Fellows and Research Projects: 2023–24

Senior Fellow: October 2023–February 2024

Research Project: The Art and Science of Philosophising: Jewish Modern and Pre-Modern Sources of Leo Strauss’s Scepticism

Thanks to new discoveries in physics and quantum mechanics, we know that philosophy and physics are equally obligated to tend to the so-called truth, to the knowledge or comprehension of what we call “reality” (even though we are aware that this knowledge can be ever-changing and never complete). For physicists, as for philosophers, a certain sceptical attitude towards reality seems to be the only method that will ever enable us to rethink reality and to change the language in which we speak of it. Leo Strauss (1899–1973)—one of the most important German-Jewish philosophers of the epoch of the (so-called crisis of the) Weimar Republic—described scientific scepticism as the basis of philosophy, as a rigorous science, and as a method that had already been used by the philosophers of the past, from antiquity to medieval and early modern times.

Central to the topic of this project is a complete examination of scepticism in Strauss’s work. To achieve this, it will systematically examine and reconstruct all the modern, pre-modern, and ancient influences that shaped his scepticism, thereby particularly considering his Jewish sources, which are generally the most neglected by Strauss scholars. This project intends to reconstruct Strauss’s scepticism in its various aspects both as a method of knowledge and a way of living.

Chiara Adorisio is associate professor of philosophical anthropology at the Sapienza Università di Roma.

Senior Fellow: April–June 2024

Research Project: First of All, Survival: Michel de Montaigne’s Existential Scepticism 

The focus of this project will be Michel de Montaigne and his peculiar form of sceptical reasoning which will be called existential scepticism. Michel de Montaigne does not belong to the well-established canon of modern Jewish thinkers: it is only recently that the scholars began to pay attention to the Marrano background of his thought. This project wants to analyse the possible connection between Montaigne’s Marranism and the existential type of scepticism which permeates his writings. The thesis is that the Marrano choice of ordinary survival over the “glorious death” of kiddush ha-Shem, explicitly affirmed by Montaigne in his Essays, favours a sceptical attitude towards the “tradition of the sublime.” When deeply reflected, as in the case of the author of the Essays, the choice of life as daily unheroic “survie” – the Marrano version of the biblical u’baharta ba’hayim – lends a critical view of the tradition (not only religious, also philosophical) conceived in sacrificial and martyrological terms as a body of beliefs that require of their followers to lay their lives at the altar of the higher truth.

Agata Bielik-Robson is professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham.

Senior Fellow: July–August 2024

Research Project: Fame and Discredit. The Reception of the Zohar among Christian Readers in the Early Modern Period

This research project concentrates on the reception of the Zohar among a Christian (Catholic and Protestant) readership in the Early Modern Period. The consideration of the Zohar as a fundamental text of Jewish mystical literature changed dramatically between the late fifteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century. What was first perceived as a sort of confirmation of the major tenets of the Christian faith turned out to be a forgery, a medieval text erroneously attributed to Shimon ben Yochay. As a result of this discovery, the attitude toward the theological conceptions expressed in the text changed accordingly, shifting from enthusiasm to open hostility.
One of the decisive factors in this attitude shift was the development of critical methods to analyse historical sources, which led to the exposure of several pseudo-Zoharic texts as forgeries circulating in the Renaissance – especially those by Pablo de Heredia and Petrus Galatinus.
At the same time (more precisely, at the beginning of the seventeenth century), another intellectual battle was being fought on multiple fronts: the Europe-wide dispute about the antiquity of the vowel-points in the Biblical text. A Huguenot, Louis Cappel, contested the antiquity of the Masoretic signs, while the Lutheran Johannes Buxtorf defended it, also against the ideas of Elia Levita, who was working for a Catholic cardinal. In this context, Buxtorf referred to the Zoharic literature (but also to the Bahir) in support of his views, since the vowel-points are mentioned and kabbalistically interpreted in several passages.
This project intends to show that the authority of the Zohar was one of the casualties of that memorable battle. This will also allow to analyse the origins of the sceptical attitude of Baroque philologists towards the Zohar: was it genuine critique, or just the usual clash of different, incompatible, faiths?  

Saverio Campanini is professor of Hebrew language and literature at the Department of History and Culture of the Università di Bologna.

Junior Fellow: October 2023–September 2024

Research Project: The Dark Ground and the Absent God: Negative Theodicy as a Sceptical Strategy in Jacob and Susan Taubes

This project advances a philosophical reconstruction and genealogy of the concept of “negative theodicy” through Jacob and Susan Taubes. It brings together their respective accounts of theodicy from the early 1950s onwards, arguing that although they often have divergent inspirations, it is possible to find in them a shared negative and sceptical core, which makes it possible to speak of “negative theodicy” as a concept that is common to them both and as their distinct contribution to the post-Holocaust theodicy debate. Jacob and Susan Taubes rethink theodicy as generating both a sceptical emphasis on questions over answers and hesitation and darkness over certainty and light, and also a sceptical strategy of questioning and resisting the imposition of truth, order, or authority from above. This strategy has ethical, political, and political-theological implications, which converge around the ideas of suffering and resistance and of approaching theodicy from below. This project contributes to the topic of “(Jewish) Scepticism as a Strategy and Challenge in Past and Present” by theorising the sceptical challenge (to positive theodicy) and strategy (of questioning and resistance) inherent in the rethinking of theodicy in two important post-war Jewish thinkers, a challenge that transforms the modern tradition of theodicy.

Kirill Chepurin is a postdoctoral researcher. He wrote his PhD thesis in theology at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

Junior Fellow: October 2023–January 2024

Research Project: Moses Mendelssohn’s Conception of the Beautiful: Scepticism and Rationalist Aesthetics in Jewish Philosophy 

This research project aims to shed light on the contribution of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) to German aesthetics, in this case through his conception of the Beautiful, as it emphasises his original image as a Jewish philosopher doing German philosophy. More precisely, Mendelssohn’s position on the Beautiful can be studied and understood as an articulation between rationalism and scepticism. In other words, by overturning sensualism, Mendelssohn displays an intellectual scepticism, denying human reason the capacity to fully access the Beautiful.
Moreover, Mendelssohn’s involvement in the field of aesthetics goes beyond the mere desire to participate in contemporary debates (the definition of the sublime, the theory of mixed feelings, and so on), for such a field requires a great deal of culture, ranging from antiquity to his own time period. He proves that he is just as worthy as anyone else to take part in the debates on the Beautiful, the tragic, or aesthetics as a science that has developed since Baumgarten’s work. This project also intends to study Mendelssohn’s aesthetics regarding his status as a maskil, a man of the Haskalah promoting Jewish emancipation and the Jews’ exit from the ghetto. Although his aesthetic works were written in German and his religious texts were written in Hebrew, it would be a mistake to treat them separately. Instead, this project seeks to bring the two fields into dialogue and to rethink Mendelssohn’s aesthetics through his role as a maskil. In this way, it intends to show that he is a paradigmatic example of how Jewish and German cultures were able to exchange and collaborate as aesthetics emerged in Germany. 

Anaïs Delambre is a postdoctoral researcher. She has a PhD in philosophy from the Université de Montréal.

Senior Fellow: May–June 2024

Research Project: Room for Doubts. Models, Practices, and People in the Ghetto System (Rome, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)

In recent years, numerous studies have investigated the ghetto system. Rarely has research addressed the internal organization of the ghetto and the weight of individual choices. It was the Jews’ ability to develop individual and collective strategies of resistance that ensured that the group survived in its diversity. In this sense, the doubts about the present and future of the individual ghettoized Jews could be seen as a structuring factor of the ghetto. Moving from this, I would like to propose a new reading of the ghettoization model that considers doubt as a categorizing element of both Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Jewish relations. I will aim to redefine the ghetto as an ecosystem of interactions in which doubt functions as a relational superfield. If by relational field we mean precisely the space of mediation in conversion processes, then the ability to resist as Jew becomes the functioning and motivating framework of mediation itself: On the part of the majority group, doubts about identity are nurtured in favour of baptism; on the part of the minority group, tools are employed to thin out these very doubts. This hypothesis will be tested on the history of the ghetto of Rome, which will be studied for the first time from this perspective.

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

Junior Fellow: October 2023–September 2024

Research Project: Sceptical Foundations in Walter Benjamin’s Reflections on Experience, Language, and Literature 

The main hypothesis of this study is that scepticism—the impossibility of knowledge—lies at the core of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on experience, language, and literature, starting from his early writings in 1913 to 1916. This impossibility does not represent a dead end. On the contrary, it is the critical precondition for a developing theory that sees constant change and the obliqueness of concepts and aesthetic forms—such as translation, allegory, and literary montage—as the only way to remain truthful to reality, both theoretically and politically.
This project’s second hypothesis is that this dialectic finds its structure thanks to the intensive exchange between Benjamin and the Jewish cultural milieu that began in 1913, and especially that with Gershom Scholem regarding Jewish mysticism from 1915 on. Its philosophical consequences, however, extended up to the 1930s and can be recognised in several works, such as Crisis of the Novel, Berliner Kindheit, The Storyteller, and even in the methodology chosen for the Arcades Project.

Caterina Diotto is a postdoctoral researcher. She has a PhD in philosophy from the Università degli Studi di Verona.

Senior Fellow: May–August 2024

Research Project: “Doubting the Classics” in the Northern Song (960–1126): Politics or Scepticism?

Contrary to modern Confucian and Peoples’ Republican lore, the authenticity of Confucian tradition and transmission as canonised by the imperial court was never uncontested. Ouyang Xiu (1007–72) is famous for his criticism of the Book of Songs, Sima Guang (1019–86) doubted the authenticity of Mengzi – one of the Four Books of later orthodoxy, and Zhang Zai (1020–78) even proclaimed doubt to be the beginning of philosophical insight. It is quite clear that these attacks were, at least to some extent, directed against the political reforms of Wang Anshi (1021–86). He was a homo novus from the south and fiercely opposed the ruling establishment which consisted of landowners from the north. In the young emperor Shenzong (r. 1067–85), he found a patron who was willing to raise him to the highest offices in order to reform the financial and social foundations of the empire and create a centralised state. Wang based himself on a new interpretation of some of the classics, Mengzi among them, and imposed his exegesis on officialdom by proscribing it as compulsory for the imperial examinations and using the new medium of print for the distribution of his commentaries. Scholarship has more or less focused on two aspects: first, on the political aspects, because there is no doubt that the motives for at least some of these utterances are immediately related to Wang’s reforms; second, on a general attitude towards criticism, which may be viewed more or less positively. To the best of my knowledge, there has not yet been a systematic study attempting to investigate the relation between these two aspects and, in a more general approach, the relevance of “doubting the classics” to the paradigm of scepticism.
This research project will take Zhang Zai as a starting point and discuss his position in the context of his time. A search for further “doubting” voices besides those already well known will be undertaken, and the resulting corpus will be critically surveyed for its relevance for a scepticism more sinico.

Michael Friedrich is professor of Sinology at the Universität Hamburg.

Senior Fellow: October 2023–February 2024 

Research Project: The Epistemic Role of Cognitive Skills in Scholastic Philosophy (1250–1650)

Scepticism about the external world took on a particularly forceful form during the late Scholastic period, where divine omnipotence came to be centred in debates about the mind and reality. While most Scholastics responded to this sceptical worry by limiting divine power (e.g., by appealing to divine goodness), some, instead of attempting to defuse the challenge, accepted it and used it as a way of testing different theories in different domains. If a theory entailed scepticism, then that theory needed to be revised. This project—part of a broader book project on moral and cognitive abilities in Scholastic philosophy (1250–1650)—concerns the following two domains where this strategy of using the sceptical hypothesis to limit our theorising was put to use: the issue of the ontological status of mental acts on the one hand and the issue of the justification of our beliefs on the other. It will argue that a distinctive “skills-first” theory of cognition emerged from this strategy, which rejected infallibilism about justification and embraced a kind of reliabilism about knowledge. On this view, a belief is justified insofar as it is reliably produced by a suitable (acquired) cognitive skill, such as the skill of distinguishing breeds of cattle.

Peter Hartman is an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago, Department of Philosophy.

Senior Fellow: January–February 2024

Research Project: The Orient in the Occident: The Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Nahda, and the Critique of European Modernity

This study of the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums focuses on Jewish scholarship that seeks to position Judaism in relation to the other major world religions, especially Christianity and Islam, but also Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and what was termed “paganism.” Jewish historiography included a sharp critique of Christian biases, European methods, and traditional Jewish modes of learning. In these ways, it bears interesting parallels to the nahda, the Arab renaissance of the same era that pursued similar goals using similar methods.

Jewish scholars employed philological analyses of ancient texts in order to prove very modern claims that held political and theological significance; for example, that Kantian ethics are inherent in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. In so doing, they demonstrate an effort to undermine the standard Christian claims regarding Western culture and its origins in classical Greek civilisation. Jewish scholarship, which was widely read and discussed by European Christians as well as Jews, was an effort to generate scepticism regarding received historical and cultural assumptions. This study will demonstrate the politics underlying their rhetoric of scepticism, with its implications for historiography’s role in the twisted road of contemporary theological self-understanding.

Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.

Senior Fellow: January–February 2024

Research Project: Scepticism of Non-Sceptics: A Puzzling Problem

Scepticism would be a much less interesting concept if, alongside the official sceptics—in other words, those of the Neopyrrhonian scepticism elaborated by Aenesidemus—there were no thinkers whose works include passages or allusions that were sceptical or close to scepticism. In some cases, even the struggle against scepticism can be a means to acquire a deeper knowledge of the concept. The most famous is that of Descartes, who thought that the discovery of the cogito could be the end of scepticism. Before him, Augustine had tried to get rid of Academic “scepticism,” a word he never used, though he probably knew something about Neopyrrhonism thanks to his master Ambrose. Moreover, in antiquity itself, there was a huge doxographical effort, at least in the New Academy, to create a genealogy of the Academic suspension of assent (epochè) by considering as sceptics those thinkers in whom there were only some traces of the philosophy of doubt. The most impressive sceptic doxography of this kind is the one we find in Cicero’s Lucullus.
The main purpose of this research project will be the evaluation of the exact role of non-sceptics in the history of scepticism. The modality of their influence is manifold: opposition, the use of sceptics by non-sceptics, the use of non-sceptics by sceptics, conscious or incidental contradictions, and so on.

Carlos Lévy was a professor of Roman philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne until 2015 and is now a professor emeritus and fellow of the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies.

Senior Fellow: January–February 2024

Research Project: Scepticism in Halakhah: Searching for Reasons for the Mitzvoth and Halakhot

The research project deals with scepticism in halakhah. Scepticism is connected to various issues in jurisprudence in general and in halakhah in particular. The research focus will be on scepticism about the human ability to discover the reasons for the commandments. This form of scepticism does not appear in the legal and halakhic discourse of Biblical, Second Temple, and Talmudic literature. Yet it is expressed by halakhists and thinkers from the late Middle Ages onwards. It should be emphasized that the need to decipher the reasons for the commandments is relevant not only for intellectual but also for religious purposes, as well as for the halakhic application of the law. In a recent article, Lorberbaum distinguishes four types of reservations about the human claim to understand the reasons behind the commandments: “halakhic religiosity of mystery and transcendence,” “halakhic religiosity of obedience and servitude,” “theistic voluntarism,” and “jurisprudence of rules.” Some of these reservations are connected to a form of scepticism about the human ability to discover the reasons for divine laws.

The work during the research stay at the MCAS will aim to study the sceptical features underlying these reservations, and to understand their impact on halakhic life and discourse. Four outstanding halakhists will be given particular attention: Maimonides, R. Shlomo b. Adret, R. Yosef Karo, R. Moshe Sofer.

Yair Lorberbaum is a professor in the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University.

Senior Fellow: June–July 2024

Research Project: Sceptical Challenges and Strategies in the Inter-Confessional Debate on Transubstantiation, the Trinity, and the Rule of Faith in Late Seventeenth-Century England

This project, which will result in a 10,000-word journal article, deals with the debate of 1686–87 between English Catholic polemicists and Anglican divines about transubstantiation, the Trinity, and the rule of faith. Drawing on anti-Trinitarian arguments on the impossibility of deducing the Trinitarian dogma from Scripture alone, Catholic apologists criticized the Protestant doctrine of “sola Scriptura” as leading to the denial of not only transubstantiation but also the Trinity. Thus, they insisted on grounding biblical exegesis in ecclesiastical tradition. Protestant theologians replied that the Trinity was a “truth above reason” revealed in Scripture. But this solution, implying that the Trinity was not plainly comprehensible to reason, involved sceptical challenges and elicited sceptical arguments, as doubt was cast on the role of rational inquiry in biblical hermeneutics, on the comprehensibility of Scripture, and on the doctrinal authority of ecclesiastical institutions. Catholics indeed denounced the fallibility of individual interpretation of Scripture, while Protestants argued that Church Councils were not exempt from mistakes. Thus, those two parties accused each other of spreading scepticism about the scriptural and ecclesiastical foundations of religious truth.

Diego Lucci is Professor of Philosophy and History at the American University in Bulgaria.

Junior Fellow: October 2023–September 2024

Research Project: The “philosophische Täuschung”: The Ground Concept of Salomon Maimon’s Critical Scepticism

The goal of this research project is to analyse the concept of “Täuschung” in Maimon’s works in order to obtain two main results: on the one hand, to define his major sceptical tool against the unproven grounds of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, as well as any kind of dogmatic assumption; on the other, to shed light on his peculiar and controversial intention to combine his sceptical doubt with the aim to follow and endorse Kant’s critical project; that is, his so-called “critical scepticism.” As will be shown, the concept of “Täuschung” clarifies how and why the necessary illusion of the certainty of those grounds arises, also establishing to what extent philosophy as critical engagement can be developed. Although present in all of Maimon’s most important essays and articles, this notion has not been deepened in any specific study that would allow us to define its function. Reconstructing the meaning of this concept would not only explain the possibility of Maimon’s project of making scepticism (understood in its much broader sense) coexist with criticism in a single system, but would also define his most challenging sceptical strategy against any uncertain argumentation, which maintains its validity beyond the limits of Maimon’s own time.

Maria Caterina Marinelli is a postdoctoral researcher. She has a PhD in philosophy from the Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata in cotutelle with Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

Senior Fellow: August–September 2024

Research Project: Eradication of the Doubt and the Formation of the Nationalist Idiom in the Maskilic Thought 

Perets Smolenskin (1842–1885) is widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern Jewish nationalism. While it's known that the his nationalist vision coincided with the critique of the Berlin Haskalah, this project aims to delve into another aspect of Smolenskin’s ideological work, presenting Jewish modernization and nationalization as efforts to eradicate doubt from the Jewish intellectual tradition. Smolenskin’s most extensive attempt to delve into the ontology of doubt emerged in the preface he wrote for the book “Even Rosha” (1871) by his mentor and friend Abraham Krochmal (1817–1888), who sought to popularize Spinoza’s philosophical ideas. Though endorsing Krochmal’s alignment with Spinoza, Smolenskin made a distinction between the “positive” figure of Spinoza and other Jewish trailblazers, and the “negative” group associated with doubt, including Rabbi Meir, Maimonides, and Moses Mendelssohn.
This project combines two intersecting research directions. The first one explores the relationship between the criticism of doubt and the nationalist vision propagated by Perets Smolenskin. The second direction investigates the encounters between Abraham Krochmal, Smolenskin, and Moshe Leib Lilienblum (1843–1910)—another student of Krochmal’s in Odessa.
Finally, the hypothesis is put forward that the critical secularism proposed by Krochmal played an instrumental role in shaping the early national thought of Smolenskin and Lilienblum. Uncovering the connections between these three figures and their intellectual influences is the main aim of this project.

Svetlana Natkovich is a senior lecturer at the Department of Jewish History of Haifa University.

Senior Fellow: August 2024

Research Project: Doubt and Fear: The Emotional Elements in Hasidic Responses to Scepticism 

In the nineteenth century, Hasidic leaders express various defensive responses to doubt and scepticism arousing in their followers, as part of their exposure to the enlightenment’s criticism on various principle traditional belief. In my proposed project I ask to reveal the “emotional” element in their response, and prominent role of fear. In my study I aim at analysing a variety of Hasidic sermons dealing with the concept of doubt (safek). From initial research I conducted of the material, I propose to differentiate between four categories of doubt, and the threat and fear related to them: a) theological doubt b) social doubt c) legal doubt d) self-doubt. I will apply methods and viewpoints developed in the field of “emotions in history,” to reveal the emotional components in the Hasidic responses to doubt and scepticism in its cultural context.

Leore Sachs-Shmueli is a lecturer in the Department of Jewish Thought at Bar-Ilan University.

Junior Fellow: October 2023–September 2024

Research Project: An Unknown Source of Scepticism? The Influence of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) on Moses Mendelssohn’s Philosophische Gespräche (1755) and Its Religious Implications

The goal of this project is to argue (i) that Moses Mendelssohn’s Philosophische Gespräche (1755) is driven by a sceptical attitude that is mainly indebted to Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique-critique (1697) and (ii) that this sceptical attitude can be seen as a rhetorical tool for facing religious oppression in both Bayle’s and Mendelssohn’s case. This project will fill a gap by shedding light on an as yet unexplored philosophical relation. This relation is very interesting from a social and religious point of view given that both authors belonged to religious minorities suffering from political oppression. The exploration of how a sceptical philosophical attitude fits into a context of social discrimination is linked to the following questions: How is scepticism manifested in literary sources and how is it employed to convey meaning and messages to the audience? How exactly and with respect to which sources is it harnessed as a tool to challenge an opponent or authority in politics and social discourse?

Guillem Sales Vilalta is currently a Research Collaborator at the Universidad de Barcelona.

Senior Fellow: June–August 2024

Research Project: Infinity in Modern Philosophy

It was generally agreed in the early modern period that infinity can be understood as a quantitative notion that applies to the likes of space, time, and number, which are in an important sense unlimited. There was, however, no consensus on the question of whether there is, in addition to this quantitative infinity, a non-quantitative type of infinity—one that applies to God, and possibly God alone. My project explores both skeptical and affirmative answers to this question in XVII century philosophy. It aims to answer three main research questions. First, what are the fundamental differences between quantitative and non-quantitative notions of infinity? The second question concerns the historical antecedents of quantitative and non-quantitative notions of infinity, and requires clarifying the theory of quantity that underlies the quantitative notion; as well as tracing a path through central figures in Judeo-Muslim-Christian tradition leading to non-quantitative approaches to infinity. A third cluster of questions concerns infinity itself: what it is, how it works, whether it is realized, and why it is unique. Answering these questions requires charting the various options, both quantitative and non-quantitative. Indeed, one of the project’s innovations resides in its attention to different versions of the quantitative and non-quantitative approaches that were on offer in the early modern period.

Anat Schechtman is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. She is particularly interested in theories of infinity, perfection, being, and substance in the early modern period, focusing on Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz. 

Senior Fellow: May–July 2024

Research Project: Judicial Proceedings in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: Jewish Trials and Doubt

Although there is no lack of works dedicated to judicial practice in our peninsula for the late medieval and early modern period (for example Zorzi, 1997; Fosi, 2007; Dean, 2007), there are conversely few contributions that deal with trials involving Jews in various ways (Quaglioni 1991; AA. VV, 1998; Esposito & Quaglioni, 2006; Veronese, 2012). Yet Jews, although a minority, were fully part of society and were consequently involved in court cases on a par with the majority group.
In most cases, mentions of judicial proceedings (both civil and criminal) are found scattered in works dedicated to the Jewish presence, without, however, a detailed analysis of the trials.
As far as I know, there are also very few editions or transcripts of court proceedings, allowing scholars to place the trial itself within a strategy (on the Christian side as well as on the Jewish side); almost always, in fact, the study on the trials involving Jews focuses on highlighting the consequences, but not the forms and procedures of the trial itself. Forms and procedures were almost always respected, without there being - apparently - any significant difference from what happens with Christians. The procedural form always starts with a doubt: why does the accused stand before the judges? What is the nature of the accusation? Why do the accusers call certain witnesses to testify and not others? And equally, what are the motives of the accused to pursue a certain line of defense? Every trial starts from a doubt, explicit or not, and that is what I am interested in working on.
There is also a particular trial, the inquisitorial one, which although in theory it should not involve Jews (how can one accuse them of heresy, as non-Christians?), in fact, does not always respect this rule. In this case, the doubt does not only concern the trial practices, but the nature of the accusation itself. The Jew does not know why he is facing the inquisitors and continues to wonder (even more so, probably, than Christians) why he is being prosecuted. There is thus in this case the doubt that comes from not understanding the accusation itself, which is completely incongruous and lacking any apparent legal basis.

Alessandra Veronese is associate professor of Medieval and Jewish history.