Biblical Interpretation - the Twelfth-Century Norman View

In person talk at UCL, also hybrid on zoom, by Professor Aaron Koller about how relationships between Rashbam and Ibn Ezra evolved in Italy, France, and England. 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. This talk will show that these two great intellectuals knew of each other even before actually meeting, and they shared certain methods and goals in their work of biblical interpretation. And yet the lasting effect of their encounter was a polemic that Ibn Ezra wrote after his departure from Rouen to London, where he spent his last years. The differences laid bare between the two scholars are illuminating regarding the questions on the intellectual agenda of twelfth-century Jewish scholars. 

Aaron Koller is the Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge The author of Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought (2014) and Unbinding Isaac: The Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought (2020), among other books, and the editor of five more, Aaron lives with his wife Shira Hecht and their children in Cambridge.

Drinks and refreshments will be served before the talk at 6pm. The lecture will start at 6.30pm