Commentary Continuities, Medieval to Modern

Join us for the keynote lecture of this year’s Jewish Thought Workshop at Princeton University on Monday, May 11. Our speaker this year is James Theodore Robinson, who at The University of Chicago serves as Dean of the Divinity School, Nathan Cummings Professor of Jewish Studies, and Professor of the History of Judaism, Islamic Studies, and the History of Religions in the Divinity and the College. His keynote lecture is titled “Commentary Continuities, Medieval to Modern.”

Open to the public. Kosher refreshments will be available.

More about James Theodore Robinson
James Theodore Robinson is the Dean of the Divinity School. The Nathan Cummings Professor of Jewish Studies, he is also Professor of the History of Judaism, Islamic Studies, and the History of Religions in the Divinity School and the College. He is also appointed in the Program on Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, Fundamentals: Texts and Issues, and the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, and he is an affiliated member in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

Robinson’s research focuses on medieval Jewish intellectual history, philosophy, and biblical exegesis in the Islamic world and Christian Europe. His main interests lie in the literary and social dimensions of philosophy, and the relation between philosophy and religion. Specific areas of expertise include ethics, political philosophy, and psychology; the history of philosophical-allegorical exegesis; Karaites and Rabbanites; the translation and reception of Greek and Arabic philosophy and science; Jewish Sufism and Neoplatonism; Maimonides, Maimonideanism, and the Maimonidean controversies; religious polemic; sermons and homiletical literature; and the interactions between the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian intellectual traditions.

Dean Robinson has published four books and three edited volumes: Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes, The Book of the Soul of Man (Texts and Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism 20. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007); (editor) The Cultures of Maimonideanism: New Approaches to the History of Jewish Thought (Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, 2009); Asceticism, Eschatology, Opposition to Philosophy: The Arabic Translation and Commentary of Salmon b. Yeroham on Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) (Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, Karaite Texts and Studies, 2012); The Arabic Translation and Commentary of Yefet b. ‘Eli the Karaite on the Book of Joshua (Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, Karaite Texts and Studies, 2014); Sefer Nefesh ha-Adam: Perush Qohelet li-Shemuel ben Yehudah Ibn Tibbon (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, The David and Amalia Rosen Foundation, Sources for the Study of Jewish Culture, 2016); (co-editor) Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Its Literary Forms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019); (co-editor) Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019).