Fellows and Research Projects: 2021–22

Senior Fellow: May–August 2022

Research Project: Laughter in the Jewish Cemetery: Comic Epitaphs, Scepticism, and Academies

The Italian rabbi and scholar Immanuel Frances (Mantua 1615–Florence 1667) is primarily known as the brother of the more famous Jacob Frances, the fierce critic of Kabbalah. A poet in his own right, Immanuel was a prolific writer whose Hebrew production also included several compositions in which he treated the themes of death and the afterlife in a comic or humoresque key. Frances’s literary levity in the face of futurity is of particular interest, for it contrasted with a general cultural atmosphere that was intensely preoccupied with the destiny of the soul in the hereafter. It was also openly incompatible with the religious and moral sentiments around death and the afterlife then fostered, partly under the influence of Kabbalah, by contemporary Jewish observance.

This project intends to look at this part of Immanuel Frances’s poetic production as an expression of doubt and dissent. It will examine the rhetorical solutions he enacted and assess how his “rhetoric of scepticism” compares to that displayed in similar compositions by contemporary Italian authors, some of them produced within learned academies. The aim of this project is to contribute to a much-needed contextualisation of Frances’s “funerary wit,” but also to answer wider questions pertaining to the place of satire in the early modern discourse surrounding the afterlife, the social settings in which its use was tolerated, and the conventions governing its articulation.

Michela Andreatta is an assistant professor of Hebrew language and literature at the University of Rochester.

Senior Fellow: April–July 2022

Research Project: Via Negativa: Linguistic Scepticism and Philosophy of Creation in Hermann Cohen, Jakob Gordin, and Emmanuel Levinas (1908–1935)

Emmanuel Levinas is sceptical of theological assertation and logic of judgment, and his ethics makes a claim to radical linguistic scepticism. Levinas’s late, post-1960 ethical linguistic scepticism has been thoroughly researched as a genuinely Jewish-philosophical via negativa (Westerkamp, 2006, 2017). This research, however, does not cover prior developments and premises. Therefore, Levinas’s scepticism will be reviewed within the wider discussion of via negativa in the Jewish philosophy of religion in the first half of the twentieth century, introduced via Hermann Cohen’s Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis (1908). This initial review of via negativa will focus on Cohen and Jakob Gordin in the period from 1908 to 1935. Therefore, the project will analyse Cohen’s logic (1902, 1914) and creation theory (1918) along with Gordin’s Untersuchungen zur Theorie des unendlichen Urteils (1929), while also addressing Gordin’s (thus far unresearched) works on Maimonides (1934—) from the former’s Paris estate. The unknown premises of Levinas’s scepticism will also be illustrated. This study will draw from ten of the author’s prior works on Cohen, Rosenzweig, Gordin, and Levinas, and the results will be published in the Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion in order to further develop an extension of preliminary publications in the 2017 issue of the Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies.

Heinrich Assel is Professor and Chair of Systematic Theology at Universität Greifswald.

Senior Fellow: April–August 2022

Research Project: Vera sine dubio: The Prophetic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia in Translation

This project aims to investigate the transmission of Abraham Abulafia’s qabbalat ha-shemot in the Christian world, taking into particular consideration the vernacular translations made for Pierleone da Spoleto (1455–92) at the end of the fifteenth century and his interpretations of them, taking into account both texts and scholia. In opposition to talmudists, philosophers, and Sefirotic Kabbalists, all of whom pursued an incomplete and partial knowledge of God that was often exposed to doubt, Abulafian Kabbalah attempts to offer a completely “certain” understanding of the Divine. By comparing the Sicilian versions of Hajje ha-ʾOlam ha-Ba (BnF, ms. it. 443) and Imrei Shefer (Arsenal Library, ms. 8526) with the original Hebrew texts, the project aims to investigate the gnoseological foundations of prophetic Kabbalah, which lead to a sine dubio knowledge, and to establish a link with certain “sceptical” ideas that characterised the nascent Christian Kabbalah. The main focus of this research is to bring to light an unexplored segment of the history of Renaissance thought through a number of vernacularisations of Kabbalistic works that constitute a relevant example of intercultural exchange in modern times.

Flavia Buzzetta is a research associate at the Laboratoire d’études sur les monothéismes at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris.

Senior Fellow: October–December 2021

Research Project: Dialects of Enlightenment: Language, Performance, and the Contradictions of Culture in Early Modern Jewish Literature

This project focuses on a crucial cultural moment in the history and development of modern Jewish literature: the origins of formal Jewish theatrical conventions during the last decade of the eighteenth century in the German-language culture centres of Königsberg and Berlin. Focusing primarily on the plays Reb Henoch, oder: Woß tut me damit (1793) by Isaac Euchel (1756–1804) and Laykhtzin und fremelay (1796) by Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn (ca. 1755–1835), this research considers the linguistic status of plays written between Yiddish and German as a strategy for representing fault lines among characters caught between East and West, tradition and modernity, as well as the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. As an aesthetic strategy, the linguistic clash between German and Yiddish signals the indeterminate status of Jews in a moment of social and historical—as well as linguistic—transition; the close proximity yet untranslatability or mutual incomprehensibility between Yiddish and German conveys the palpable yet unspeakable barriers confronting Jews at the first moment when a significant number of them were beginning to interact with a larger society of non-Jewish elites. As an ideological strategy, the linguistic indeterminacy of this writing indicates a widening rift between philosophical aspirations to Enlightenment (Aufklärung) and social aspirations to assimilation. What emerges in this study is not only a distinction between haskole (Haskala) and Aufklärung, but a sense, through haskole literature, of the contradictions within the Enlightenment project and the subsequent pitfalls of Enlightenment as a simultaneous source of knowledge and authority for Jews and other politically marginalised subjects.

Marc Caplan is Brownstone Visiting Professor at the Jewish Studies Program, Dartmouth College.

Junior Fellow: October 2020–July 2021 and March–June 2022

Research Project: Experience, Intuition and Understanding: Sources of Knowledge and Scepticism in Maimon’s Commentary on Bacon’s Novum Organum

This project explores how various sources of knowledge produce new propositions in Salomon Maimon’s philosophy and how his sceptical stance shapes his thought about the formulation of new knowledge. More particularly, it examines Maimon’s commentary on Bacon’s Novum Organum and his intellectual shift from knowledge based on experience to the invention of a priori knowledge based on intuition and understanding. This shift is motivated by his scepticism. The project will examine the logical foundations of knowledge grounded on empirical inventions and discoveries and will present the advantages of turning to empirical knowledge over speculative philosophy. Furthermore, it will show how induction can be used to decrease the level of doubt and increase the level of certainty of empirical knowledge.

Idit Chikurel received her PhD from the School of Philosophy, Linguistics and Science Studies and the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University in 2019.

Senior Fellow: June 2022

Research Project: The Sceptical Administration: Bureaucracy, Translations, and Otherness in Early Modern Records. A Case Study on the Roman Ghetto

This project focuses on early modern transcultural polyglossia from a social history perspective. It addresses the making of basic documentation in polylinguistic societies by focusing on the cultural agency of the professionals and clients involved in the process. It will work on the translation skills requested from notaries in multiple circumstances by arguing that this communication system should be reframed under the methodological approach of scepticism. On these bases, this project will assume the writer’s conscious intervention in the making of official documentation in multilinguistic recording contexts, as the Roman Jewish community was at the time. It will investigate the autonomous agency of the writers in the service of the Kehilla, who were in charge of guaranteeing the validity of the documentation—and therefore that of the documented action—by focusing on their daily duties and doubts in different times. The main sources will be the registers of the community, synagogues, and brotherhoods. Documentary linguistic choices were never neutral and imply a continuous and problematic dialectic of identity, otherness, and religious belongings that is still to be researched, where the sceptical approach offers a unique way of rebalancing classical reasonings and methodologies.

Serena Di Nepi is a professor of early modern history at Sapienza Universitá di Roma.

Senior Fellow: July–August 2022 and April–June 2023 (DEFFERED/2019–20)

Research Project: Scepticism between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries

During the seventeenth century, thanks to the influence of René Descartes on the one hand and Robert Boyle and Joseph Glanvill on the other, the interest in the epistemological side of scepticism prevailed. Therefore, scepticism seemed to avoid the critique of religion and moral relativism and appeared to be compatible with an apologetic design. Despite these precautions, sceptics were often accused of irreligion or atheism. The refutation of modern scepticism requires the construction of a complex speech, building an intricate network of sceptical affinities which often includes authors from ancient times and authors of the modern age, and not only philosophers, but also theologians. Condemnations of scepticism actually elaborate some doxographic treatises which would evolve into histories of philosophy during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Anontella Del Prete aims to examine this evolution through some cases studies, especially referring to Dutch and German cultures, and  intend to establish a possible link between the refutations of scepticism found in Martin Schoock and Gijsbert Voetius’s works and the presentations of this philosophy present in Georg Morhof and Jakob Brucker, finding and analysing intermediate texts and paying particular attention to the disputes produced by Dutch and German universities.

Antonella Del Prete is an associate professor at Università degli Studi della Tuscia in Viterbo.

Senior Fellow: October 2021–February 2022

Research Project: Scepticism in Biblical Exegesis—The Reaction to Maimonides among Medieval Jewish Exegetes in the Fourteenth Century

The Guide for the Perplexed, written by Maimonides towards the end of the twelfth century, introduced a radical new reading of the Bible. The application of Aristotelian hermeneutic attitudes and philosophical notions to the Holy Scripture raised a vivid debate among Jewish scholars in both East and West. The translation of Greek philosophy in Arabic garb into Hebrew opened a new chapter in the intellectual history of the Jews in the Middle Ages. But this new material also encountered a broad range of scepticism, sometimes resulting in complete rejection. The waves of the Maimonidean controversies eventuated fierce attacks on Maimonides and his writings. In the thirteenth century, during the first, second, and third controversies, there was resistance to the Great Eagle and his methodology. By the fourteenth century, however, some of the basic Maimonidean assumptions had already penetrated into exegetical attitudes to the Bible. Nevertheless, several of Maimonides’s notions were still disputed. The ambiguity of the statements in the Guide facilitated the use of his arguments in more than one direction, pro as well as contra. The exegetes of the fourteenth century, such as Gersonides, Joseph Kaspi, Judah Romano, Shemarya ha-Iqriti, and others, discussed Maimonides’s notions in a more moderate manner. The process of the adaptation and reception of the sciences into Judaism resulted in the diversification of cultural phenomena: mysticism and Kabbalah, critical philosophical exegesis, and a complete rejection or ignorance of science and philosophy (as in Northern France and Ashkenaz). These same directions can be found among Jewish exegetes in the West as well as in the East; that is, in Byzantium, Palestine, and Egypt.
The project to be carried out at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies will focus on the sceptical reception of Maimonides in biblical exegesis in Italy and Byzantium in the fourteenth century, with special attention to the subject of creation. In both geographical areas, discussions of Maimonides were characterised by the intellectual context in which the Jewish scholars found themselves. In Italy, the intellectual atmosphere was heavily infused with Scholasticism. The role of the Karaites and their relation to the Rabbanites will be addressed when asking how Maimonides was read and received by Jewish exegetes in the Byzantine Empire (which is still a neglected field of research). Moreover, the relations between Italy and Byzantium will be taken into account, considering the change brought upon the East in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. As a consequence, the stream of knowledge increased and more “Western” literature was received in Byzantium. The reactions to the Maimonidean enterprise and their implications for Bible commentaries will be examined in the context of the exegetical debates held among Jews within the Mediterranean scholarly network as an example of the transfer of knowledge from West to East and vice versa.

Saskia Dönitz is a research associate at the Institute of Judaic Studies at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany.

Senior Fellow: April–August 2022

Research Project: Cartesian Scepticism and Loose Talk

Following Descartes’s method of doubt, Cartesian sceptics claim that hardly any of our convictions amount to knowledge because we are hardly ever in a position to rule out every possible source of error. According to Cartesian scepticism, we do not even know that we have hands because we are unable to rule out, for example, evil demons that make us think we have hands when in fact we do not. At least since G.E. Moore, Cartesian sceptics have faced a formidable challenge. If knowledge is as demanding as they assume, how it is that we ascribe knowledge all the time in everyday discourse? And how can we, for instance, criticise conspiracy theorists when they deny what we regard as scientific knowledge? In this project, the aim is to explore the most promising response strategy available to Cartesian sceptics, according to which knowledge ascriptions are instances of loose talk. It is strictly false to say “It is 3 pm” when it is actually 3:01 pm. The utterance may still be fine if we are speaking loosely, ignoring the often irrelevant difference between 3 pm and 3:01 pm. Based on recent developments in the theory of loose talk, the project will argue that knowledge ascriptions and denials work just like this and will thereby explain our ordinary practice of ascribing and denying knowledge from a sceptical perspective.

Alexander Dinges is a lecturer of philosophy at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.

Junior Fellow: October 2021–August 2022

Research Project: Translators against Translation in Modern Hebrew Literature and Early Zionist Thought

This project examines claims about the untranslatability of Hebrew in Hebrew essays and fictional works from the late nineteenth century to the third decade of the twentieth century. Recording and analysing such claims, it sets out to locate them in two primary contexts: the growing number of published translations in the Hebrew literary field in Europe in the early twentieth century and the rise of nationalist and racialised notions of language that link geographical, ethnic, and philological origins. The project asks why a number of Hebrew writers and Zionist thinkers expressed scepticism towards the idea of vernacularising Hebrew in the early twentieth century by underscoring translational limitations and the asymmetry between Hebrew and other languages. Did these writers believe that Hebrew was innately untranslatable? On what Jewish sources, from the Bible to Jewish mysticism, did they rely? Was the expression of translation scepticism a political act, or did it manifest a spiritual position, or both? And what can early twentieth-century Hebrew translation scepticism teach us about the shared history of Jewish nationalism and the so-called revival of the Hebrew language?

Danielle Drori is a lecturer in Modern Hebrew Literature at the University of Oxford and Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, London.

Senior Fellow: October 2021–February 2022

Research Project: Hope as the Flipside of Scepticism: The History of Esperanto as Jewish Linguistic Utopia

What is the flipside of scepticism? Is it hope? And what is the Jewish name for this hope? Hatikva? Or perhaps Esperanto? Can mistrust among human beings be eradicated by a linguistic utopia? Can language become a faith? In the matter of scepticism and violence, can the former be neutralised by trust in (a new) language? Is it possible that conflict among humans might not be caused by language itself, but by incomprehension among speakers? Is language a begetter of violence? Could a neutral tongue, without a sole owner, become a weapon for humankind?
This contra-project proposes to consider these divergent viewpoints within the Jewish tradition in which language (and silence) play an immense role, whether from the perspective of utopian hope or linguistic scepticism: language and writing are at the core of tradition, of revelation, and of the diasporic situation: a portatives Vaterland (Heine, “portable homeland”). It will analyse Zamenhof’s texts and the history of Esperanto in dialogue with the Jewish philosophy of language (Baruch Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Walter Benjamin, etc.), but also with the creators of another new Jewish language: Modern Hebrew (Ben Yehuda and Ahad Ha’am). The problem of sources and translations is also of vital concern given their role in the construction of the humanity and sacrality of language.

Liliana Ruth Feierstein is Professor of Transcultural Jewish History at Humboldt Universität Berlin, Germany.

Senior Fellow: July–August 2022

Research Project: The Language of Doubt and the Doubts of Language in Modern Kabbalah

This project joins and thus advances earlier investigations into doubt and language in Kabbalah. Within the rubric of language and meaning, its two interrelated themes are the vocabulary and rhetoric of doubt and certainty and the growing doubts about the capacity of language to represent the Kabbalistic universe (and by doing so, to advance the transformative goals of its accompanying practice). On the historical level, the project will conjecture that exposure to scepticism and other open-ended modern epistemologies increasingly undermined the linguistic certainty characterising earlier forms of Kabbalah (strengthening existing tendencies towards paradox). It will also posit that doubt became an increasingly important centre of an entire cluster of terms, mostly of an emotive nature. More broadly put, destabilising moments in modern Kabbalah, such as the Lurianic trope of the breaking of vessels or Sabbatian challenges, can be seen to be far more the norm than the exception. In addition to these outcomes, this project hopes to add a chapter to the little-researched histories of the Kabbalistic dictionary and rhetorical strategies. The plan is to complete a book discussing late modern texts on doubt soon after the proposed summer period of the fellowship, accompanied by an article on early modern sources.

Jonathan Garb is a professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Senior Fellow: April–June 2022

Research Project: Hasidism, Haskalah, and the (Dis)enchantment of Modern Judaism

This project will examine the different attitudes towards Jewish magic and popular religion in Eastern Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Magic was a key concept in the literary agendas of both Hasidism and the Haskalah, and it was extensively reflected in the ideological discourse between traditionalists and modernists. Both camps reflect scepticism: one towards segments of older religious traditions which appear irrelevant and the other towards the flawlessness of modernity. The Hasidim categorised the physical world into religious concepts that empower man’s influence on nature and challenged scientific knowledge and human reason. The Maskilim adopted a scientific and rational worldview, questioning the authority of mystical and magical traditions. The project will study Maskilic literary attitudes towards magic and public criticism of believers in superstition as presented in their satirical literature and political activities alongside the Hasidic masters’ theological and practical attitudes of towards Jewish magical traditions. Several case studies of magical rituals performed by Eastern European Jews in modern times will illustrate the actual perspectives of the various groups within Jewish society towards magic. This project will present an original comprehensive study of an important chapter of Jewish modern culture that has yet to be told.

Uriel Gellman is a senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan.

Senior Fellow: October 2021–February 2022

Research Project: Scepticism and Language

This project will investigate recent concepts of a Jewish and Christian hermeneutics of the Hebrew Bible in order to evaluate the role of scepticism and doubt in such approaches. It is remarkable how many scholars of the Hebrew Bible in the last decades have devoted their research to wisdom literature from Persian and Hellenistic times. Books such as Job and Kohelet/Ecclesiastes have generally been acknowledged as the outcome of an intellectual dialogue with Ancient Near Eastern and Greek thought. This dialogue in early Judaism encompassed pluriform and contradictory ways of understanding human existence. The disputes reflected in works of wisdom in the later Tanakh reveal a critical attitude towards the founding traditions of Judaism, which have become questionable. This critique of tradition was not merely destructive, but aimed for a reaffirmation incorporating arguments of doubt. The need for the translation of the scriptures (predominantly into Greek; cf. the Septuagint) and the difficulties of transcultural understanding made a remarkable contribution to an explicit notion of the ambiguity of traditions. The current interest of scholars in such early forms of “enlightenment” in the Hebrew Bible (for example, in problems of theodicy or the veneration of images) also mirrors the present needs of a sceptical hermeneutics. This project aims to arrive at a new interpretation theory for Hebrew Bible studies based especially on the thought of Paul Ricoeur, Hans Blumenberg, and cognitive linguistics (for example, George Lakoff): a critical hermeneutics uniting sceptical doubt and an ongoing interpretation of religious symbols, the latter being a given infinite task of religious thought.

Friedhelm Hartenstein is a professor at the Institute of Old Testament Studies II at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

Senior Fellow: October 2021–February 2022

Research Project: Epistemological Scepticism, Linguistic Criticism, and Critique of Modern Culture: Georg Simmel and Theodor W. Adorno

At the centre of this research work lies the question of how the relationship between epistemological scepticism and linguistic criticism is thematised in the philosophical thought of Georg Simmel and Theodor W. Adorno.
In the late nineteenth century, the criticism of idealism, the debate on materialism, and pessimism were at the centre of debates that influenced the linguistic and cultural theory of modernity. The blending of epistemological scepticism (a rejection of classical ontology) and linguistic criticism (a criticism of strict correspondence and language and logic, as well as linguistic usage) allowed the thinkers of the late nineteenth century (Steinthal, Lazarus) to prepare a position of cultural criticism that either had a radically sceptical profile (Mauthner, Wittgenstein) or aimed at overcoming scepticism (Cassirer). This constellation has a special relevance to research into the effect of German-Jewish thinkers on the history of theory in the modern era, in particular on linguistic and cultural theory: see the book Beyond the Babylonian Trauma: Theories of Language and Modern Culture in the German-Jewish Context (Berlin and Boston, 2018).
This project seeks to go one step further and will take the view that Georg Simmel and Theodor W. Adorno are the most important representatives of a radical scepticism in the aforementioned German-Jewish tradition. This concerns both the opening of philosophy to sociological questions and the conducting of micrological analyses of phenomena, both the emphasis on dialectical thinking and the turn towards metaphysics, both the critique of knowledge and the critique of the use of language. For all their well-known differences, which Adorno emphasised with polemical intent, this research aims to present Simmel and Adorno as representatives of a radical philosophical scepticism.

Gerald Hartung is professor at the philosophical seminary at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany.

Senior Fellow: June–August 2022

Research Project: Spinozan Pedagogy

Spinoza’s account of how human beings can become philosophical is both theoretical and practical. Spinoza’s texts—the questions they pose, the arguments they present, and the ways of thinking and feeling that they cultivate—offer exercises in becoming philosophical. While Spinoza is famously dismissive of Cartesian scepticism, chiefly because he rejects the Christian model of free will and the epistemology of an atomistic incorporeal subject, he treats doubt and scepticism as inevitable and potentially useful. This is especially true in the transition from imagination to reason. Imagination, whose passivity and complexity explain confusion and doubt, is the origin of all human knowing and an experience we repeat. Although Spinoza is often read as promising an end to doubt in the achievement of truth and certainty, as if we could become rational or even intuitive once and for all, the Ethics demonstrates that human knowers are “infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes” (E4p3). Thus becoming and remaining, to whatever degree, rational and/or intuitive are ongoing projects, with advances and regresses, successes and failures. Spinozan pedagogy involves the cultivation of a cognitive–affective critical sensibility.

Julie R. Klein is an associate professor of philosophy at Villanova University.

Senior Fellow: April–August 2022

Research Project: The Sceptical Student: Learning and Dissent in Renaissance and Early Modern Jewish Italy

While scholarly research has dealt with the reconstruction of the curriculum studiorum of Italian Jews and the economic impact of Jewish education on communal life, including the teacher–disciple relationship, its complex dynamics and intellectual reverberations still await a thorough investigation. The proposed research project aims to fill this lacuna by addressing the following questions: How can we measure the intellectual impact that teachers and their authority exerted on students? Were the developments in early modern Italian Jewish education and pedagogics a result of the influence of sceptical views in humanist circles, according to which the seeker of knowledge was considered a “perpetual student”? If so, what role did the “perpetual student” play in the context of communal education? Our investigation will focus on notable Jewish educators and “perpetual students” of the Renaissance and early modern period: (1) the Cretan rabbi Elijah Capsali; the Venetian rabbis (2) Elijah Menahem Halfan and (3) Leon Modena; and 4) the latter’s student Giulio Morosini. The role they played will be explored against the background of the main educational frameworks that characterised late medieval and early modern Italian Jewish society: the yeshiva, private tutoring, and the communal school.

Fabrizio Lelli has been teaching Hebrew language and literature since 2001 in the Faculty of Languages of the Università degli Studi di Lecce (now called the Università del Salento), where he became an associate professor in 2006.

Senior Fellow: April–August 2022

Research Project: Sceptical Strategies in the Anti-Hasidic Propaganda of the Haskala in Eastern Europe (Eighteenth/Nineteenth Century)

At the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskala, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the main figure of this movement in Western Europe, showed a positive attitude towards Kabbalistic ideas and concepts and even integrated some of them into his biblical commentaries. Other representatives of this initial period such as Solomon Maimon (1754–1800) and Isaac Satanow attempted to establish harmonious syntheses of Maskilic and Kabbalistic thought and, in the latter’s case, even printed Lurianic treatises for the first time.
In the later development of the Maskilic currents, however, and particularly in Eastern Europe, we find strong anti-Kabbalistic and anti-Hasidic polemics. Authors such as Yehuda Leib Mieses (1798–1831), who engaged in a zealous battle against Hasidism, Josef Perl (1773–1839) with his anti-Hasidic satires, and Isaac Baer-Levinsohn (1788–1869) launched harsh attacks against Hasidism. The complex relationship between Hasidism and the Maskilim has been fiercely debated in recent scholarship as we find various diverging approaches that these groups took towards one another. The proposed research project will include a thorough analysis of this multi-faceted entanglement between the two movements and their larger religio-cultural and socio-historical contexts.
The focus of the project will be to shed light on the hybrid sceptical strategies of anti-Hasidic and anti-Kabbalistic polemics found among Eastern European writers and the role they played in their efforts for economic, social, and cultural change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To what degree were the figures involved familiar with Kabbalistic and Hasidic materials? What were their sources and what were their channels of transmission? In what manner were their sceptical approaches employed in their assaults against Hasidic theories and practices shaped by these sources? Do they refer to earlier sceptical polemics against mystical trends in Judaism from either inside or outside Jewish cultures and traditions?
In a final step, the transition of these sceptical strategies from Eastern to Western Europe will be examined, as they are of the utmost importance for the further development of European intellectual history and its perception of mystical traditions, as exemplified in the Wissenschaft des Judentums and modern academic research.

Elke Morlok is research associate at the Bavarian Research Center for Interreligious Discourses at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Senior Fellow: June–August 2022

Research Project: Love, Language, and Scepticism in Early Modern Judaism: The Case of Yohanan Alemanno

This project will develop a book chapter exploring the ideas of the famed fifteenth-century thinker Yohanan Alemanno with regard to love as expression and the limited ability of language to properly convey thoughts. As a medium that externalises and connects between two or more self-contained internal souls, love itself is a form of language. If it is given over to ambiguation for Alemanno, as he holds is the case with all language, then ideas of true union are thrown into doubt, on both the human and the divine planes. This project will examine the foundations of these ideas and how Alemanno seeks to overcome this scepticism.

Alemanno’s main ideas on love may be found in his commentary on the Song of Songs entitled Heshek Shlomo, as prompted by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. This was perhaps the first Jewish contribution to Renaissance trattati d’amore (treatises on love), though it was certainly not the only one. The most famous was Judah Abravanel’s Dialoghi d’amore, which was published in Italian in 1535. The phenomenon includes two additional commentaries on the Song of Songs: the 1605 Kenaf Renanim by Isaac Alatrino of Cingoli and Tzehalah u-Rinnah by the famed seventeenth-century physician Jacob Zahalon. The larger monograph that will ultimately result from this project will include analyses of all of these, though the research at MCAS will focus upon Alemanno.

Brian Ogren is an associate professor of Judaic studies at Rice University, Houston, Texas.

Senior Fellow: October 2021–February 2022

Research Project: Post-Cynical Linguistic Scepticism: Yehuda Amichai’s Moral Philosophy of Linguistic In-Betweenness

The poetic corpus of Yehuda Amichai, the internationally renowned literary figure lauded as a “secular psalmist” and a “poet of faithful humanism,” constitutes a profound exploration of the moral, spiritual, and social philosophy of language, which nonetheless remains strangely under-explored as such. Amichai’s underlying philosophy of language and language ethics encompass a multi-layered perception of the linguistic human experience, and of linguistic alterity, that is centred on an experience of linguistic in-betweenness: between the universality of the capacity for language and the particularity of linguistic identities; between Biblical and Modern Hebrew; between the codified language of sacred texts and the fluidity of secular everyday speech; between his German and Israeli identities; between God’s silence on the holocaust and the linguistic necessity of post-trauma healing; between the grand language of modern political ideologies and the intimate speech of the individual; and between what language can and cannot express, such as the experience of particularly profound emotions. Building on recent work in language ethics and the philosophy of language, this project explores Amichai’s moral philosophy of linguistic in-betweenness. More specifically, it argues that this human predicament of linguistic in-betweenness gives rise to a particularly insightful form of linguistic scepticism, transforming its destructive potential (as linguistic populism, cynicism, and/or nihilism) into a constructive source of ethical engagement with linguistic difference and linguistic alterity instead.

Yael Peled is a research associate in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

Junior Fellow: October 2021–September 2022

Research Project: Rule-Following and Scepticism: Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein

The aim of this research project is to bring together historical as well as systematic considerations regarding Wittgenstein’s rule-following argument conceived as a scepticism concerning meaning and language. The main idea behind the project is that the argument in question is a radicalisation of Kantian scepticism, which is itself a radicalisation of Humean scepticism concerning causality. Hume famously challenges the notion of causality by arguing that in our experience, there is nothing more than a kind of succession in physical entities. Kant radicalises this problem by arguing that it is not limited to the concept of causality, but that it rather applies to all pure concepts of the understanding or categories. Following this line of thought from Hume to Kant to Wittgenstein, this project puts forward the idea that the rule-following argument is a radicalisation of Kantian scepticism in two important respects. First, it transfers the problem from a conceptual to a linguistic phase. In so doing, it makes it a problem not just about the pure concepts of the understanding, but also about the meaning of all linguistic units. More importantly, it changes the problem’s direction of fit. Whereas for both Hume and Kant the problem merely concerns the objects of experience, in Wittgenstein’s version, there is also a corresponding problem in one’s actions.

Mahdi Ranaee is writing a PhD thesis in philosophy at Universität Potsdam, Germany.

Senior Fellow: December 2021–February 2022

Research Project: The Shadow of Reason: Imagination, Language, and Scepticism in Spinoza

This project will argue that we can explain the structure of the imagination in Spinoza’s mature work, the Ethics, if we pay close attention to his use and critique of the late scholastic notion of a “being of reason” (ens rationis) in his early works. Although Spinoza rejects the metaphysics of the medieval doctrine of the analogy of being (analogia entis]), he adopts it for a very different purpose; namely, to explain the nature and function of the imagination. Some recent scholars have argued that Spinoza ultimately drops the notion of analogy from his mature system. In contrast, this project will argue that he transforms the notion of analogy in his theory of the imagination. It will show how we can use the notion of analogy to explain how imaginative signs are formed and how they are employed in understanding the world, and will also show how the analogical structure of the imagination explains the extent to which they are partly true and how the imagination might aid reason in discovering adequate ideas. Because the imagination is at the core of Spinoza’s account of language, this interpretation also attempts to explain how language sometimes functions to lead us astray and sometimes functions to help us to reason correctly in his critical explanations of religion, politics, and even philosophy itself. Thus, this interpretation of the imagination makes sense of how sceptical problems are generated and partly overcome in his system.

Michael Rosenthal is Grafstein Professor of Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Junior Fellow: October 2021–September 2022

Research Project: A Sceptical Examination of “Immortality” in the Kabbalistic and Daoist Hagiographical Texts

Our human nature tends to reject and transcend death, the inevitable end of life. This aspiration is amply reflected in various literary works, among which hagiography is a primary field. This research aims at a sceptical analysis of the notion of “immortality” in the legendary accounts of the saints by comparing the mystical language of the Kabbalistic and Daoist traditions. On the one hand, immortality is a classic motif in the library of world literature, mirroring an everlasting desire for an eternal life shared by all humanity. Yet on the other, this concept transcends the empirical knowledge of the living, who have never vanquished death. The fundamental question is therefore: How could the idea of “immortality,” the triumph over death, be described in the sacred texts by those who have no experience of it at all (as first-person reports are less than rare)? More generally, can something beyond human experience be transmitted via language? Furthermore, what literary techniques did the hagiographers use in order to persuade their readers to believe in something that none of them had achieved? In short, the linguistic bewilderment of the meaning of immortality and the mechanisms of its persuasion based on an empirical absence are the two major angles of enquiry. While the narrators of the past encountered the challenge that “dying is itself a nonevent” and “the absence of death changes the meaning of all other events,” our challenge is now that of a sceptical demystification.

Jianyu Shen is writing a PhD thesis in Jewish studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Senior Fellow: December 2021–February 2022

Research Project: In Search of a Subterranean Strand in “Marrano Heresy”: The Philological and Historical Questioning of the Bible

The focus of this project is the role that criticisms directed against the biblical text, construed as a source revealed by God, played in the formation of scepticism. It will trace the development of these criticisms among conversos and former conversos in the Jewish community of mid-seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The various voices challenging the authority of the Jewish Bible have different origins and advance different arguments, which are sometimes closely connected to one another. Some of them arose in the Iberian Peninsula within the Jewish milieu, others were born out of libertine literature, and still others were nurtured by the anti-Jewish Christian polemic. What comes to the fore in this last strand of anti-Jewish polemic is arguments pointing to different translations of the same words in different translations of the Bible into Latin or Spanish. This project will focus on early evidence for the various attacks on the Bible coming from the heterodox thinkers described, among others, by Saul Levi Morteira. It will then raise the question of whether in his early years, Spinoza shared, at least in part, the topics of biblical criticism that will be discussed.

Myriam Silvera is an adjunct professor at the Italian Rabbinical College and at Università di Roma Tor Vergata, Italy.

Junior Fellow: October 2021–September 2022

Research Project: Educating Doubt: Scepticism and Certainty in the Translation and Transmission of Knowledge in a Modern Shi’ite Community

This project, based on eleven months of ethnographic field research, proposes to analyse how the language of philosophical and religious scepticism is communicated, translated, and transmitted by multi-lingual “Islamists”—both clerics and lay persons—associated with the Islamisches Zentrum Hamburg, a major centre for the Shi’ite community in Germany and one affiliated with religious figures representing conservative elements within Iran. Despite engagement by leading liberal intellectuals in the Shi’a world (for example, Abdolkarim Soroush), the concept of religious scepticism typically plays a subordinate role in the theology and philosophy of Iran-based Shi’ite “Islamist” movements, which instead tend to stress a vocabulary rooted in a moral universe structured by concepts like certainty, divine truth, and perfection. By examining how religiously conservative institutions and communities engage with, translate, and transmit these conceptual inventories of certainty and scepticism in the liberal socio-political order of post-reunification Germany, rather than presenting an intellectual impasse, we are afforded a fertile opportunity to explore both the limitations and potential extensions of religious scepticism.

Simon Theobald is a postdoctoral fellow and holds a PhD in anthropology from the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.

Senior Fellow: April–August 2022

Research Project: The Apocrypha in Yiddish: Translating Biblical Literature in Early Modern Ashkenaz

Biblical literature was the most common reading material in the medieval and early modern world for Jews and Christians alike. Beginning in the fifteenth century, biblical texts multiplied through the invention of the printing press, as well as through Bible translations into the vernacular. The Protestant Reformation questioned the canonicity of the books of the Bible and suggested a new order for the Bible that included a new section incorporating the Apocrypha. The Bible and biblical literature in Yiddish are commonly seen as having been transmitted separately from the Christian tradition. There are, however, multiple Yiddish manuscripts and prints of various books of the Apocrypha, which prove to have been derived from the German-language Bible translations of the Reformation era, such as the Zürich Bible (1531) and the Luther Bible (1534/45). The dependencies of these Yiddish texts on German Protestant sources has been hitherto unnoticed, in spite of the wide circulation attained by the Yiddish editions in German-speaking lands, Italy, Poland, and the Netherlands between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This book project, The Apocrypha in Yiddish, will examine these texts and the related dynamics of cross-cultural, cross-linguistic, and cross-religious negotiations.

Ruth von Bernuth is a professor at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.