Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism

Jeremy P. Brown, Ph.D. (2015), New York University, is Assistant Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He has served as Simon and Ethel Flegg Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University. His research and teaching focus on kabbalah and medieval Judaism. Marc Herman, Ph.D. (2016), University of Pennsylvania, is a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He has held fellowships at Columbia University, Fordham University, the University of Michigan, and Yale Law School. He researches and teaches medieval Judaeo-Arabic and Arabic legal thought.

Acknowledgements



Introduction



1 The Commandments as a Discursive Nexus of Medieval Judaism

 Marc Herman and Jeremy P. Brown



Case Studies in Individual Commandments



2 Dê Maḥsoro as the Key to Jewish Almsgiving: A Maimonidean Interpretive Innovation and Its Legal Afterlife to the Fifteenth Century

 Alyssa M. Gray



3 The Taqqanah of the Moredet in the Middle Ages

 Judith R. Baskin



4 An Early Kabbalistic Explanation of Temple Sacrifice: Text and Study

 Jonathan Dauber



The Ramifications of Maimonides



5 Early Evaluation of Maimonides’s Enumeration of the Commandments against the Background of the Eastern Maimonidean Controversy

 Marc Herman



6 Maimonides’s Long Journey from Greek to Jewish Ethics

 Albert Dov Friedberg



7 The Reasons for the Commandments in Isaac Ibn Laṭīf’s The Gate of Heaven (1238)

 Guadalupe González Diéguez



Accounting for the Decalogue



8 The Ten Commandments Are Implanted in Human Minds: Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Rational Approach to the Decalogue

 Mariano Gómez Aranda



9 Decoding the Decalogue: Theosophical Re-engraving of the Ten Commandments in Thirteenth-Century Kabbalah

 Avishai Bar-Asher



Discourses of Ṭaʿame ha-miṣvot: Tosafism, Rhineland Pietism, Egyptian Pietism, Kabbalah, Sabbatianism



10 Ṭaʿame ha-miṣvot in Medieval Ashkenaz

 Ephraim Kanarfogel



11 Pietism in the Law and the Law of Pietism: From Moses to Abraham Maimonides

 Elisha Russ-Fishbane



12 A Castilian Debate about the Aims and Limits of Theurgic Practice: Rationalizing Incest Taboos in the Zohar, Moses de León, and Joseph of Hamadan

 Leore Sachs-Shmueli



13 Ascesis, Hypernomianism, and the Excess of Lack: Semiotic Transfiguration of the Somatic

 Elliot R. Wolfson



Select Bibliography

Index