The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain: Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts

The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain: Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts investigates the relationship between the Bible and the cultural production of Iberian societies between the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 and the Expulsion of 1492. During this turbulent and transformative period, the Bible intersected with virtually all aspects of late medieval Iberian culture: its languages of expression, its material and artistic production, and its intellectual output in literary, philosophical, exegetic, and polemical spheres. The articles in this cross-cultural and interdisciplinary volume present instantiations of the Hebrew Bible’s deployment in textual and visual forms on diverse subjects (messianic exegesis, polemics, converso liturgy, Bible translation, conversion narrative, etc.) and utilize a broad range of methodological approaches (from classical philology to Derridian analysis).

Jonathan Decter, Ph.D. (2002) in Medieval Jewish Studies, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, is Associate Professor and Edmond J. Safra Professor of Sephardic Studies at Brandeis University. He is author of Iberian Jewish Literature: Between al-Andalus and Christian Europe (Indiana UP, 2007), which won the Salo W. Baron Prize for best first book in Jewish Studies.

Arturo Prats, Ph.D. (2004) in Semitic Philology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, is assistant professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He has published on Hebrew literature of the fifteenth century focussing on the work of the poet Shelomoh Bonafed including La disputa de Selomohh ben Reuben Bonafed con la aljama de Zaragoza (Granada 2010)