Author Meets Respondents: Marc Herman's “After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World” (Penn, 2025)

This session features Marc Herman's After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World (Penn, 2025). After Revelation offers a dynamic new perspective on medieval Jewish legal thought and its integration in the wider Islamic world. Herman demonstrates that Jews were fully conversant in their contemporaries’ ideas about revelation, law, and legal interpretation. Tracing the idea of the Oral Torah from Baghdad to Córdoba to Cairo, After Revelation makes plain that medieval Judaism took the shapes that it did largely because of contact with Islam. Panelists will respond to this book from their own perspectives as scholars of premodern interreligious exchange.