Emerging Voices in Jewish Studies: Marc Herman

Legal Theory and Revelation: Jewish Law in an Islamic Milieu
A Lecture by Marc Herman, with responses by Kathryn Kueny, Professor of Theology, and Jed Shugerman, Professor of Law

Medieval Jews in the Islamic world were the first to pen systematic accounts of revelation and the rabbinic tradition. This lecture explores two competing accounts of Sinaitic revelation authored by two of the outstanding jurists and philosophers of the Jewish Middle Ages, Saèadya ben Joseph Gaon and Moses Maimonides. While both thinkers implicitly asserted the timelessness of their ideas, this lecture situates these two narratives of revelation and presentations of the role of the Talmudic rabbis within contemporaneous developments and trends in the Islamic legal tradition. Though cloaked in rabbinic garb, these dueling attempts to theorize revelation were both innovative and profoundly contemporary.

Marc Herman, Ph.D., is the Rabin-Shvidler Joint Post-Doctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Fordham and Columbia. He graduated from the Department of Religious Studies of the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. His dissertation, “Systematizing God’s Law: Rabbanite Jurisprudence in the Islamic World from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries,” examines Jewish legal theory in the Islamic world, with a particular focus on medieval approaches to the Oral Torah. His dissertation was named as a finalist for the Association for Jewish Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and in the past, he has been awarded fellowships from the Knapp Family Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Cardozo Center for Jewish Law, and the Wexner Foundation. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University, and he has forthcoming articles in The Jewish Quarterly Review and Jewish History.

This is a joint event of Fordham’s Program for Jewish Studies, the Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work, and Columbia University’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.