2026 Jurnet's House Lecture: Jewish Biblical Interpretation in Medieval England and Normandy

The Spanish polymath Abraham Ibn Ezra spent the last 25 years of his life traveling through Christian Europe. Already renowned and advanced in years, he arrived in the mid-1150s in Rouen, then the home of the great French biblical commentator and talmudist Shmuel ben Meir (Rashbam), grandson of the even more famous scholar Rashi. Since they shared certain methods and goals in their work of biblical interpretation, the relationship between the two scholars was one of admiration and rivalry. We will follow the manuscript trail to see how their work evolved in dialogue with each other, climaxing with a poetic polemic that Ibn Ezra wrote in London after his departure from Rouen. Situating the differences between these scholars in their contexts illuminates the intellectual agendas of twelfth-century Jewish scholars and the ways in which ideas flowed around western Europe.

Speaker: 

Aaron Koller is Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought (2014) and Unbinding Isaac: The Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought (2020) among other books and is currently working on a global history of the alphabet.