Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies

The Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies is a DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe directed by Prof Dr Giuseppe Veltri. It opened in October 2015 and will run for eight years. The central aim of the Maimonides Centre is to explore and research scepticism in Judaism in its dual manifestation as a purely philosophical tradition and as a more general expression of sceptical strategies, concepts, and attitudes in the cultural field.

MCAS offers a senior and junior fellowship programme that allows internationally established scholars, as well as aspiring early career researchers, to participate for extended or shorter periods of time.

MCAS will host thirteen senior fellows and five junior fellows (PhD and postdoctoral candidates) during the summer term.

Senior Fellows

• Michela Andreatta (University of Rochester/USA),
  
• Heinrich Assel (Universität Greifswald/Germany),
  
• Flavia Buzzetta (CNRS Paris/France),
  
• Antonella Del Prete (Università degli Studi della Tuscia, Viterbo/Italy),
  
• Serena Di Nepi (Sapienza Università di Roma/Italy),
  
• Alexander Dinges (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg/Germany),
• Jonathan Garb (Hebrew University of Jerusalem/Israel),
  
• Uriel Gellman (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan/Israel),
  
• Julie Klein (Villanova University/USA),
  
• Fabrizio Lelli (Università del Salento, Lecce/Italy),
  
• Elke Morlok (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg/Germany),
  
• Brian Ogren (Rice University, Houston/USA), and
  
• Ruth von Bernuth (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill/USA).

Junior Fellows

• Idit Chikurel,
  
• Danielle Drori,
  
• Mahdi Ranee,
  
• Jianyu Shen, and
• Simon Theobald.
  

Maimonides Lectures on Scepticism are scheduled two to three times a semester. Eminent scholars focusing on various aspects of scepticism are invited to present and discuss their research in an evening lecture.

• Wednesday, 8 June 2022, 18:00 (CEST), MCAS and online (Zoom)
  Necessity and Impossibility: On the Internal Split of Identity in Améry and Jankélévitch
  Ilit Ferber (Tel Aviv University)
  
  
• Tuesday, 14 June 2022, at 18:00 (CEST), online (Zoom)
  Prophetic Books and Their Interpretation
  Moshe Idel (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Richard Popkin’s scholarly interest in Judaism appears relatively late in his academic career, following what he described as an “overpowering religious experience” that took place in 1956. His contributions to Jewish history are prevalently focused on the role of Marrano thinkers in early modern scepticism and in Christian messianism and millenarianism. Therefore, recent scholarship on Jewish scepticism has rightly stressed that Popkin’s multifarious oeuvre lacks any serious consideration of a specifically Jewish current within the sceptical tradition, which is independent from the converso encounter with classical philosophy and Christian theology.

However, in his correspondence and autobiographical writings, Popkin did acknowledge the importance of his Jewish identity in shaping his intellectual interests and directing his research on scepticism. In view of the forthcoming publication of Popkin’s correspondence with Judah Goldin edited by Giuseppe Veltri, Jeremy Popkin, and Asher Salah, this conference aims to further our understanding of how Popkin’s strong commitment to Judaism affected his perception of Jewish history and Jewish philosophy.

•  9–11 May 2022, MCAS and online (Zoom)

Convenors:

• Jeremy Popkin (University of Kentucky)
• Asher Salah (Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design)
• Giuseppe Veltri (Universität Hamburg)

MCAS will organise three workshops during the summer term 2022.

• 16–17 June 2022
  Beyond Doubt: Prophetic Language and Esoteric Knowledge in Renaissance Kabbalah
  
  
• 26–27 July 2022
  Gates to Modernity: New Views on Hasidism and Haskalah
  
  
• 22–23 August 2022
  Morality, Emotions, and Scepticism

The Maimonides Library for Philosophy and Religion book series aims to present a wide spectrum of studies and texts that cover philosophy and religion in a Jewish context, broadly construed. The series seeks to explore connections, tensions, and dialectics between philosophy and religion in the Jewish tradition through monographs, collected volumes, scholarly translations, and critical editions of key texts. Special emphasis will be given to unearthing sceptical elements within Jewish thought and in relation to other traditions, as well as to its interactions with the scientific and intellectual climate in which it is situated.

Halper, Yehuda
Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age without Plato. Permitting and Forbidding Open Inquiry in 12-15th Century Europe and North Africa.
Boston, Leiden: Brill, 2021.

Yehuda Halper examines Jewish depictions of Socrates and Socratic questioning of the divine among European and North African Jews of the 12th-15th centuries. Without direct access to Plato, their understanding of Socrates is indirect, based on legendary material, on fragmentary quotations from Plato, or on Aristotle. Out of these sources, Jewish authors of this period formed two distinct views of Socrates: one as a wise, ascetic, monotheist, and the other as a vocal skeptic. The latter view has its roots in Plato's Apology where Socrates describes his divine mandate to question all knowledge, including knowledge of the divine. After exploring how this and similar questions arise in the works of Judah Halevi and the Hebrew Averroes, Halper traces how such open-questioning of the divine arises in the works of Maimonides, Jacob Anatoli, Gersonides, and Abraham Bibago.

MCAS would like to invite you to attend the online book launch of Yehuda Halper’s monograph Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age without Plato. Permitting and Forbidding Open Inquiry in 12–15th Century Europe and North Africa.

• Tuesday, 17 May 2021, at 18:00 (CEST), online (Zoom)

MCAS is staffed by the director of the Centre (Giuseppe Veltri), along with two co-directors (Racheli Haliva and Stephan Schmid), three research associates (Yoav Meyrav, Isaac Slater, and Sarah Wobick-Segev), an academic coordinator (Maria Wazinski), a librarian (Silke Schaeper), and two project assistants (Karolin Berends and Verena Frenssen).

Ze’ev Strauss (MCAS research associate 2020–22) has been appointed a junior professor of Jewish religion at Universität Hamburg. Congratulations, Ze’ev!

Welcome to Isaac Slater, who joined MCAS’s research team in April 2022. Before coming to Hamburg, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva. Isaac Slater will be replacing Ze’ev Strauss.

Congratulations to Yoav Meyrav, who has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for the “HEPMASITE” project. HEPMASITE (Hebrew Philosophical Manuscripts as Sites of Engagement) will investigate Hebrew philosophical manuscripts and their special features in order to understand the production, study, and evaluation of the Hebrew philosophical corpus in the real world.

In April 2014, Universität Hamburg founded a Chair of Jewish Philosophy and Religion with the appointment of Prof Giuseppe Veltri. For the first time in its history, the university has created a framework for the academic study of Judaism, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration across the fields of Jewish studies, philosophy, early modern studies and manuscript studies.

In October 2016, the Faculty of Humanities introduced a Master’s Programme in Jewish Philosophy and Religion, the first subject programme of its kind in Germany. The programme’s teaching and research are supported by Hamburg’s excellent library resources in the field of Hebrew and Jewish studies and specialist collections in Jewish philosophy. The Institute is part of the Department of Philosophy and operates in close collaboration with researchers and fellows based at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies and with the team of the “PESHAT in Context” project and the “Jewish Moralistic Writings of the Early Modern Period” Emmy Noether Junior Research Group.

The IJPR organises a lecture series (mainly in German) on the subject of “Jewish Thought and Jewish Education” during the summer term 2022. This lecture series is convened by Ze’ev Strauss.

• Mondays, 18:15–19:45 (CEST), online (Zoom)