Exegesis and Appropriation: Reading Rashi in Late Medieval Spain

Scholarship in the humanities has seen a recent burgeoning interest in the processes of “appropriation,” a conceptual category that moves us away from the idea of one-way transmission or “influence” and allows us to explore the complex ways in which intellectual, literary, and material expressions o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Harvard theological review
Main Author: Lawee, Eric 1963- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge Univ. Press [2017]
In: Harvard theological review
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Shelomoh ben Yitsḥaḳ 1040-1105, Perush ʿal ha-torah / Commentary / Spain / History 1350-1550
RelBib Classification:BH Judaism
HB Old Testament
TE Middle Ages
TJ Modern history
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
Volltext (doi)
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Summary:Scholarship in the humanities has seen a recent burgeoning interest in the processes of “appropriation,” a conceptual category that moves us away from the idea of one-way transmission or “influence” and allows us to explore the complex ways in which intellectual, literary, and material expressions or artifacts come to represent something “different from their original purposes.” Though the term has not acquired much currency in studies of medieval Jewish biblical scholarship, its fruitful deployment is amply attested in broader explorations of premodern exegetical literature. This investigation takes “exegesis and appropriation” as a revelatory integrating perspective on a neglected body of Hebrew scriptural scholarship: commentaries on the most important and influential work of Jewish biblical interpretation ever written, the Commentary on the Torah of Rashi (Solomon Yitzhaki; 1040-1105). The focus falls on “Rashi supercommentaries” (as glosses on Rashi's Commentary are usually called) from medieval Spain and on some striking religio-intellectual dynamics evident in their pages. The study thereby addresses Moshe Idel's call for scholarship to engage more with questions about “the meaning of the arrival of a corpus of writings in a new cultural environment.”
ISSN:1475-4517
Contains:Enthalten in: Harvard theological review
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S0017816017000244