribution in accordance with merit. The Aristotelian claim is that only reason should guide judgements on equitable treatment. The subject "distributional justice," an antique inquiry into the understanding of "what one deserves," focuses on the negotiation processes at various levels of society. These can be adequate participation in decision-making, adequate access to resources and markets, adequate insights into the workings of government and the adequate opportunity to participate and stimulate (or even instigate) changes in societal ideology and cultural practices. Various verbal and visual expressions of Eastern Mediterranean cultures within the Roman Empire thus present us with subtle but remarkable traces of scepticism. However, these sceptical tendencies hardly ever challenge the Roman entitlement to rule.

Marietta Horster is professor of Ancient history at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.

Senior Fellow: May 2016–June 2016

Research Project: Rabbi Yehudah Moscato’s Kol Yehudah

Lawrence Kaplan’s contribution will consist of two parts, an essay and an annotated translation. The essay will be an elaboration on and defense of Yehudah Moscato‘s Kol Yehudah, an appraisal of Yehudah ha-Levi‘s treatise Sefer ha-Kuzari. Moscato lists what he views as the four key issues of the Kuzari: the People of Israel, the Land of Israel, the Temple, and the Torah. They are God’s four kinyanim, and "when they are joined together, the world is filled with light, joy, gladness, and honour." Moscato, both in his description of the Kuzari’s five sections and in his commentary proper, seeks to show how these key issues structure all the sections throughout the text. Given the great importance of Moscato’s introduction to Kol Yehudah, the second and major part of the project will be a complete and fully annotated translation of that introduction. This project will complement Giuseppe Veltri’s translation of Moscato’s collection of sermons, Nefutsot Yehudah.

Lawrence Kaplan is associate professor of Rabbinics, Jewish law and philosophy at McGill University Montreal.

Senior Fellow: April 2016–September 2016

Research Project: The Sceptical Meditations of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) in Rabbinic Midrash and the Embodiment of Scepticism in Rabbinic Narratives

Reuven Kiperwasser will explore Midrash Kohelet Rabbah, which expounds the verses of Kohelet. In addition, he will scan other Rabbinic texts in order to discover the sceptical topoi in Kohelet exegesis not preserved in Kohelet Rabbah. Ecclesiastes was accepted by the rabbis as a prophetic book composed by King Solomon. The tendency to treat components of a prophetic script with scepticism already appears in ancient Midrash. The rabbis inverted problematic verses of scepticism and the narrator‘s pessimistic point of view, and frequently interpreted them apologetically. This raises a question about Rabbinic culture: what kind of sceptical reasoning was appropriate for the rabbis and what function did it have within Rabbinic culture? These questions will be explored and the nature of this exegetical phenomenon and its theological background will be examined. The project aims to approach the cultural expressions of scepticism, manifested in Rabbinic exegetical narratives, based on the verses of Ecclesiastes as well as on other "problematic" verses from wisdom literature.

Reuven Kiperwasser currently holds a Humboldt Research Fellowship at Freie Universität Berlin
.

Junior Fellow: March 2016–February 2017

Research Project: Linguistic Scepticism

• From Isolation to Community. Sceptical Strategies in Landauer’s Anarchy (March–August 2016)
• Limits of Language. Limits of Understanding. Linguistic Scepticism in Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein (September 2016–February 2017)

Libera Pisano’s research is structured into two main sections and deals with linguistic scepticism among pairings of German-Jewish thinkers of the last century: Mauthner/Landauer and Rosenzweig/Wittgen­stein. The historical context is the so-called Sprachkrise, a complex critique of language diffused in the philosophical and literary de­bate before World War I. In her first six months of research, Libera Pisano analysed the logos-scepticism in Mauthner’s philosophy as the theoretical premise of the anarchist thought of Gustav Landauer by shed­ding light on the turn of linguistic scepticism into a political praxis and a mystical conception of community. For the second part of her research, she has chosen to investigate the different ap­proaches of Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein as two manifestations of the constellation of Sprachkrise, which—despite their apparent divergences—is the common thread linking these different authors. Libera Pisano will attempt to show how reflection about the limits of language, the relevance of the apophatic moment, the critical attitude towards the tradition, and the new task of philosophy—the main features of both Rosenzweig’s and Wittgenstein’s thought—stem from the radical linguistic scepticism present in the cultural debate of that time.

Libera Pisano earned her PhD in theoretical philosophy at Sapienza University of Rome in 2014. She was visiting research fellow (post-doc) at the Humboldt University Berlin in 2014–15.

Senior Fellow: July 2016–September 2016

Research Project: Between Fascination and Scepticism: Charismatic Authority Figures in Religion and Philosophy

Almut-Barbara Renger’s work at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies is based on foundational studies resulting from her research on one of the most distinctive social forms of religious community, the so-called master–disciple relationship. Expanding on these studies, the project investigates issues of ambivalence and scepticism toward religious and philosophical authority by pursuing one of the central research objectives of the Centre: the examination of whether the method of enquiry, as implied in the term "scepticism," could be regarded as an anthropological constant in the context of an alleged dialectic difference between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ philosophy and culture. In light of this objective, the project examines the extent to which attitudes and approaches comparable to the sceptical posture and practices of Greco- Roman antiquity as outlined by Sextus Empiricus can be identified in the cultural and religious history of both Europe and Asia. It is through its comparative perspective, which takes the sceptical posture of antiquity as its starting point and tertium comparationis, that the project makes a valuable contribution to the Centre. Its enquiry is not intended as an attempt to arrive at normative statements concerning the languages, cultures, religions, and world-views it focuses upon in interdisciplinary discussions. Rather, using analytical descriptive approaches to enquire into similarities, parallels, and analogies, the aim is to avoid generalisation and to open up scope for differentiation.

Almut-Barbara Renger is professor of ancient religion, culture, and their reception history at Freie Universität Berlin.

Senior Fellow: February 2016–March 2016, Februay 2018–March 2018, and February 2019

Research Project: The London Missionary Alexander McCaul and his Assault on the Talmud

David Ruderman’s research will focus on the London missionary Alexander McCaul, one of the primary leaders of the famous London Society for the Promotion of Christianity amongst the Jews, his assault on the Talmud, the very interesting converts he attracted, and the debate he engendered in the mid-nineteenth century with Jewish thinkers, especially Eastern-European maskilim. The topic of scepticism insinuates itself into the project in the revival of the Jewish-Christian debate engendered by McCaul‘s attack on the Talmud and rabbis. Both sides use sceptical arguments to undermine the certainty of their opponent‘s positions. This of course is standard in all Jewish-Christian debates, but the present debate applies methods of modern scholarship in highly innovative ways, particularly by using historical arguments about ancient history and culture. After winning the loyalty of several Jewish intellectuals to his cause, several of them change their positions vis-à-vis the missionary of the London Society and offer a sceptical critique of the very foundations of Christianity, and its need to save the souls of Jews, by obliging them to relinquish Rabbinic Judaism. Their arguments are highly revealing when defining and redefining the implications of being a Christian and how Jews and Christians could co-exist.

David Ruderman is Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Senior Fellow: July–September 2016 and July–September 2017

Research Project: Scepticism and Anti-Scepticism in the Jewish Intellectual Debate of Nineteenth-Century Italy

Asher Salah’s project focuses on the context and the uses of the term ‘sceptic’ in the writings of Italian rabbis in the nineteenth century. Scepticism appears to be a central topic in the debate concerning the Jewish Reform, playing a crucial role in the revival of the anti-Karaitic polemic in nineteenth-century Italian Judaism. The interest in recovering classical defences of Jewish oral law is attested by the numerous translations into Italian of the Mate Dan by David Nieto, by the renewed interest in the commentaries of Yehudah Halevi’s Kuzari, and by the proliferation of self-defined ‘anti-Karaitic’ tractates, targeting not only contemporary deist philosophies and religious reforms, but first and foremost positivistic systems of disbelief and secularism. At the same time, Italian rabbis in the nineteenth century engaged in an unprecedented programme of dogmatic interpretation of Judaism. The debate concerning scepticism sheds new light upon the Jewish response to modernity and emancipation in Italy, the challenges to rabbinical authority, the convergence of Catholic and Jewish apologetics in the frame of a growing estrangement from religious practices, and the continuities and discontinuities with previous Jewish philo­sophical traditions.

Asher Salah is a senior lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in 2011–12 and in 2014–15.

Junior Fellow: October 2016–March 2017

Research Project: Plato and the Art of Academic Scepticism

Charles E. Snyder’s project explains why both doctrinal and anti-doctrinal interpretations of Plato fail to identify the art of Plato’s sceptical philosophy. His project recovers and enlarges a third paradigm of interpreting Plato that conforms to the way the sceptical Academy received his dialogues. Snyder argues that the doctrinal interpretation fails to explain why Plato cast phil­osophical arguments and beliefs in the form of dramatic dialogues, not treatises; the anti-doc­trinal paradigm, on the other hand, cannot discern the practical knowledge, or the non-doctrinal know-how, exhibited by Socrates in the activity of philosophical inquiry. For Snyder, the many dif­ficulties that emerge from the demand for definitions (e.g. virtue in the Meno, knowledge in the Theaetetus, temperance in the Charmides, courage in the Laches) find a positive solution in the art of Socrates’ dialectic. In the give and take of argument, Socrates exhibits the practical knowl­edge that virtue and knowledge are irreducible to propositions, definitions, and demonstrations. Arcesilaus the sceptic is primarily a practitioner of this art, emulating Socrates in challenging the conceited dogmatism of other philosophers. This means, for Snyder’s project, that Arcesilaus exhibits non-proposi­tional knowledge by showing that virtue and knowledge cannot be defined or proven. Part three of the project argues that the modern tradition of interpreting Academic scepticism according to a narrow scheme of pure episte­mology is fundamentally flawed, distorting the character and virtue of scepticism in antiquity.

Charles Synder earned a PhD in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 2015–16, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center, and a teaching fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative in New York.

Senior Fellow: May 2016

Research Project: Education and Scepticism as a Way of Life

During her stay at the Centre, Christiane Thompson would like to carry out a comprehensive study on scepticism as educational and cultural practise—limited to Plato, exemplary text fragments from the (older and middle) Stoic tradition and possibly from Pyrrhonianism. However, rather than treating these school(s) as epistemological endeavour(s) she will focus on the above-mentioned significance of scepticism as a cultural practice of the self. Christiane Thompson will attempt to look out for coherent structures in the dispersed field of educational voices on scepticism today. Since scepticism has not formed a guideline to unravel the educational dimension of self-relations or selfpractices, it is important to compare contributions and to put them in contrast to the limited significance of scepticism in education today. She will devote the major part of her stay to the examination of the original Greek texts. She has chosen Plato’s early dialogues, Protagoras and Charmides, which offer themselves for analysis because they explicitly mention and emphasise the care for the self. From the Hellenistic tradition she will turn toward text fragments from the Stoa, and possibly move on to Pyrrho’s scepticism, which will enable her to formulate initial conclusions.

Christiane Thompson is professor of theory and history of education at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
.

Senior Fellow: October 2015–November2015 and January 2016–February 2016

Research Project: Abraham Gómez Silveyra (1656–1741): An Amsterdam Sephardi Controversist in Search of a Theological Truce among Faiths

A comprehensive study and digital edition of Gómez Silveyra's work is at the centre of a new project designed by Carsten Wilke in cooperation with Professor Harm den Boer (Universität Basel, Hispanic Studies). It is part of a larger joint research on the literary, intellectual, social and material history of the manuscript corpus inside the communities of the Sephardi diaspora. Comprising more than four thousand still unedited pages, which were written in baroque Spanish between 1700 and 1738, the monumental theological oeuvre of the Jewish stockbroker Abraham Gómez Silveyra is the last highlight in the history of anti-Christian literature among the Early Modern Portuguese Jews. Gómez Silveyra arrives at a disillusioned conclusion concerning the reliability of theological reasoning, and voices such wisdom in an idiosyncratic mix of learned scholarship and satirical buffoonery. He argues that Human understanding is always grossly misleading; truth can only be found in revelation, that is, in a strictly literal reading of the Scriptures in accordance with the Oral Law. Besides rejecting modern science, even Copernican cosmology, on such Biblical grounds, Gómez Silveyra also maintains that no theological system has ever been able to prove its superiority.

Carsten Wilke is associate professor at Central European University in Budapest.